Las flores del vicio

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.

One of the undeniable pleasures of compulsive movie-watching is discovering obscure stuff such as this one which not only managed to rope in a surprising number of talents but the end result is so oddball as to make one wonder how it ever came to be written, shot and distributed!; indeed, in comparison to the stream-of-consciousness nature of the film under review, the same director's would-be arty Western BLUE (1968; which I have just watched) seems like a walk in the park!

For leading man Dennis Hopper (called "Chicken" here!), it was no big stretch to play this after his self-directed THE LAST MOVIE (1971) and TRACKS (1977) – what is more, he seems to have kept his APOCALYPSE NOW (1979) look for it – nor, for that matter, appearing as a junkie. For his co-star, too, Carroll Baker – here sending up her own image of a has-been Hollywood diva (dubbed "Treasure" in her case!), it was basically a continuation of her "Euro-Cult" outings of a few years earlier. Way-past-his-prime Richard Todd, however, must have kicked himself for accepting to appear in such a 'depraved' film, where he has to call his hard-drinking suicidal wife a "bitch", gay hanger-on Alice a "whore", and is even seen ogling an Oriental girl about 40 years his junior! Todd's wife is Faith Brook, an unknown name to me but, looking up her resume' to IMDb, she has been featured in films as diverse as Alfred Hitchcock's SUSPICION (1941), Joseph Losey's THE INTIMATE STRANGER (1956) and Anthony Mann's THE HEROES OF TELEMARK (1965)! With respect to the transvestite, apparently the actor was himself so inclined, since he went by the name of Win(ifred) Wells: actually, it was the latter who supplied the script and that of another strange Narizzano film i.e. the Italian-made REDNECK (1973)!

What plot there is essentially develops into a quartet of couplings: Hopper with a good-looking blonde, Baker with a bland-looking macho (who's almost always stark naked), Todd with the afore-mentioned Asian and Wells with a black stud (unflatteringly referred to as "Turd")! For what it is worth, a fleeting character in the film announces herself as "Carrie Nation", but whether this was a direct nod to the pop group at the center of Russ Meyer's BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS (1970) is hard to tell under the circumstances! Anyway, all four protagonists come to a sticky end: WWII vet Todd goes willingly before a firing-squad, spurred on by his girl, in full official regalia(?!) – his wife is thus left alone; Wells is gored by a bull in his lover's shack (how the animal came to be there is anybody's guess); Baker is drowned in a pool following an orgy; and Hopper stumbles dead on the beach, having shot up once too many (he frequently hallucinates about his parents, with whom he seems to have had an oedipal relationship – worshipping his mother while hating his evangelist father).

The rest is a semi-improvised wallow in hedonism: this Spanish production bore the original title LAS FLORES DEL VICIO – which, translating to THE FLOWERS OF VICE, links it with Jose' Ramon Larraz' no less outrageous THE COMING OF SIN (1977); the BLOODBATH moniker, then, is hilariously misleading and, for the record, the film is also known as THE SKY IS FALLING (an appropriately bleak line in a song Baker is constantly crooning). In fact, it is overflowing with local color in the form of peasants' toil-ravaged faces and solemn religious rites, to say nothing of violence – animals being nonchalantly slaughtered or beaten and, in the best (if tellingly irrelevant) sequence, the Bunuelian image of a child getting trampled by a crowd (even if we had already witnessed the discovery of the same kid's drowned body!). That is not forgetting the expected moments of Hopper lunacy: notably, squashing a handful of eggs early on squarely in the face of his black lover and then forcing her to sing a traditional 'from the old plantation' tune(!) and a remarkable dialogue exchange by the sea-side between him and his latest partner, which I quote verbatim: "You look beautiful like that" – "What?" – "I said 'You look beautiful like that'" – "I can't hear you" – "I said 'I wanna rape you'!" – "Then you should!"

I was in Spain when this was filmed with my family. The film was shot in the town of Mojacar in the early 1970's. I met most of the actors and knew Silvio Narizzano and his partner Winn Wells personally since they lived down the street from our home. My parents owned a bar/restaurant called El Saloon and all the actors spent a great deal of time in their establishment during filming. My brother was cast as the mentally challenged child who was stomped to death in the plaza as a woman looked on from a balcony.

I clearly remember the shot, however I have never seen the movie as I was quite young at the time. I would like to obtain the movie (dvd, video). If anyway can tell me where to purchase that would be great.

Thank you.

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 junky (Dennis Hopper), a retired Hollywood actress (Carroll Baker) and several other misfits live in a run down Spanish village. Suddenly they begin turning up dead! A strange and violent film, almost like an Italian "giallo" as if it were directed by Andy Warhol! I dug it!