Fittingly, only Byrnes’ Lord Vile and the rest of the underground dwelling elite are for the most part unscarred, though they’re uniformly pale and unseemly looking. Even Joan Chen, God bless her for taking on this part, gets a bike chain or dog leash or something across the cheek early on, and Sallow’s old League buddy Gonzo (Max Fairchild, who, along with Hugh Keyes Byrnes, appeared in the granddaddy of savage post apocalyptic movies, Mad Max) looks like Frankenstein’s monster, with an exposed steel plate in the side of his head. Instead of a lot of pretty boys and girls, the bodies of the characters and their appearances reflect this admirably. This is a violent as hell sport with little protection, in a world where doctoring is a lost art. Justin Monjo’s Dog-Boy looks like his entire face has been removed and put back on upside down. The rest of the guys, especially Delroy Lindo’s Mbulu and Anna Katarina’s Big Cimber, are crisscrossed with old scars and cauliflower ears. Joan Chen bites a guy’s ear off, and in another match, Rutger Hauer has his eye knocked out. The juggers get the crap beat out of them. The excellence of this weird little movie, which is much better than it should be, is in its details. Then the next morning the winning juggers set out with the defeated village’s dog skull. Perhaps The Game has taken the place of raiding and warfare, because the winning team automatically gets their pick of young villagers (male and female) to sleep with, is treated to a no hard feelings banquet by the losing team, and is then paid tribute by every villager from the youngest to the eldest. The only guy for which there is no Quidditch counterpart is the slash, who protects the kwik with a whirling chain. I wonder if JK Rowling has seen The Blood Of Heroes actually, because the big guys are like beaters. This is the equivalent of catching the Golden Snitch in Harry Potter. The big guys in armor go at it, alternately trying to protect their own or harm the other team’s kwik, the lightly armored and unarmed one whose job it is to spear the dog skull on the other side’s stake. The village idiot (and it seems in every Game we see played, it’s ALWAYS the village idiot who gets the stone counting job – maybe because they’re the only ones who don’t get distracted by the game) pitches rocks at a bit of hanging metal and announces when he’s reached one hundred, which means a cessation of play.
Then The Game begins, and if we’re paying attention, we can pretty much figure it out. We see the juggers gear up, their armor culled from scavenged materials like old tire treads and the like. The first scene is of Sallow leading his team out of the desert to challenge the village team, with the coach/medic/trainer Gandhi MacIntyre bringing up the rear, lugging their equipment in a wardrobe strapped to his back. They didn’t remember when juggers first played The Game or how it came to be played with a dog skull….īy this brilliantly concise bit of flavor text, we learn all we need to going in, and by the richness of the world that follows, we discover all we need to. They didn’t remember the miraculous technology or the cruel wars that followed. People no longer remembered the Golden Age of the 20 th Century.
BLOOD OF HEROES 2021 MOVIE
I saw this one on Cinemax one night and expected absolutely nothing, but I liked Rutger Hauer in Blade Runner, Blind Fury, and Ladyhawke, and I’ll give any post apocalyptic movie at least five minutes of my time.Ī lot of these dystopian future movies open up with a paragraph describing at length how the world got in the mess it’s in. But Sallow’s own past mistakes may stand in the way of all their aspirations. When ex-League jugger Sallow (Rutger Hauer) and his team take on a new, ambitious young player named Kidda (Joan Chen), they decide to take their game as far as it can go – to the vicious League play deep beneath the ground in the subterranean Red City. In a bleak post apocalyptic future, scarred and battered juggers in piecemeal armor and gear roam the wastelands from settlement to settlement playing The Game, a furious cross between football and gladiatorial combat, where the object is to place a dog skull on a spike before three hundred stones hit a makeshift gong. The time will come when winning is everything.
(1989) Written and Directed by David Webb Peoples Today I review the post apocalyptic sports movie The Blood Of Heroes.
Time once more for my blog feature, DT Moviehouse Reviews, in which I make my way alphabetically through my 200+ DVD/Blu-Ray collection (you can see the list right here) and decide if each one was worth the money.
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