c fossel

Warning that the film is both sexually explicit and graphically violent. I put that up front because if you start streaming the movie and turn it off, you will likely get the wrong impression of what ‘Love Lies Bleeding’ has to offer. In context, everything in the film that is OTT is meaningfully so. Meaning it isn’t just lazy. I am finding reviews citing its references to David Lynch, the Cohen Brothers, many directors in the classic noir genre, etc. but, for me, first and foremost—it recalled the endless stream of Chuck Norris et all movies from the late 70’s and early 80’s. This is not a martial arts movie but it’s heavy revenge-based themes of “dirty violence” begetting “morally just violence” and set in the American SW (NM) really recalls the machoarama genre (drawing inspiration, clearly from Bruce Lee) that started out with lean figures such as David Carradine, Chuck Norris, Clint Eastwood in hot dry climates and then saw the bodies grow more inflated until the string finally capped/tied off in the vigilante jungle-based films of Van Damme, Stalone and Schwartzenegger. Few of those movies had a sense of humor about how OTT they were. This one goes all the way into camp. It mixes it up, also recalling the drugs, sex and cars B-movies of the same era I mentioned before. Not in a way that isn’t hot. Because the gender roles here are reversed. The movie also offers a conversation about the Superhero Genre domination of the US feature film market in the past 15 years and speaks specifically to of the mythos of The Amazing Spider-Man and The Incredible Hulk. The casting is solid. The actors’ performances are solid. However Glass was directing them, they are all “in the same movie” which is saying a lot because as referential as this film may be, it’s a completely novel world. Undefinable. Fresh. And well-shot to boot.