Dir. Mike Cuenca (2024)
A group of road-tripping friends stumble upon a brothel with a very odd set of services.
Holy hell. Let me preface this review by saying that I'm going to gush through pretty much the entire thing, and, if you somehow manage to get the chance to watch this one, you'll think I'm out of my goddamned mind. Watch Them Come Blood is madness, a film that is absolutely not going to be enjoyed by the vast majority who watch it. This isn't even one of those "indie horror movies that I'm trying to love because I appreciate the dedication." This is a movie that is batshit insanity, a post-punk dedication to horror that feels wrong. It's a movie that shouldn't be made. And I loved every second of it.
A group of friends (whose names aren't particularly important or need to be remembered) gather together to go on a road trip for one of their birthdays. It's the last time they're going to be together, so when they catch a man masturbating in a bar, they decide to follow him to his destination in order to do something truly memorable. What they find is a brothel that specializes in killing its patrons in whatever way they choose, and they find themselves caught between this sadistic self-pleasure palace and a group of criminals who decide to rob the place for one final score.
An off-kilter mashup of Reservoir Dogs and Hostel, Watch Them Come Blood is experimental horror, a crime movie-neé-torture porn-neé-arthouse flick with surprisingly little blood and even less organized plot. The actors are all phenomenally strange, as dedicated to being off-putting as they are to filling whatever roles director Mike Cuenca (who also stars in the film) has chosen them for. Cuenca is an underground, post-punk filmmaker, and he presents here a movie far less concerned with where it's going than how it gets there. It's a brilliant concept, but it's also terrifyingly nihilistic, a drug-fueled trip-to-nowhere that feels like the drug trip from Natural Born Killers with a Joy Division flair.
Watch Them Come Blood is dangerous filmmaking. It's tonally bipolar, with half of the film serving as a Larry Clark-esque exploration of young people with nothing better to do and the other half a brutally anarchic expedition into anarchy itself. It's non-linear, with several time jumps serving to clue the audience into what is happening in the most disorganized way possible. The film doesn't feel like it was made in America: no, this one feels like the type of discordant chaos that would come from Germany. At the same time, it's entirely American. The punk aesthetic and muddled storytelling is CBGB and Harmony Korine, Pulp Fiction as told by Olaf Ittenbach.
This is most certainly not a film that will be for everyone, and I can't stress this enough. It's chaotic, oftentimes makes little sense, and rampages through film rhetoric like a bull in a pornographic china shop. It's bizarre, filled with choices almost no other filmmaker would make. And that's the beauty of a film like this. Were it to be made in a straightforward manner, it could have been almost unwatchable. It is because is it rebellious that it works. Watching this film feels like being on the ground floor of Warhol's Factory, a peek behind the curtains of an artist that will never find the audience he deserves but one who makes his art anyway. I fully recognize that this one won't be appreciated by the standard horror fan, but if you're an appreciator of avant-garde horror-as-art, the juice is worth the squeeze.
Who this movie is for: True indie horror fans, Post-punk film lovers, Kinky nihilists
Bottom line: You're more than likely going to hate Watch Them Come Blood. In fact, I'd be willing to bet the majority of people who come across this review will dislike the film if they get the chance to watch, or they're reading this because they're looking for some guiding light through the chaos of watching the film. You won't find it here, dear readers, because the chaos is the message. This is exactly the type of film that I made this website to discuss, an underground movie that most will never see and only the most avant-garde film lovers will appreciate. If that sounds like you, you should definitely check it out. If not, stay far, far away.
