1985, United States/Spain. Starring Rutger Hauer, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Tom Burlinson, Jack Thompson, Fernando Hilbeck, Susan Tyrrell, Ronald Lacey, Brion James, John Dennis Johnston, Bruno Kirby, Kitty Courbois, Marina Saura, Hans Veerman, Jake Wood. Directed by Paul Verhoeven. Buy it from Amazon.

Ah yes, Paul Verhoeven. What a director. Before he became famous/infamous with big budget sci-fi hits like Robocop and Total Recall or the low-concept, low-intelligence Showgirls that has somehow managed to become a cultural icon, he was plying his trade in this grim, gritty, and sometimes awkward medieval adventure that showcases all his favorite traits: political commentary surrounded by tons and tons of gratuitous nudity and gore. It also continues his knack for directing movies that tell you exactly what the film is full of. Robocop was full of Robocop. Showgirls was full of showgirls. And Flesh + Blood is full of flesh and blood. It's also full of some entirely ludicrous scenes, awful "ancient meets modern" dialogue, and Rutger Hauer's strange '80s hairdo. But these things only serve to ingratiate the film to the viewer, while the greater portion of the film remains a taut if extreme experience.

Rutger Hauer -- Remember when he was the coolest actor on the face of the planet. I mean, he was never as big a name as previous coolest actors, and frankly he was never really as cool as we thought he was, but he still etched out his little niche thanks in large part to a quality turn as the determined and occasionally murderous android in Blade Runner. Then what happened to him? He made some films that disappeared quickly, gave C. Thomas Howell a bag of fries with human fingers in it, and then apparently discovered pie and started eating a lot of it with Steven Seagal, who was never the coolest actor on the face of the planet at any point in his career, though he could make some headway if he gave it up and started doing comedy (and I don't mean The Glimmer Man). Men loved Rutger Hauer because he was cool and would eventually get big and fat like them. Women loved him because he was hot and weird and dangerous and they didn't realize he was going to eat so much ham later on down the line.


He's on and off, as he often was, in this film as the leader of a ruthless and dirt-smeared band of mercenaries and whores in 1501. After helping lay siege to a castle, Hauer's Martin and his men find themselves betrayed, cheated out of their pay and spoils, and cast out into the rain. A good rule of thumb for kings and conquerors is that if the strongest part of your army consists of mercenaries, and they're the only reason you win a battle, you probably shouldn't just go and cast them out a couple days after the battle is won because chances are they'll take it hard and make trouble. It's hardly worth retaining the few silver pitchers and baubles you'll save. And sure enough, Martin and the gang ambush the king and his son shortly after the caravan has picked up the son's bride-to-be, played by a very young and frequently naked Jennifer Jason Leigh. Martin's band hole up inside a keep while Tom Burlingson as Steven lays siege to the castle in attempt to rescue the bride he'd only known for an hour or so before she was kidnapped.

There are plenty of adjectives that readily lend themselves to an accurate description of this movie. Depraved. Bawdy. Mean-spirited and offensive. These are leap immediately to mind, as they tend to do with most any Verhoeven film. But the film is also intelligent, satirical, and lyrically beautiful in a sick and twisted sort of way. Verhoeven does, after all, possess a wicked sense of humor to match his overall pessimism about the nature of man, best represented here by the "storybook romance" scene in which Steven and Agnes discuss love and flirt with one another in a rolling, lush green field. Only here, they're doing their flirting beneath the hideous, graphically rendered rotting corpses of two hanged criminals. The thing that has always kept Verhoeven as something of an acquired taste, or more accurately an acquired tastelessness, is the fact that he takes perfectly intelligent and well-written scripts and drapes them in overwhelming amounts of sadism and perversion. What brain there is behind Flesh + Blood is often obscured by all the raping, nudity, and gore.


But this is the Middle Ages about which we're talking, and such things were as much a fact of life as they remain today, only without as much of the added social sensitivity about them. Verhoeven wallows gleefully in the filth of the era, and if his film is not entirely historically accurate, it is at least successful in accurately creating the atmosphere of the 16th century. A film that was willing to indulge in the grim realities of medieval life and warfare was still a rare thing in 1985. Boorman's Excalibur tread there to a degree but was still a movie steeped in hypnotic and fantastic poetry. Flesh + Blood is just harsh, gory reality, a move in the opposite direction perhaps as extreme as Camelot was in the musical dandyland direction, a snapshot of a world in which people were hardened beyond compassion and would do whatever they had to do, degrade others or themselves, to stay alive.

There are basically no likable or sympathetic characters in the film. Martin is a certifiable scumbag and rapist, as are his men, but the king who betrays them and the captain he forces to abet him in the treachery are equally despicable. And yet, all of them showcase moments of tenderness and bravery. They are, in effect, humans. Dumb, mean, kind, hateful, emotionally stunted, forgiving, and prone to acts of unspeakable cruelty. The captain who betrays Martin does so against his will and ultimately only because he wants to be over and done with the business of war as quickly as possible so he can retire to a life of peace and penance. Martin is callous and vicious, but something inside him is brought out that makes him yearn to improve himself, to become the more heroic man he wants to be. Circumstance simply never allows it to blossom.

Jennifer Jason Leigh's Agnes fares better, though one can't help but wince as she submits to every one of Martin's sexual whims in order to win his trust and save her own life. As Steven, Tom Burlinson is the closest thing the film has to a good-guy. He's a man of science, disgusted by his father's betrayal of the mercenaries but also quick to forgive him. His obsessive pursuit of Agnes seems born less out of love (they don't even know one another) than out of the sense that something that belongs to him has been taken. Still, he's generally an agreeable person, a voice of Renaissance reason amid people who are still steeped in the superstitions and cruelties of the Dark Ages. Of course, when a man gets blown up by one of his inventions, he seems less concerned about the life lost than he is about the fact that the fuse burned too quickly. But then, I guess when you're standing in the middle of a siege, that sort of thing can happen.

The other "main" character in this grotesque Shakespearian play isn't an actual person, but its presence is felt in every scene and motivates much of the action, and that's our old friend the Black Death. Bubonic Plague. Call it what you will, you just don't want hairy warriors flinging pieces of dog infected with it over your castle walls and into your drinking water. The Plague exists as a specter looming over everything that happens in the film and represents the gulf between the old ways (as represented by a stubborn doctor who refuses to acknowledge advances in plague treatment simply because they come from Arabic research) and the enlightened (as represented by Steven, who understands how simple it is to treat the disease if only people would stop being so superstitious). As he often does in this film, Hauer's Martin stands somewhere in the middle. He understands something of the plague and the realities of what causes it, but he's also not completely divorced from the old way of thinking if for no other reason than he has used it so many times to his advantage. Where as most people in this film are stupid, Martin only pretends to be stupid, but sometimes you can engage in the masquerade so long that it starts to become reality.


Verhoeven's two biggest enemies in the world seem to be corporate greed and religion. He has stated, I believe, that he believes in God but not religion, and it's religion that is on the skewering end of Flesh + Blood's awl pike of criticism. Religious men are seen as either backwards and "so Dark Ages" or as charlatans using religion as a means to enrich themselves. Martin himself is a grand manipulator of religion and the superstitions of those around him. His advising cardinal is a true believer in Christianity, but to such a degree that he fails to question anything at all that is invested with supposed religious significance. To him, everything is a sign.

The direction is tight. Even if you're not a fan of Verhoeven's films, at the very least you have to admit him to be a tight and competent director. He knows what he's doing back there, and he manages to make Flesh + Blood poetically gorgeous, lush, and hideous at the same time. His pacing is good, and his action scenes are what I'd call solidly 1980s. They lack the "cast of thousands" grandness of the 1960s but also lack the over-directed, over-choreographed, "everything must look absolutely cool" sickness of the post wire-fu/CGI era in which we currently reside. Fight scenes are not epic in scale, but they are realistic. Instead of slick and polished, they seem awkward, confused, and brutal. In other words, a lot more realistic. This was the film that introduced him to American audiences, and it must have been quite a shock. Distributor Orion was so appalled by the movie that they shuffled it in and out of theaters without a peep. It hardly even ever showed up on cable and was more or less MIA fromt he home video market for years, and even then only in a badly washed out transfer. Their gamble would pay off later, though, when Verhoeven started becoming a blockbuster machine, but they just couldn't see trumpeting Flesh + Blood, no matter how good it was, at a time when even Conan was being kinder and gentler.

Realism as I said permeates this film, so it is that much more jarring when Verhoeven's script slips up. From time to time, dialogue sounds a little overly modern, less for what's being said than for the way it's said. When Bruno Kirby says anything at all, I can't hear anything but "that squeaky guy from City Slickers" or "that squeaky guy from Good Morning, Vietnam." A lot of the cast members can't seem to make up their minds whether or not they have accents, even though acting jobs beyond those inconsistencies are generally "workmanlike" to "above average." However, script credibility really takes a blow when, in what seems like a day, Steven and a small crew of men with no scientific background erect a siege machine of a complexity that would dazzle Leonardo De Vinci himself. It's utterly fantastic and absurd and feels completely out of place in a film that otherwise strives to maintain a high degree of period accuracy.

But then, this is a Verhoeven film, so you sometimes just have to roll with the eccentricities. Luckily, the surrounding film is good enough to help you overlook the improbability of such a machine. And it does succeed in further the film's ongoing theme of the Renaissance versus the Dark Ages while keeping Martin as a man with one foot in both worlds. He's not smart enough, like Steven, to conceive of such a device, but he is smart enough to use something else Steven tried out.

Barring the occasional awkward accent (or lack there of) and bit of over-ripe dialogue, peformances are uniformly grand. Jennifer Jason Leigh performs admirably in what was surely a difficult role made no easier by the fact that she does about half her screen time completely naked. Hauer remains one of the most underrated actors of the 1980s, probably because he starred in so many awful films. But the thing is he made so many awful films watchable. This seems almost to be his answer to his role in Ladyhawke, another medieval film but with more fantasy and a much friendlier cast. I think Hauer has some off lines here but on the whole he carries the film admirably and conveys a man who is enchanted by the notions of enlightened society but ultimately unable to divorce himself from the crudeness of the Dark Ages. The supporting cast includes a number of familiar faces and character actors, all of whom perform well. Brion James will be the most recognizable of the bunch, seeing as how he's made eleven million films and starred alongside Rutger Hauer in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner -- another violent film, incidentally, that was reviled upon release but has since become considered a modern classic. I don't know if I'd consider Flesh + Blood a classic, but it certainly deserves more recognition than it receives.

Flesh + Blood is a smartly written, well-paced, well-directed piece of period action. It's not really an easy film to like because of the cruelty and sadism on display in certain scenes, but if you can get over that and accept that these things happened (and continue to happen), then you'll find a sharp adventure tale with a lot going on. It's not perfect, but it's well enough crafted to set it apart from the crowd, especially if you figure the crowd was mostly dim-witted sword and sorcery barbarian movies. As long as you don't mind the blood, gore, rape, nudity, festering boil lancing, and bloody chunks of dog meat being flung around, Flesh + Blood is one hell of a good film.

Labels: Fantasy: Sword and Sorcery, Historical Epics, Netflix Diary, Year: 1985