This one was a little disappointing. Rather than deliver on the heroic bloodletting promised in the title (it takes nearly fifty minutes for the hero to show up, and the only blood I noted was at the very end), the film instead opts for a slow, depressing story about a woman's ongoing traumatization at the hands of thieves, jealous lovers, and an indolent family. Bleah.





The movie begins eerily, with a woman playing a flute in a courtyard at night. Her beautiful playing catches the attention of an unsuspecting traveler, whom she leads, without a word, to the bedchamber of her mistress. This opening scene has a certain dreamlike quality -- unfortunately, the brain-dead dub ruins the mood a moment later, as the flute-playing woman and the traveler have what has to be one of the strangest, most inane conversations I've ever heard. "Excuse me," the traveler asks, "what is this place?" Then he looks at the mansion's mistress, standing near her bed, and slurps, "Is she a woman or a monster?" This becomes his mantra; even after they explain to him that no, she's not a monster, he continues to ask this question, and when the woman invites him into her bed, and he is overwhelmed by lust, he blurts out, "never mind if you're a monster!" as he embraces her. It's pretty funny.

The next day, the maid sics two deaf sword-wielding warriors on the traveler as he leaves the mansion following a night of (apparently) glorious lovemaking with the mysterious woman. They kill him. So: the lady of the house uses her maid to draw in male travelers, seduces them, and then has them killed. To explain how this state of affairs came to be, the movie abruptly (and quite clumsily; I was very confused for a while here) flashes back several years, into the midst of a battle between an "official" (and his household) and the leader of a group of thuggish thieves. This scarred gang leader, a fat, rowdy fellow who is never given a name, corners the official's family and expresses his desire to take the official's only daughter for his wife (I haven't been able to find a good romanization of the daughter's name, so I'll just go with a phonetic take on how the British dub actors pronounced it: Suu-Ow). Suu-Ow's fiancee, General Yu, appears and tries to fight the Leader off, but is outclassed, and General Ching, another ally, gets an arrow in the eye during his own attempt to rescue her.

Laughing all the while, the Leader drags Suu-Ow back to his cave hideout and, over the course of what I think was supposed to be a few months, manages to convince her that her situation is hopeless and that she's stuck with him for a husband. (He even brings her family in to see her. Her father explains that times are tough and, well, she's just going to have make the best of being violated by a brutish murdering oddball in his cave. General Yu is brought in as well, and is shown to be a coward, begging for his life and prostrating himself before the Leader. Suu-Ow is less than pleased, especially when the Leader orders him to "crawl under her skirts", an act which is presented as being so undignified that a respectable man would rather die than do it. Suu-Ow slaps him before he actually goes through with it, though).





Suddenly Suu-Ow is fine with being the Leader's wife! The next few scenes (literally seconds later) show her smiling and laughing and in bed with him. I was forced to conclude from this inexplicable change of heart that she was either putting on an act, or that the film had inexpertly skipped over several months during which she had grown to like the big lug. Or maybe she was just so traumatized that she didn't know what she was doing; I considered that too. The following scenes depict her as having grown somewhat callous and cruel, and hip to the Leader's way of life -- in fact, one of these scenes made the movie for me. "Please," she begs the Leader, "burn a mark on my thigh!" (As an initiation into his gang, I guess). "How?" the Leader cries, anguished. "How can I burn a mark on your beautiful silken thigh? I can't do it! I can't!" The dub actors really nailed this one.

Meanwhile, General Yu, Suu-Ow's father, and the eyepatched General Ching plot to rescue Suu-Ow. They call up some villagers and raid the Leader's caves, driving him out. He's killed by General Ching, and Suu-Ow is rescued -- and, because Suu-Ow's father promised her hand to any man who could bring her back to him, General Ching ends up engaged to her. This really pisses General Yu off -- her parents have broken the engagement, and Suu-Ow no longer wants anything to do with him (she's actually fine with General Ching, though; he's a good guy). So, General Yu kills General Ching on their wedding day, shooting him with another arrow and running away. Whee! This plot's movin' like a freight train!

To ease her suffering following this new tragedy, Suu-Ow's parents (at the suggestion of a certain Mr. Cock) decide to build her a mansion of her own, where she can hang out and watch dancers dance and wrestlers wrestle. And so we're back to the beginning of the movie, with the emotionally damaged Suu-Ow using her maid to find men for her to seduce -- men she can later have killed. How exactly this satisfies her shattered psyche, I don't know, but hey, that's the movie. Anyway, the "hero" of the film finally appears in this final act, as another man Suu-Ow attempts to seduce. He suspects something is up, however, and so fakes a stomach ache before getting anywhere with her. She then summons her deaf warriors to take him away, and, safely out of her sight, he proceeds to easily kill them with his sword-mastery. He wanders back into her chambers, where, after another brief fight, she announces that he's passed the test and gets to be her bodyguard. Huh? Okay, whatever.





But there's one final wrinkle: Suu-Ow's new bodyguard, we learn, turns out to be an agent of General Yu, sent to assassinate her for revenge's sake. After a while he discovers he's in love with her, though, and can't do it -- so, in the final scenes, after an exhausting fight with about twenty of General Yu's men, he kills General Yu himself and walks off to be with Suu-Ow.

Part of the problem here (aside from the dopey dub and the fact that the actress who plays Suu-Ow, who gets by far the most screen-time, is about ten or fifteen years past her prime) is that the film is only eighty-three minutes long -- an exceedingly short running time for such an ambitious (if ineptly realized) plot. I mean, years are passing here. The movie does not handle the passage of time well. As to the fight scenes...well, this is really more of a staid period drama than an action movie, so there's nothing really special to go on about in that department. About the only thing that recommends the movie is the dub, which seems to have been done by the same British group that tackled Swordsman With An Umbrella (I recognized a few of the same "actors") -- I found it pretty amusing. (I should mention as well that despite the fact that Hero's Blood looks as though it was filmed in the early 70's, it was actually shot in 1991, and is of purportedly Malaysian provenance). If amusing dubs aren't your thing, though, you really ought to stay the heck away from this sort of nonsense.

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