Earth and Blood

Netflix produced this Western in 2019.  It's short (80 minutes) and stylishly made, although the plot is moronic.  The picture reminds me of an old Walter Hill flick, something on the order of  Southern Comfort or Trespass which Earth and Blood resembles in many respects. 

A half-breed with a deaf daughter lives in a  remote valley on the frontier.  In that place, the man operates a saw-mill.  Seven desperadoes besiege the isolated saw-mill.  The hero kills them all in ingenious ways, but, also, suffers fatal injuries himself.  The deaf girl survives unharmed. 

That's it:  there's no more to the film. Except that I should note that the half-breed seems to be anAlgerian Berber living on the frontier between Belgium and France.  The desperadoes are a gang of drug dealers of mostly African origin -- they are like the Indians besieging Fort Apache.  There's no acting to speak of -- just a lot of scowling and muttering threats.  The hero looks good with a shot-gun and most of his dialogue consists of ordering people to "hide" or "get down!"  As usual in films like this, your sympathy always is diverted to the indefatigable and doomed bad guys.  In this case, the object of their assault is a satchel full of cocaine -- surely a replaceable item and not worth the massive sacrifices that the villains make in terms of blood and guts.  After about the third bad guy is slaughtered in some picturesque way, any sane person would vamoose for the hills and get away from the implacable killing machine hero.  But these guys heroically keep up the attack until they are slaughtered to the very last man, of course, the big malevolent boss being spared for the end.  Since the action takes place at a saw-mill, lots of lethal industrial equipment is deployed to butcher the bad guys.  One villain gets his forearm spiked to a sliding table and his hand sawn off.  The hero hops in a huge front-end loader that looks like it weighs about ten tons.  One hapless bad guy gets involved in a SUV v. Front-end loader crash with predictable consequences.  In an early scene, a burly-looking drayhorse drags a huge log out of the forest.  As Chekhov advises:  If you show a dray horse in the first scene, that dray horse has "to go off" by the last scene.  (I'm borrowing from a Manchester Guardian review.)  In the midst of all the mayhem, the hero spends time rigging up the dray horse so that it can literally tug one villain in two .  (Generally, the special effects aren't very good and you have to, more or less, surmise that this guy gets bisected in this way.)  The head bad guy, the big chief, has a way of killing people by twisting their heads in his hands -- he's like a psycho-killer chiropractor.  At the climax, the villain decides to break the deaf girl's neck instead of just shooting her.  He approaches, lovingly caresses the terrified girl's neck and skull for a long moment, draws close and, then, of course, gets an ax smashed into the back of his head.  He falls over grunting, having no one to blame but himself and his propensity for extended murder-foreplay and bare-hands spine-snapping for his demise.  The hero, dying of lung cancer we're given to believe, takes the ax, raises it over his head, and slams it down on the bad guy's breast-bone.  This is distinctly anti-climactic:  in any self-respecting American film, even a TV show like West World, the ax would split the villain's face in two.  In fact, the film is weirdly restrained:  all of the opportunities for mayhem potentially provided by saws big enough to cut a semi-tractor in two, all of the wood chippers, bark-peelers, and aerial conveyor belts leading to fearsome blades don't get used at all. 

Blood and Earth is attractively mounted in wood tones -- everything looks like a tastefully paneled room even the exteriors.  The skies are muted and grey and rain falls.  There's mist in the mountains and the movie is a symphony of wood tones and pale gray colors -- even the blood looks monochromatic.  This sort of movie would be better if it were silent -- you don't need dialogue to tell this story and, in fact, the characters' speech is a just a distraction  Furthermore, I don't know why the French was dubbed -- I suppose because fans of this kind of movie don't know how to read.  Everyone speaks very clear (dubbed) American English.  Someone named Julien LeClerq directed this thing.