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Rojo Sangre
I’d kill to get this part
2004
Review: July 13, 2007
Director: Christian Molina
Starring: Paul Naschy, Menh-Wai Trinh, Miguel Del Arco, Bibiana Fernández
If you want. You might just fall asleep.
THE SETUP:
Guy sells his soul to be a murderer for Satan.
DISCUSSION:
I don’t know how I came across this movie, but I’m sure it stayed on my list because it appears that the killer has a big mustache on the cover. But then I saw a preview for it on some other disc and it looked a lot trippier than I expected [and more modern, I had imagined it was from the 70s], so it shot into the “immediate viewing” category.
Things begin oddly with this bouncy light jazz over the menu. Then we have these semi-interesting credits, each name on a B&W slide, then finally we go into the slides and enter the movie. The camera tracks around a bunch of men in identical suits as they sit in a line. The two at the end are talking about what gets them off, and one, Mr. Thevenet, says that he most enjoys putting live mice up his ass, and is quite descriptive about it, rather insisting that the other man try it sometime. He says that the death throes of the mouse are a small price to pay for the pleasure it brings him. Then his name is called and he goes into the other room.
Turns out they’re all actors auditioning for the same part. That’s why they’re all dressed alike. Thevenet is trying out for this small part, telling the assistant about his illustrious past in film and on stage and how he deserves better than this. She says she wasn’t even born when his best-known films were out. He goes into the audition and it the director hates the way he’s playing it and is massively belittling. They mock each other. On the way out he tells the female assistant that silicone is much more important than talent, and she seems to take this as sage advice.
So he goes to see his agent. The agent tells him that there is no, N.O., work for him. He keeps asking what the agent is really saying… becoming reminiscent of some Saturday Night Live skit with Burt Reynolds, I think. Finally the agent tells him of a gig as a doorman/entertainer, and although it’s far beneath his dignity, he checks it out.
He goes to this extravagant gentleman’s lounge. There is a somewhat interesting thing as someone approaches and we hear a man’s voice, then see it issues from this lithe blonde woman. She exhorts him to get revenge on everyone who ever wronged him by working for them, and takes him to meet her boss, Mr. Reficul. They make an arrangement, and give Thevenet a cane with a wolf’s head handle that pulls out to be a sword. Hmmm, I’ve never gotten a sword on my first day of any job.
By now one has noticed the large number of semi-flashy scene transitions, in which we zoom into one element of a shot [with accompanying whoosh sound effect] and are in the next scene. It is never quite clear why this is employed. So Thevenet goes home and wakes, the screen turns red, and he looks at a picture of a woman. The picture changes into a street, and we go into the picture and Thevenet is stalking the street. He goes into a store and buys a set of Japanese knives, and since he acted before midnight, also received a copy of Heart-Healthy Recipes, a $19.95 value, his absolutely free.
He goes home and watches soaps, then walks the street and sees one of those living statue guys. This is to show us the depths to which actors have been forced to lower themselves lately. He goes back to the club and meets a beautiful Asian named Tick-Tock. Then his head morphs into that of a clown that Mr. Reficul thumps with his finger. Thevenet signs a contract—duplicated in several languages including Cyrillic. Now, please, PLEASE don’t try to spell Mr. Reficul’s name backwards—if you don’t want to nearly pass out from fear.
So Thevenet starts killing people. He offs this snide director and a female star, and before you know it has killed his agent. He talks about “finishing off my daughter’s murderers,” and this is the first we’ve heard about his daughter being killed. Then he starts killing stars and directors that we don’t recognize, so we can’t know if he had anything to do with them.
SPOILERS > > > Anyway, so he meets this guy in a limo who wants him to direct—snuff films. When we see the woman struggling in one of the snuff films. I thought “a-ha, now we’re going to get the connection to the speech about the mouse at the beginning, and how its death throes are worth the pleasure of others... but not really. Then things start getting really weird, and I simultaneously started losing a great deal of interest. Did you know that you can scan at double-speed on most DVD players and still read the subtitles? Yeah, that’s one of the small gifts of foreign films.
So some guy gives him Reficul’s password and he goes onto his computer and discovers that he’s sold his soul. Then he shoots Reficul, then Dora, the blonde, takes over. Then we hear that “the police can do nothing in this dimension,” and we see Tick-Tock walking with some man through a very Matrix-y set of blood, each drop apparently representing a soul or time period. Blah, blah, blah, so Thevenet gets expelled from whatever dimension he was in [and if he’s just killing alternate dimension people, who cares?] and the police see him and shoot him in this pointless Matrix rip-off shot. I just know that in 10 years someone is going to compile the most pointless Matrix rip-offs into one shocking collection. But then he’s still apparently alive, or alive in the guise of a younger man, to accept a Murillo, which is some sort of Spanish award. He delivers the film’s repeating lesson: Be careful what you sign.
< < < SPOILERS END
It started promising, then lost focus. Mention must be made that this film was written by its star [under a pseudonym], and that he, in real life, was a noted actor who found his parts drying up in later life. So there is an air of him getting psychic revenge by writing this tale of an actor gaining real revenge. But I don’t know, it’s hard for me to be fully sympathetic. How myopic do you have to be not to realize that the popular taste is for younger actors? Did he not see this happening to other actors as they age? And if he needs work so badly… well, why didn’t he save? Even if he was blind to the prospects of older actors, he could have considered the possibility of injury or something else, so why didn’t he prepare, at all, for that? So it was difficult for me to fully sympathize with Thevenet’s situation and get behind his quest for revenge.
Then the movie just kind of drifts. Okay, so Thevenet is a killer for Satan. Interesting concept. But if he exists in an alternate dimension, why should we care? Are the murders even really happening? And what exactly do the snuff films have to do with? And the rearrangement in Satanic organization toward the end, what did that have to do with? I will, however, grant the film that there may be a larger concept that I didn’t get because the film lost my interest halfway in.
The direction is also pointlessly juiced up with swooshy transitions and tricks. A few of them were clever—Thevenet morphing into a clown that gets thumped on the head by Reficul—but they’re mostly just distracting. The director had apparently never done a feature film before and there is a fair amount of outrage expressed on the IMDb that he should have been given the reins here.
So there ya go. Not horrible, but if I could go back and not watch it, I would have gone back and not watched it.
SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?
It won’t kill you, but there are a lot better ways to spend your time.
