My experience of Mexican cinema tends towards the non-mainstream, admittedly, but even based on the little I do know, it seems that lurching straight into the strange and the bloody unreasonable is a niche national pastime. And so we come to Violent Delights a.k.a Beber de tu Sangre, which certainly starts as it means to go on, i.e. as a rather ungovernable, occasionally charming and always fairly confusing jumble of nudity and (some) horror elements. I counted four sex scenes before the title of the film appeared on screen. Now that is some pioneer spirit.
So much as we have a plot here – and I must stress, plot is not a priority – this is a break up movie, which becomes a tangled web of new relationships movie, which then stops making sense in any clear-cut way soon after that. Oh, and one of the couples is vampiric, although this doesn’t seem to confer many of the special powers we usually associate with vampirism; there’s no ‘time is an abyss’ here, but there is some pretty adventurous blood-letting (this film is very grisly when it wants to be, and doesn’t scrimp on the practical splatter effects). Other than that, the vampirism is just another vainglorious excuse to crowbar more boobs in, and I don’t really buy the script’s occasional excursions into existentialism because the boobs were too much of an utter distraction. But there we have it.
Couple number one, Lizeth and her on-off boyfriend Javier (not a pun), are trying to make a go of it after originally parting ways for some time; the fact that she’s pretty heavily pregnant with his child has rather forced the issue, and there’s a fair amount of second thoughts on his behalf (second thoughts which lead him to almost sleep with someone else during the nanosecond he left Lizeth and her friends at a bar to go to the toilet). The other woman who catches his eye is Alani, a vampire bored of her partner Gabriel after an unspecified amount of time together. All the orgies and the blood-letting just isn’t what it was.
It transpires that Alani and Gabriel are having problems for another reason: she wants a baby, and he doesn’t. This makes it even clearer to us that these are not vampires in a standard-issue kind of a way, as this would usually prohibit conception on account of being dead. Anyway, Javier wends his merry way back to Alani’s side when he gets half a chance, and so these two couples get drawn into a tangled web indeed. Gabriel fancies himself as a bit of an am-dram expert, so he invites Lizeth, Javier, and her friends Vania and Claudia to their house/theatre for dinner and a show. From here, things take a less linear turn, as for the rest of the film each individual actor seems to meander around the house, stopping to sleep with one another, quarrel, drink a bit of blood, or – if it’s Alani – talk about her maternal urges, which she now believes can be assuaged by the new love of her life, Javier; this girl is one big red flag. He seems game as well, which is particularly something given his pregnant partner is actually at this dinner with him. Things get gorier and dafter by turns as the film pushes towards its conclusion, giving the nod to a few other cult exploitation films along the way but feeling for all the world like a kind of tripped-out Coffin Joe story, with the same emphasis on getting the ‘perfect offspring’ by any means, even great sacrifice.
The main idea here – of a kind of love triangle (rectangle?) between vampires and non-vampires actually ain’t half bad. It could have been explored in a number of different ways, but the fact is that director/writer/editor Edin Alain Martinez opted to go for a sexploitation route here – by and large, at least – and that’s definitely what you get. There’s a certain scene with a certain cake which made me roar laughing; it was also an obvious ruse to emulate something rather more hardcore than might otherwise have been gotten away with! There is horror though, and there are some gory set pieces which have a bit of expertise behind them; overall, the film looks pretty crisp, with strong colouration and lighting which gives the film a nicely-stylised feel overall. The way in which the film veers from arthouse to exploitation means a mixed bag script-wise (accepting, of course, that things can get lost in translation). Some of the sexy-time dialogue is as laugh-out-loud ridiculous as the cake is; there’s definitely some knowing humour in here. At least, I bloody hope so.
Still, for all that, and it’s something I keep coming back to: at least Violent Delights tries to be different and tries to be entertaining, looks fine (some of the casting notwithstanding) and gets everything done and dusted in ninety minutes, which in itself is only polite. Mesmerisingly trashy, I’d say. And on occasion, you can’t say fairer than that.
Violent Delights is available for your education and edification via Redemption TV, a streaming service which you can find out about here.