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Director Paul Verhoeven has always enjoyed shocking his audience with violence, sex, gore and filth. This love of all things sordid can be traced right back to his European films of the '70s. In Flesh + Blood, his English-language debut, Verhoeven delights in pushing back a few Hollywood boundaries and serving up a medieval romp that alternately intrigues and disgusts. While it is most definitely not everyone's cup of tea, Flesh + Blood is never boring.... and certainly shows the plague-ridden period in a more authentic light than most films that have gone before.In Western Europe during the early 16th Century, a gang of mercenaries led by the charismatic Martin (Rutger Hauer) help a nobleman to win back control of his city. The nobleman (Fernando Hillbeck) promises that they may take loot from his city if they help him. but once the battle reaches a favourable conclusion he goes back on his word and banishes the mercenaries to the wild. Martin's gang return for revenge and discover that the nobleman's son, Steven (Tom Burlinson), is to be married to a virginal princess named Agnes (Jennifer Jason Leigh). The mercenaries kidnap Agnes and head off with her, leaving young Steven to lament his loss. Agnes is abused and tormented by her captors, and ultimately raped by Martin himself, but she gives the impression that she is actually enjoying her ordeal. Martin falls in love with her and takes her as his "official" lover, making a home for her and the band in a nearby castle. Meanwhile, Steven enlists an old soldier, Hawkwood (Jack Thompson) - once a colleague of Martin's - and together they plan a way of rescuing the princess from the clutches of the mercenaries.Flesh + Blood is full of deliberate unpleasantness. Rotting corpses hang from trees; a stillborn baby is crudely stuffed into a barrel and buried in a puddle; gang rape reigns supreme; heads and torsos are impaled on lances; nuns are disfigured and murdered; a plague-ridden dog is dismembered and its body parts used for a primitive form of germ warfare. Verhoeven is clearly having a ball rubbing our noses in all this dirt, and he somehow encourages his well-known cast to enter into the vile proceedings with full-blooded gusto. The problem is that the story is not all that compelling and takes a long time to play out to its obvious conclusion. There are occasional foolish moments that mar credibility too, such as the scene where Steven's soldiers build an unbelievably complex assault contraption overnight (a scene which hilariously reminds one of The A-Team!), and the bit where Martin spends several hours in a poisoned well but climbs out uninfected, while other members of his band drop down stricken merely by drinking a sip of the same water. Flesh + Blood is ultra-violent, ultra-brutal and ultra-sordid, so you'll need to be in a certain frame of mind to enjoy it. In other words, it's admirable but not enjoyable.
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