Flesh+blood 1985 Full Movie

[Katina Piccirilli]

Thescript is partly based on unused material for the Dutch TV series Floris, which was the debut for Verhoeven, Soeteman and Hauer. The film, originally titled God's Own Butchers,[2][3] was also known as The Rose and the Sword on early VHS releases. It was Verhoeven's first English-language film.[4]

The film follows a group of mercenaries who carry out missions for a lord who has lost his castle but after retaking it they are betrayed and forced to leave. During a revenge attack the group find and take a young woman who is betrothed to the lord's son. This changes the dynamic of the group during a dangerous time of medieval fighting and the plague.

In 1501, a city in Italy was taken by a coup d'tat while its rightful ruler, Arnolfini, was away. Arnolfini promises some mercenaries 24 hours of looting if they succeed in retaking the city, and they do so, raping and killing those who stand in their way. In their revelry, Arnolfini decides that he wants the mercenaries gone.

Arnolfini's son Steven is betrothed to Agnes. They meet for the first time and eat from a mandrake to magically fall in love, and later the entourage is attacked and robbed by Martin's band. Arnolfini is seriously injured; Kathleen, Agnes' lady-in-waiting, is killed; and Agnes is hauled away, concealed among her valuable dowry. Martin discovers Agnes that evening as they strip the caravan of valuables. The men desire to rape her but Martin decides to take her himself. He rapes Agnes in front of the caravan while she at first taunts him, and then begs Martin's protection when he is finished. Martin prevents the rest of the men from raping her.

The mercenaries come upon a castle where, unknown to them, the inhabitants are infected with the plague. They capture the castle with the help of Agnes. She induces Martin to fall in love with her and works on the other mercenaries to accept her. She appears to have given up on her former life. Determined to rescue her, Steven turns to Hawkwood. Hawkwood only wants to live a quiet life, married to the former nun. Steven, becoming as ruthless as his father, seizes her to force Hawkwood to help his pursuit of Martin.

Steven's party locates Martin and the mercenaries. They do not have sufficient force to take the castle and lay siege to it. In the castle, Martin asks Agnes where her true loyalty lies; she is noncommittal, hinting that the winner takes all. Outside, the plague spreads among Steven's forces and infects Hawkwood. Steven builds a siege tower to storm the castle, and Martin destroys it with something Steven had tried earlier: gunpowder. Steven's soldiers are killed as Steven scales the tower's ladders, and falls into the castle grounds.

The mercenaries capture Steven and shackle him in the courtyard; Agnes joins in his abuse. Using a new medical technique Steven learned (cutting the buboes on the infected body), Hawkwood cures his plague. He cannot continue the siege alone but, before leaving for additional troops, he catapults pieces of an infected dog into the castle. One chunk lands near the chained Steven; he initially warns Martin of the danger of the dog, but flings it into the castle's water well after seeing Agnes acquiesce to Martin's sexual demands. Steven says that she can decide whether to tell the mercenaries.

The mercenaries wish to leave the castle, fearing the plague, but Martin persuades them to stay. At the next meal, Agnes watches as they drink infected water. As Martin begins to drink, she slaps the cup from his hand, just as the mercenaries begin to show signs of the plague. The party blame Martin, and hurl him into the well. Agnes then joins in the abuse of Martin.

After the throng departs, Steven needs Martin's key to escape from the shackles, and Martin needs Steven to get out of the well. The two cooperate, but upon seeing that Hawkwood and Arnolfini recovered from their wounds and returned with an army, Martin flees to the belfry. Using a lightning storm to strike the chain, Steven frees himself and, as the battle rages, races to find Agnes. During the fighting, the belfry catches fire. All the mercenaries, save Martin, Polly, Anna, and Little John, end up dead.

Martin confronts Agnes, who claims that she loves him. He prepares to murder her rather than allow her to return to Steven. As Martin is strangling Agnes, Steven attacks. Martin overpowers Steven and almost drowns him, but Agnes strikes Martin on the head, and she and Steven flee the blazing castle and reunite with Hawkwood. As Agnes and Steven embrace, Agnes sees Martin over Steven's shoulder, escaping from the castle, a sack of loot on his shoulder. She says nothing.[5]

In addition to a cast featuring American, Australian, British, Spanish and Dutch actors, attempting to handle an international co-production funded by multiple sources who all wanted to take the film in different directions overwhelmed Verhoeven, who had also not storyboarded the film in a bid to achieve a "looser visual approach".[3] There were a number of delays and disagreements because of the subsequent improvisational style of filming; many members of the cast and crew also arrived and left when they pleased to party on a local beach.[3] One of the most notable disagreements was between Verhoeven and Hauer, who wanted to cultivate a reputation for playing heroic characters rather than villains, as he did in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982).[3] This was at odds with Verhoeven's intent to portray the moral ambiguity of its characters and the Middle Ages as a "stinking time in which to live" to distance it from typical medieval fantasy depictions of the period.[3] This caused a bitter rift to develop between the two, who did not work together again.[3]

Some of the film was censored, including the rape sequence. This upset Jennifer Jason Leigh, who was opposed to censorship. "It's a hard scene to watch," she said. "Brutal and ugly as rape is, I know it's going to upset a lot of people. But the film is extraordinary. Paul Verhoeven is so gifted."[6]

Flesh and Blood's musical score was composed by Basil Poledouris, conducting the London Symphony Orchestra.[7] La-La Land Records released an extended CD of the score in 2013 with almost twice as much music as the original 1985 LP/CD release by Varse Sarabande.

Though the film received worldwide release in the summer of 1985, in the United States, Orion Pictures gave the film a limited theatrical release on August 16, 1985, in Los Angeles and New York City. Thus, the film did not gross a large amount in the country, and by most accounts, performed poorly.[3] By 1986, the film was showing in the U.S. on HBO, a business partner of Orion Pictures.

Verhoeven has hypothesized on the reasons for the film's failure at the American box office in the years since its release, including statements that it was "too cynical and downbeat" to be a hit.[3] Professor of film and literature at California Polytechnic State University Douglas Keesey suggested that the film had "no hero to root for and no happy fantasy element to lighten its unpleasantly realistic depiction of the Middle Ages".[3]

The film's financial failure caused Verhoeven to move to the United States in September 1985 in order to better understand American culture and what films would be suited to its audience.[3] In addition to this, his previous films, notably Spetters (1980), had been protested by members of the Dutch public and it had become difficult to gain financing to shoot productions in his home country.[3]

Although unsuccessful at the box office upon release, the film has become a critical and cult favorite.[3] It maintains an 86% approval rating on the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes based on 21 reviews, with a weighted average of 6.1/10.[8]

The movie inspired Berserk creator Kentaro Miura, who said in a 2003 interview when he won the Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize's Award for Excellence (2002) that he based the design of Berserk protagonist Guts on the character Martin as portrayed by actor Rutger Hauer.

A band of medieval mercenaries take revenge on a noble lord who decides not to pay them by kidnapping the betrothed of the noble's son. As the plague and warfare cut a swathe of destruction throughout the land, the mercenaries hole up in a castle and await their fate.

Rutger Hauer Jennifer Jason Leigh Tom Burlinson Jack Thompson Susan Tyrrell Ronald Lacey Brion James John Dennis Johnston Bruno Kirby Fernando Hilbeck Marina Saura Kitty Courbois Simn Andreu Jake Wood Hans Veerman Hctor Alterio Blanca Marsillach Nancy Cartwright Jorge Bosso Mario De Barros Ida Bons Jaime Segura Bettina Brenner Siobhan Hayes Susan Beresford Mnica Lucchetti Anne Lockhart

Verhoeven's medieval THE WILD BUNCH, only not an elegy for a time of idealized masculinity or old codes of honor but an incredibly skeptical story of superstition & tradition giving way to pragmatism & capital. Money, religion, love, sex, class; spoiler alert: power is power, everyone's full of shit, survival is the only cause. Rutger Hauer's Christ halo FTW.

Deranged medieval historical fantasy, loaded with so much filth that you can practically smell the blasphemy, and a fascinating dichotomy of religion and progress. A world shifting from ancient roots to commodified desires. Would pair well with Monty Python and the Holy Grail or Hard to Be a God, take your pick.

on paper, this reads like Verhoeven doing an Excalibur riff but in actuality it's more of an exceedingly, almost grotesquely, horny exploitation movie that just so happens to be set in medieval times -- understandably reviled by many as it may very well be Verhoeven's most intensely off-putting film: full of vile characters, exceptionally brutal violence and sweaty sex, the result of which is 128 minutes of Rutger Hauer maiming and fucking his way to victory; sign me up

"Listen, Shakespeare. My name is Paul Verhoeven. I'm from the future. I need to take you to the year 1985 because I want to watch Straw Dogs with you and then we're gonna do coke and write a medieval AIDS movie. You in?"

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