Mixed Blood

One of the reasons that I thoroughly enjoy gritty urban crime films is because I often times find them to be gregariously gratifying and unintentionally hilarious. When I found out about Paul Morrissey's black comedy crime flick Mixed Blood – a work chock-full of politically incorrect racial tensions and multicultural sociopathic juvenile career criminals – I was fairly intrigued, as I have come to love the cynical gritty realism of the director's Warhol produced Trash trilogy (Flesh, Trash, Heat) and his politically satiric Monster films (Flesh for Frankenstein, Blood for Dracula). After watching Mixed Blood, I must admit that I was more than delighted by the flick, as I surely can't remember the last time I “laughed out loud” while watching a film. Despite wickedly laughing throughout my viewing of Mixed Blood, I still wonder whether or not all of the somewhat ambiguous scenes featured in the film were intended to be capricious (I assume a little of both). After all, Mixed Blood features a variety of ethnic actors with heavy accents and nonexistent (yet charming) acting skills.  The plot of Mixed blood centers around two rival ethnic gangs – one composed of recently arrived underage illegal aliens (people described by the mainstream media as "undocumented workers") from Brazil and another composed of vicious Puerto Ricans – who battle for criminal (drug trafficking) control of New York City’s Lower East Side. The Brazilian gang is led by Rita La Punta (aka the bitch), a middle-aged Mary Magdalene-like figure who controls the gang of ruthless and underage gangsters. Although she acts as a pseudo-mother to the boys of her gang, she also has a bastard biological son (whose father is unknown) named Thiago; a boy that is clearly mentally retarded (an unflattering fact Rita openly admits and regrets). The actress that plays Rita, Marilia Pera, is probably best known in the cinema world for her performance in Hector Babenco's Pixote (1981). When one of Rita’s beloved adolescent hoods meets a grizzly death via being thrown off a roof by members of the Puerto Rican gang, she realizes that she must wage a war against the rival (but somewhat) similar race. As Rita dramatically states in Mixed Blood, “There Will be Blood.”

If there ever was a crime film that dramatized the murderous dangers of urban race-mixing, it is the fittingly titled film Mixed Blood. Anti-heroine Rita has no reservations when she states the following regarding miscegenation, “Never mix blood.” Over a quarter-century after Mixed Blood was released, racial tensions have only intensified for the worst in the (especially urban) Occidental world. Of course, Rita is not the only character featured in the film that despises other races, as every race is attacked by virtually ever character in Mixed Blood; with whites being described as "whitefaces" and musical Puerto Ricans being labeled as "Spanish Negroes." In Paul Morrissey’s Andy Warhol produced Trash Trilogy, the admittedly conservative director lampooned the absurdity of the hedonistic “counter-culture” revolution, drug addiction, free sex, and “women’s liberation.” In Mixed Blood, a film created over a decade after the final chapter in the original trilogy was released, Morrissey unabashedly foretells the crime-ridden virtual hellhole that would bloom like an army of weeds in a flower bed as a result of third world immigration (a direct result of the 1965 Immigration Reform Act proposed by hypocritical Zionist politician Emmanuel Celler and heavily supported by degenerate senator Ted Kennedy) and nihilistic race-mixing. The unspoken fact that multiculturalism advocates don’t dare ever mention - which is a central theme to Mixed Blood – is that so called minorities almost exclusively become victims of crime and terror from fellow minorities, and not from the distinctly (or so Hollywood tells us) and mystically evil white man. Of course, one most accept this largely forgotten biblical truth: for the life of every creature is its blood (Leviticus 17:14) – whether the collectively neurotic and illiberally-liberal sick members of white American and Northern/Western Europe acknowledge it or not – as virtually all other races and life forms do. In the urban nightmare contained within Mixed Blood, race-hate is in its most primitive, yet hilarious form. One of the funniest scenes occurs early on in the film when a black female cop approaches a drug dealer who has a line of buyers that crowd a city block. After inquiring about his blatantly illegal activities, the dealer retorts to the cop, “What the hell are you talking about you nigger bitch……dyke.” Not long after, the cop visits Rita who also calls her a dyke. Naturally, racial and sexual discrimination are not the only things that make Mixed Blood an uproarious piece of black comedy crime cinema. One of the funniest characters in the film is Thiago – Rita’s delightfully dimwitted son – a young man who repeatedly states variations of the following when he is under the suspicion that a person is poking fun at him, “Don’t make fun of me, I don’t like it.” When it comes to unconventionally charismatic criminal speds, Mixed Blood generously delivers. 

Like most crime-related films, Mixed Blood features a couple alphas and a bunch of betas, but of a totally unorthodox sort. Clearly, the greatest alpha featured in the film is Rita – a woman who leads a gang of underage boys from the comfort of her decrepit apartment; the intellectual epicenter of her crudely, but carefully assembled criminal enterprise. Like the equally exotic Anna Magnani (Mamma Roma, The Fugitive Kind), Rita is sexually alluring despite her overused and rapidly deteriorating flesh. Obviously, being a woman that has bedded uncountable men, Rita knows how to mentally manipulate youthful boys into executing her criminal demands. Juan, an alpha in the Puerto Rican gang, controls his men in a more masculine way – establishing authority via violent verbal and physical assault. During a particularly jocular scene in Mixed Blood, Juan states to one of his philistine henchmen, “Who the fuck washes his hands then takes a piss? Only a no brain spick would do something like this….I’m the only that tells you how to piss.” Indeed, Juan rules with a unruly black-market iron fist, ruthlessly mutilating and murdering rival gang members just for kicks. To say the least, Mixed Blood is a counter-revolutionary vintage crime film with a certain authenticity that you won’t find in Hollywood. Additionally, Mixed Blood is a wonderfully zany work that celebrates multiculturalism in a most honest way by valiantly portraying the true colors of a color-clashing urban dystopia.  Instead of offering silly hope like the repulsively sentimental work Crash (2004), Mixed Blood condemns multiculturalism (the word itself being an oxymoron) and its culture-destroying tendencies (The failure of the USSR and Yugoslavia have proven this). Like Paul Morrissey’s previous films, Mixed Blood is more relevant today than when it was originally released. Unlike your typical Hollywood crime, Mixed Blood neglects to romanticize the urban proletarian criminal world, but, instead, shows it for what it is; a group of uneducated individuals who irrationally see crime as the only way to survive. The film also features John Leguizamo’s first credited film role, thus foreshadowing his fairly successful acting career in Hollywood crime films. Equipped with a complimentary and highly festive soundtrack, Mixed Blood is a truly vibrant (despite the ultra-realistic gritty anti-aesthetic used by Morrissey) and uncompromising black comedy crime drama that is a fine anti-tribute to the third-worldization of the United States. I will end this review with some words of wisdom from Rita, “You must always do what your mother says.”

-Ty E