Surprisingly, some of your universe's top critics feel Alien Blood is not a masterpiece. Reviewer spike_jonez writes, “This movie simply should not have been made….This movie is one huge plot hole. It's simply bad. Not even the kind of bad you can make fun of.” Reviewer squlknife writes, “All I can say is, don't watch this movie. There isn't a single redeeming quality about it.” And reviewer leofwine_draca writes, “Plenty of effort has gone into the visuals but the plot is real mess and the whole thing soon descends into incoherency.”
Read on for the truth about Alien Blood...
The film begins with an artful bang as the camera rushes toward a huge granite stone in a rainstorm to show a woman cradling the dead body of a child as a UFO appears in the sky.
The woman then wakes up in bed while wearing a black trench coat and dark sunglasses. The words “The Last Day of the 20th Century” appear onscreen. Then a waiter arrives at the woman’s door offering breakfast, so she beats him up and sneers at him.
After the opening credits, a crew of black-clad government agents (also wearing dark sunglasses) find the body of the waiter. Significantly, they take two of his teeth from the bed and place them on a silver tray, shaking their heads dejectedly.
The film cuts to a mountain stream, where the woman from the opening, Helene, washes her clearly pregnant belly. The story follows two pairs of mothers and children. One is the black-clad, pregnant woman, whose daughter has voluminous blond hair. The other is a woman dressed in colorful clothes, whose son has short dark hair. While the black-clad woman sits at a rocky quarry, the colorfully dressed woman and her son find a farmer in a rural area with a white horse. When the farmer grabs the woman’s backside, she uses a judo flip on him, tosses some money onto his prone body, then she and the boy steal the horse and ride toward the sunset. They meet up with their counterparts and show each other their graphing calculators, which appear to be alien communication devices. They also fondle the pregnant woman’s belly.
The next morning, the two pairs part. The colorfully clad woman and her son ride away on horseback, but they are suddenly attacked by masked men in black. After a fight consisting mostly of kickboxing (in which the young boy resourcefully flips one of the men over his back), one of the men in black fires a rifle at the boy. He is hit several times, as is his mother. She kills the shooter, but the boy dies. She cradles his body and screams as lightning strikes all around her.
The film cuts to an image of an alien screaming at sunset, possibly showing the grieving mother’s true form.
Elsewhere, in a field, the men in black gather. Their leader, who does not wear a mask or sunglasses but wears an ankh around his neck, introduces himself to his cohorts. “Michael Jouvet, the man who tread on 10,000 skulls to get where he is. Well, where am I today? Standing in the middle of nowhere, time running out, surrounded by expensively trained, smart-assed pricks.” He is angry that the women haven’t been captured. He proves he is serious by shooting one of the men in the head.
Meanwhile, in a surreal and possibly symbolic scene, the pregnant woman and her body sit by a lake and watch a juggler perform on the other side, until Michael Jouvet shoots the juggler and dumps his body in the lake. Jouvet does not appear to see the woman or her child.
The film cuts to a small house in the forest where two nude lesbian women dress each other (based on their fangs, they are both vampires). The alien woman watches from outside. In the same house, a man and a woman have sex on a bed while another woman sits in the bathtub. The sound of bagpipes is heard from outside. The man and woman stop having sex for a moment, and he comments on her interest in the as-yet unseen bagpiper. “We know you like him in his kilt. We’ve all seen you looking.”
“Yes, and? Men look at women all the time, or hadn’t you noticed?”
“Brilliant. So now women are chasing anything in a skirt.”
One of the men in black is also outside the house, and he shoots the piper, killing him.
In a sepia-toned chapel that is also part of the house, a woman in a wedding dress named Rachel walks up to a middle-aged man in a tuxedo. He offers her wine and then he toasts her: “Here’s to the most glorious bride Dracula ever had.”
“Except you don’t bite me anymore,” Rachel complains.
The man is not actually Dracula but a man named James (or perhaps his full name is James Dracula), and even though they are actually vampires, they are dressed for a costume party to celebrate the turn of the millenium. They are joined by a younger woman named Vickie. Comically, both women reject James for sexual favors, so he walks through the large house searching for a woman willing to sleep with him, finding none.
As several vampires in fancy dress gather together in the house, the woman in the bathtub, a psychic named Elizabeth, says, “Something’s coming.”
Indeed it is. The pregnant alien woman enters the house and aims a handgun at James, shooting him three times. He falls back into Elizabeth’s bathroom and she begins to scream. The woman turns the gun on the other occupants of the house. The only man remaining, Tom, loses control of his bladder when the woman points her gun at him.
The woman and her child eat some fruit from a bowl on the table, and the occupants of the house, who are British, realize the woman speaks French. She tells them they are all going to die, and that they are all in danger (which might have been implied by her first statement). There are men after her child, so she asks if they have weapons, which they deny. Then the woman, inexplicably, begins speaking English with a French accent. She realizes that Elizabeth is psychic. She also introduces herself as Helene and her daughter as Monique.
Suddenly, a man in black (the one who shot the bagpiper) bursts into the room shooting, but Helene shoots him (after humorously throwing Tom across the room to save his life), then goes outside to shoot the other men in black surrounding the house.
When she is outside, Rachel opens a trunk to reveal some guns, so she aids Helene by shooting out the window. Helene returns to the house, where she stabs one man in black’s hand to a doorframe so he won’t be able to attack them when he regains consciousness. As the house is besieged, suddenly Helene pulls a bloody piece of her pregnant belly off her body (possibly her heart, as it pulses) and drops it on the floor.
The others ignore Helene and gather various weapons. The women take off their fancy dresses so they are dressed only in underwear as they lug automatic weapons through the house. Meanwhile, Monique steals an angel from their Christmas tree and psychically unlocks a door, revealing Rachel in her wedding dress with her gun.
As the women fire at the men in black attempting to invade the house, Tom escapes, but he is shot by Michael Jouvet, who says, “Goodbye, little brother.”
When a man invades the house, Monique stares at him and psychically forces him to bleed to death from his mouth.
When all seems lost, an alien spaceship appears over the forest. It zaps most of the men in black.
Michael Jouvet enters the house and confronts Helene, asking her where Monique is. She says nothing. Then two female aliens beam down from the spacecraft. Defiantly, Michael Jouvet shoots Helene in the head, but the alien women telekinetically force him to blast his own head off.
Dying, Helene tells Monique to go with the alien women, who are her “own people.” The girl complies, disappearing in a beam of light as a single tear rolls down her cheek.
In the film’s elegiac coda, we watch as Helene’s second child (perhaps spawned from the heart ripped out of her body) grows up in the house, watched over by the surviving women. In voiceover, one of the women summarizes the profound meaning of the story (ending her statement, poetically, with a preposition): “The future is always a mystery. The past, a puzzle. We never found out the whole history of Helene and Monique. We are left to wonder. But the example of this new mysterious child will have to be enough. For in this chaotic and savage world, if we cannot put our faith in our children, wherever they may come from, then what can we put our faith in?”
The End
As must be clear from the review above, Alien Blood is a sophisticated allegory. What does it mean? If it is not clear, I will be unable to explain its nuances to you because it is so complex and well-thought-out. Suffice it to say that women are aliens, men are militaristic, and children are angelic alien beings with infinite telekinetic powers. Do vampires exist? That is the one point of ambiguity in Alien Blood, as the film never truly explains whether the occupants of the house are real vampires or are simply dressed as vampires for the customary New Year's Eve costume party (see also 1980's Terror Train). However, the man dressed as Dracula is killed by one shot of a handgun, and all the women appear in the daylight at the end of the film, so it is clear that Alien Blood is not adhering to traditional vampire mythology. Whether the characters are vampires or not, the film is clearly a powerful philosophical statement about humanity itself. As is often the case with such masterworks, the director never made another feature film, which, as always, is humanity's loss.