Las flores del vicio

BLOODBATH opens with a woman walking the world's ugliest pig. No, really, you've got to see this thing! Next, a woman pulls the head off of a chicken. We get the immediate impression that something wonky is going on here, since none of the locals seem to have been born with the ability to smile. That is, unless they happen to be leering maniacally.

In total contrast to this, a very non-twelfth century-looking woman appears, dressed in groovy threads. She enters a building where western music plays. Her name is Susanna (Alibe Parsons), and she's met by the heroin-filled, racial slur-spouting, Chicken (Dennis Hopper). They're part of a misfit group of expatriates, living together in this tiny, ultra-religious village in Spain, and they stick out like ballerinas in a bowling alley.

These two groups are set against each other, as scenes of a religious festival is intercut with the hedonistic frivolity of the foreigners. Does anyone see a catastrophic culture clash coming?

Enter the fun-loving ex-movie star, Treasure Evans (Caroll Baker). She's sort of a younger version of Nora Desmond, and another part of this oddball bunch of bananas, that includes an aging WWII General and a mega-flamboyant gay man. They're a family, clinging together in order to be themselves, in spite of their increasingly oppressive surroundings. We get the impression that none of them could survive alone.

When these exiles gather for a Good Friday celebration, their drunken revelry flies in the face of the solemn procession going on beside them. Things have been tense and creepy all along, and the atmosphere gets really thick from here on out!

Soon, the darkness, religious insanity, and death take over completely.

This is one of those wonderfully weird, disturbing films that could only have come out in the 1970's. Filled with bizarre situations and an overhanging sense of gathering, unstoppable doom, the horror bubbles up like a corpse in a bog!

Mr. Hopper is as good or better here than in many of his outings, playing it natural, and letting it fly! For those who've never seen him go absolutely berserk, well, he certainly does that here!

SOME NICE TOUCHES: Watch for the red telephone! And, what's up with the pregnant woman with the umbrella?...

A bunch of jaded Anglo-Americans are hanging around a dusty, seaside rural Spanish village for some reason. There is a religious festival going on, but the self-absorbed characters are oblivious (and equally oblivious to the daily tragedies happening around them like a child in a well or a retarded youth being trampled during a parade). Each of these tourists hooks up with a local object of sexual attraction. The washed-up expatriate American glamour actress (well played by washed-up, expatriate American glamour actress Carroll Baker) goes off with a young white "muscle man". Her camp gay friend finds an African-American stud. A British WWII vet ditches his drunken, embittered wife for a young Asian-looking girl. And a junkie played by Dennis Hopper gets together with a young blonde Spanish girl (Inma DeSantis).

This Spanish-Italian co-production could be considered a giallo I guess as the characters all meet their comeuppance in what (sometimes) appears to be foul play, but who is killing them or why is kind of beside the point. It's kind of just instant karma or the "flowers of vice" (as this is called in Spanish) coming to fruit. This movie kind of reminded me of Alberto Cavallone's deranged surrealistic masterpiece "Man, Woman, and Beast" (which was also set during a rural religious festival) or one of those late 60's/early 70's drugged-out "head" movies like Dennis Hopper's own "The Last Movie" where the people behind the camera were no doubt consuming more pharmaceuticals than the people on screen.

Carroll Baker is surprisingly good (even if her role here is obviously not much of a stretch) and Dennis Hopper could always do this kind of stuff pretty well no matter what substance was in his bloodstream. It's also nice to see the ethereally pretty Spanish actress Inma DeSantis, even if she got rewarded for her presence here by getting to do a long, nude sex scene with a VERY sweaty, pre-detox Hopper (who French kisses a cough drop out of her mouth in a scene that is either very erotic or very disgusting, I'm not quite sure). This is a very strange movie, but I actually kinda liked it

A bunch of burned-out, washed-up ex-pats live out their existence in a Spanish Coastal town, ignoring the natives and bitterly waiting for better days that never come. The locals practise weird rites and old crones walk the streets. Kids are found drowned or worse. Strange hippies descend on the town to seduce the ex-pats. There's barely and plot and the ending just raises more questions.

Dennis Hopper plays Chicken, a burned out drug addict with the manic personality of Dennis Hopper. Chicken keeps seeing his mother everywhere and has all sorts of crazy crap going on in his head. Carroll Baker plays a washed-up actress whom we first see having a pee into the sea after a drunken night out. She keeps waiting for a call to go back to Hollywood. Some other guy plays an ex-RAF officer waiting out his days getting drunk with his wife. Oh, and then there's the middle-aged gay guy firing out snide remarks left right and centre.

We get to see this lot living some sort of budget-level Fellini type lifestyle almost independent of the locals. The hippies seems to spark of some sort of killing spree by someone, but don't be fooled into thinking you're going to get any resolution from this one because while there are a few bloody murders, we never really get to find out who did them. Or why, for that matter. It's all very arty and surreal.

What makes it watchable is Dennis Hopper being insane and Carroll Baker trying to outdo him by being the same. In fact, I've never seen Baker more animated. She even lets out a blood curdling scream at a dinner table when she isn't the centre of attention. Her character is continually on the move while reminiscing about past times (she even relates an encounter which sounds exactly like something Harvey Weinstein would do!) while getting progressively more drunk and depressed.

What's it all about though? No idea. There's some gory deaths here (including a kid being crushed and a nasty impalement up the jacksy for one character) but...can't help with any explanations.

This flick is for the Hopper obsessive fan. When you have seen all his other work, then you have no choice but to see this. I agree with the other reviewer, much of what you see him "acting" like, is probably close to the real Hopper. This was done right after Apocalypse Now, he went from that film to do this one. The movie itself is horrible. No real story. Bad sound and picture. Even some really horrible dubbing of Hopper's voice which leaves me scratching my head because the dubbed voice matches exactly to what Hopper is saying, but it clearly is not him speaking. It is not all dubbed, but a few parts are and it was a disappointment because I happen to be one of those obsessed fans who not only loves his eyes and smile, but loves his voice. LOL So, if you have seen all of his work, then watch this (if you can find a copy of it). My fave movie of his is Kid Blue, good luck finding a copy of that too, however it was on TV not long ago. I being the obsessed person I am, have a copy of ALL his movies, even the really really bad ones. :)

This bizarro cult thriller has a bunch of languid American expatriates dwelling in a dreary Spanish village on the sea. Among them are a hippie junkie with mommy issues (Dennis Hopper), a has-been Hollywood glamour queen (Carroll Baker), and a jaded gay man (Win Wells). The presence of a religious cult infiltrating the community has dire consequences as the American outcasts meet their individual demons.

"Bloodbath," also known as "The Sky is Falling" and "The Flowers of Vice," is, in a word, obscure— it's been rarely seen in North America, and is often quietly shuffled in with all of the really odd career choices Dennis Hopper made in the late seventies/early eighties in a substance abuse stupor. While this is a fair categorization, what's not fair is that this film deserves an audience that has no reasonable access to it.

For fans of bizarre, surrealist thrillers and horror films from the bygone acid era of the sixties and seventies, "Bloodbath" is quite an experience. Narrative cohesion here takes a backseat, while the individual stories of these characters weave in and out of fantasy and consciousness. While on one hand we have a sort of surrealist thriller, or even a giallo, we also very much have a tragedy, and that's one of the more interesting things about the film. Remnants of American culture are tormented by their own failures, and their successes. The fluid unspooling of the narrative framed in the context of the religious cult festival is strangely sublime.

Dennis Hopper plays up his role as the drugged-out hippie tormented by his upbringing; Carroll Baker, who oddly enough co-starred with Hopper in 1956's "Giant" alongside Hollywood royalty Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, and James Dean, arguably outshines him, and is fantastic in the role of a forgotten Hollywood starlet; the role is half-truth for Baker herself, and she uses this to her advantage. The fact that these two wound up together in such a production so many years later, both ostracized from the industry, would be a weird twist of fate in any other film, but it's almost an inverse normalcy here.

Overall, "Bloodbath" is a strangely eerie and thoroughly bizarre endeavor. It is a film that admittedly has a limited audience, but it is a pleasantly befuddling ninety minutes, and is prime viewing for anyone who has an affinity for some of the seventies' weirdest offerings, complete with child sacrifice, drugs, and tragic beauty queens. Definitely an "out there" flick, but for fans of bizarro thrillers, it's definitely worth seeking out. 7/10.