Past Misdeeds: Blood Beat (1985)

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.


It's Christmas time in the highly isolated wilds of rural Wisconsin. Artist Cathy (Helen Benton) and her extremely beardy boyfriend Gary (Terry Brown) are awaiting a seasonal visit by Cathy's children Dolly (Dana Day) and Ted (James Fitzgibbons).

Ted is bringing his new girlfriend Sarah (Claudia Peyton), but the hope for a friendly first meeting with the family already evaporates on the doorstep. Cathy has a habit of just staring at the poor girl without even trying for small talk and nicety that Sarah finds deeply disturbing. Why, it's as if Cathy would look right into her mind and disapprove of what she finds there!

In fact, Cathy possesses some sort of psychic powers the film defines as "the powers of good", and while the rest of the plot is going on, Cathy will have shaking fits and visions of something terrible that is going to happen.

Sarah's day doesn't get any better when Ted and family are dragging her with them to murder innocent deer. At the moment of the killing shot, Sarah throws a fit, scares the deer away, runs off screaming through the woods and right into the arms of a guy whose guts are hanging out. Must have been one of those hunting accidents.

After that bit of fun, and a visit by the police, the girl tries to sleep off a bit of stress, but only falls into a strange dream (or is it?) in which she finds a samurai armour and sword in a chest in her bedroom. She cuts herself on the sword and falls out of bed.

Soon, a blue glowing guy in samurai armour wanders through the (suddenly surprisingly populated) area and kills people, while Sarah has finely timed orgasms.

A few killings and orgasms later, the blue glowing samurai guy decides to attack the family home, but he has to go through Cathy's awesome power of shaking her glowing red hands first.

Blood Beat is a peculiar regional picture made in Wisconsin by a (as far as I understand) Frenchman named Fabrice A. Zaphiratos, but supposedly edited in Paris, France. Its structure and texture have not much to do with European horror, but are completely in tune with the obscure and weird work done during the 70s and 80s by filmmakers working in the most improbable parts of the USA.

Watching films like this is often a problematic experience for the unprepared. Their flaws are all too obvious while their charms depend on a certain state of mind in their audience, a willingness to forget standards of professional filmmaking and just enter the world of a film wide-eyed as if exploring a parallel dimension.

Zaphiratos' film doesn't make this exploration too difficult for a willing viewer. Sure, it shows its probably non-existent budget through laughable special effects and a confused and confusing script, but at least Blood Beat's wild detours off the road of logic or just simple narrative progression are already a part of what makes the film as interesting an experience as it is. The film's world is a place where the usual rules of the progression of time and space don't exist, where amateur actors are either reacting much too cold and distant to everything or are jumping into hysterics at the slightest provocation. I like to compare this peculiar type of acting so typical of local filmmaking to aliens trying to emulate human emotions without ever having experienced any for themselves.

Zaphiratos' direction is quite the thing, too. Besides providing Blood Beat with the usual distracted and obscure feel, overly slow pacing and bad sound, Zaphiratos also shows remarkable cleverness when it comes to his film's visual side. Blood Beat is full of scenes shot from skewed and slightly disturbing camera positions, sudden shifts from lingering, static shots to quick cuts and lots of camera movement. It's the work of a director pulling out all the stops he can to draw his audience into his film, without a care for the silliness of the things that are happening on screen and as far from the self-deprecation of camp as possible. There's a mood of wrongness to evoke, and this director is damn well going to evoke it.

For most of the time, Zaphiratos' technique of overloading the audience's brain with strangeness embedded in moments of boredom works fine. Blood Beat's finale however is too silly and needs too much of the non-effects to keep to the moodiness of what came before. The finale has its cheesy charms, to be sure, but it's a grating step away from the utter weirdness that came before into the realm of the merely unintentionally humorous.


But of course, one shouldn't go into a film like this expecting it to work all the time. The moments of floating nonsense are what counts here, and Blood Beat delivers quite a few of those.