#we don’t live in jondor

[mst3kproject]

607: Bloodlust

Guys.  For the sake of yourselves and everything you love, never look for material related to this movie by searching the tumblr tags for bloodlust.  Just don’t.  While you will find the odd bit that’s actually relevant, you will also find… look, I’m sure your imaginations are equal to the task.  Some of the bonus material this week will be stuff from the episode, but there will also be a few things I found in the tag that just made me go whaaaaaat?.  None of them are gross, I promise, they’re just… odd.

A couple of blond dumbasses, who I think are named Johnny and Betty, and a couple of brunet dumbasses, possibly Jeannie and Peter, decide to have a picnic on a tropical island.  Unsurprisingly this turns out to be the home of a transparently evil Vincent-Price-looking asshole, whose hobby is murdering his guests and taxidermizing their corpses (apparently ‘taxidermize’ is a real word – my spellcheck doesn’t underline it).  Vincent-at-half-the-Price’s drunk flunky and cheating wife have an escape plan, but once that’s been foiled it’s just these idiots against the world’s self-proclaimed greatest hunter.

I am apparently in a minority, but I think this episode’s host sketches are brilliant.  Pearl’s first appearance is classic and Crow ruining Mystery Dinner Theatre is great, but my favourite part is when the SOL’s hoedown descends into anarchy.  I can watch that over and over.  If I ever witness a riot I’m going to be very tempted to just shout, “and now promenade!” and see what happens.

Anyway, The Most Dangerous Game is one of those things they make you read in English class, and like many things I had to read in English class it left me mildly traumatized.  It’s a deeply distasteful story about man’s bloodthirsty nature and how the only way to overcome evil is to sink to its level, and every so often I’ll remember it, or Harrison Bergeron, or The Lottery, and it makes my day seem a little more dismal.  I’m pretty sure nobody ever reads it except high school students and the Zodiac Killer.

So if you were wondering why it took me so long to get around to reviewing this one… well, I felt like I had to revisit the story in order to do justice to a review of this movie, and I really really really didn’t want to do that.  Just thinking about it gives me flashbacks to things like Sonnet 116 and that horrible story in which the floor was both lava and snakes.  But I said every episode and so here I fucking am.

Anyway, my return to The Most Dangerous Game, or at least to its Cole’s Notes, proved very educational – it taught me that not only is Bloodlust a lousy movie, it’s also one of those adaptations that completely misses the point of the work it’s attempting to adapt.  The main theme of The Most Dangerous Game is how the only difference between the hunter and the hunted is which one is in a position of power. Rainsford is himself a big game hunter, and discusses this with his friend Whitney.  Upon finding himself on Zaroff’s island, he becomes the prey, because Zaroff is the one with all the power.  At the end, Zaroff had believed Rainsford is dead, which gives Rainsford the advantage of surprise and turns the tables again.

Bloodlust completely discards this theme.  There’s never any real discussion of the power imbalance. Worse, while Rainsford was an experienced hunter and fighter himself, somebody Zaroff considered a worthy adversary, these four clowns are just young people who blundered into this situation and aren’t even Vincent-at-half-the-Price’s preferred prey.  He doesn’t hunt them like he does his escaped criminals, because he thinks it’ll be a challenge, he does it because the only other alternatives are to straight-up murder them or to let them go, neither of which are acceptable to him.

Rainsford was an expert on traps and tracking, which meant he could offer Zaroff a meaningful  challenge. Of the four young people in Bloodlust, only one of them is kind of barely competent, that being Betty the judo expert.  She’s smart enough to figure out how to get away with breaking the window, and manages to keep her head and chuck the lackey into the vat of acid.  When confronted with the John the Baptist dude, however, she freezes and screams along with Jeannie.  The group survives through nothing but sheer luck.

It was luck that allowed them to get out of the house and then back into it without getting seen.  It was lucky that Vincent-at-half-the-Price chose to go after the drunken sea captain first and the boys later.  It was just good luck that Jondor survived the quicksand and showed up in the nick of time to take revenge on his master.  The supposed heroes are barely involved in their own salvation.  At the end of The Most Dangerous Game, Rainsford had to sink to Zaroff’s level and become a murderer.  The four idiots in Bloodlust just stand and watch.

The one kind of interesting spin the movie tries to put on things is when it takes some time to explore why Vincent-at-half-the-Price is the way he is.  He describes how war inured him to killing until he came to consider it a pleasure. This invites us to think about people who become murderers – prevailing opinion seems to be that people like the aforementioned Zodiac Killer are born without compassion, that their killing sprees are inevitable.  Some killers, like BTK or the Green River Killer, have stated themselves that they need to kill and couldn’t put it off forever, even when they managed to take long breaks.  It’s true that many of these murderers come from terrible backgrounds – but other people are abused as children and don’t grow up to kill people.

Vincent-at-half-the-Price’s killing spree is not inevitable.  He claims to have found it distasteful at first but it later became a pleasure as repeated kills eroded the value of human lives in his eyes.  This is actually a bit more thoughtful than Zaroff, who started out killing animals and moved up when it no longer offered him enough of a challenge.  He kills people because he thinks if they can’t escape him then they don’t deserve to live.  Once again, however, this change loses one of the points The Most Dangerous Game was trying to make, which is that killing animals for sport is brutal and pointless.  At the beginning of the story Rainsford and Whitney were on their way to the Amazon to hunt jaguars – not for food, or because the jaguar offers any threat to them, but simply because they can.

So while the source material may have left stains on my young psyche, it at least had something to say.  I will also say that it’s pretty suspenseful, and leaves you honestly worried for Rainsford as Zaroff evades his traps and closes in on him.  Bloodlust, on the other hand, is mostly just boring. You know they’re not going to kill off any of the four protagonists, because the movie just doesn’t have the guts to do it.  It can’t kill the girls because they’re girls, and it can’t kill the boys because then the girls would be sad.  Sandra and the two drunks are nothing but sacrificial victims, because the writers think you can’t have a horror movie without a body count.

Even aside of that, though, this movie would still be boring.  Sandra and Drunk #2 come to the girls’ room (not the boys’ room, because they couldn’t afford another set) to tell them a bunch of things we’ve already figured out for ourselves.  Vincent-at-half-the-Price monologues endlessly as if one of his tactics is boring his guests to death.  We never actually believe that Sandra and Drunk #2 mean to come back for the protagonists, so it doesn’t really matter to us when they’re killed.

I keep wanting to refer to the main characters as ‘the kids’ but I refuse to do so.  They’re at least not as annoying as the cast of your average 80’s slasher film, but they accomplish that mainly by being very bland.  Johnny is Brave, Peter is Nerdy, Betty is Tough, and Jeannie is Scared, and that’s it.  It’s really hard to care about any of them except Betty, who earns a modicum of sympathy by being the only really proactive one (and from my longstanding crush on June Kenney).  Once we realize the movie isn’t going to kill any of them we just stop caring.

I’m not sure what to make of Vincent-at-half-the-Price’s cheating. This seems like they’re trying to make some kind of point with it – he takes a crossbow with three bolts, one for each intended victim, and gives them a gun with one bullet.  This is supposed to be sporting.  But the gun has been disabled, and when he uses the bolts he pulls them out of the corpses, cleans them off, and recycles them.  Since the ending has him just pulling out a gun to shoot his cornered victims at point blank range, I guess the point is that for all he justifies it as a form of sport, really he just likes killing people.  The story managed to say that about Zaroff in other ways.

So yeah, this one really sucks.  Even Mike and the bots couldn’t save it.  There’s a few odd lines that are really funny but most of them are so-so, and there’s stretches when the movie just doesn’t offer them anything to riff.  Watching it without the intermittent relief offered by the host sketches was a chore, and it forced me to re-visit a bad experience from my childhood.  Fuck this movie.