BLOOD FOR FLESH (a.k.a. Sangre Para La Carne) * Mexico 2019 Dir: Alex Hernandez. 56 mins
A young woman (Erika Lopez, giving it all she has) wakes up surrounded by what appear to be tribesmen, who pin her down as she screams. Flashbacks to her family life punctuate present day suffering, as her brother – with whom she has an incestuous relationship – is sodomised while she is raped repeatedly and eaten out by a severed head. Cannibalism, extended sexual violence, protracted torment and icky close-up gore figure prominently in this hugely pretentious, monumentally boring art-horror wankathon, which strains for significance via snicker-inducing chapter titles like “The Domain of the Primitive Beast” and “Without Crying”. The episodic, surrealistic approach and idiosyncratic, atonal sound design and score suggest a filmmaker indebted to David Lynch, Alejandro Jodorowsky and Bunuel, though with no discernible cinematic voice of his own. Unfolding mostly without dialogue and weighed down with a portentous voiceover, it’s an incoherent endurance test to sit through despite admittedly striking visual moments courtesy of cinematographer Dante Belmont and an evocative score by Esteban Ibarra Rivero. If you make it through all the rape and mutilation and sixth form level would-be profundity, you may get a welcome giggle out of the climactic line “I’ll always imagine the warm dermis of your clitoris in my mouth”. I bet you say that to all the girls…
Review by Steven West
BLOOD FOR FLESH (a.k.a. Sangre Para La Carne) is available HERE