A local musician and aspiring terrorist in Cuba is unaware of his actual nature as a day-walking vampire. He is apparently Count Dracula’s grandson and has served as an unwilling test subject for the experiments of one of Dracula’s sons. The musician finds himself targeted by both an American crime syndicate from Chicago and a multinational group of European vampires. He desperately tries to escape their manhunt.” (wiki)
It is an absolutely absurd madcap adventure with political and historical tones, more like an animated soap opera, but at the same time told with incredible zany humor. Blood since Bram Stoker’s Dracula was forever involved in telling the story of hidden desires, or intimate physiological communism, of the ‘other’ (usually an Oriental or someone from Eastern Europe, usually with a bad accent or Hungarian-sounding name). Less known is that Marx himself used the vampire as a metaphor for the operations of big capital sucking out living labor and transforming it into dead labor, while workers become more or less a blood bank. This animation is thus also about privatization, the grey line btw multinationals and mafia, access, equality and privilege, IP rights and patent trolls, and monopolies. As a socialist country, they have an excess of doctors, and it comes perhaps as no surprise that Cuban medical workers and doctors and “Doctor diplomacy” were deployed in 40 countries to help combat the COVID virus pandemic around the world.
Two space hunters are tracking down a machine trying to free itself. After taking it down, they witness a mystical phenomenon: the ghost of a young woman pulling herself out of the machine, as if the spaceship had a soul. Trying to understand the nature of this entity, they start chasing the woman through space… (official http://bloodmachines.com/)
This minis series (actually a movie in 3 chapters) was really hard to find, especially (like me) if you are not in a country where SHUDDER channel is supported (bad luck!). Shudder started making small genre productions, mostly horror but also SF, and the quality has been rising constantly. Many hidden gems still hide out there. Blood Machines was not in my tractor beam range for a long while, even if I knew about the Kickstarter crowdfunding project (since 2016). I knew Seth Ickerman’s was a French giant of retro 80s exploitation retrowave stylishness – mixing post-ironic, highly outrageous martial arts videos with bravado and VHS post-production VFXs. His Turbo Killer collaboration videoclip (Blood Machines 1) – with its cosmic space opera Cadillac cheap thrills grandeur and fashionista looks drowns everything in a pool of dark brooding space junk mysticism. Ickerman would be part of this new generation that adds a ton of pseudo- analog digital glitches, post filters that ooze unrepentant and nostalgic visuals. They are perfectly at home within the fold of synthwave retromania – nostalgia industries, while at the same time keeping it really really sleasy, steamy exploitation (Blood Machine has a +18 label).
Wanted to write about Blood Machines since a whole while and now friend Bogdan Lypkhanu, investigator of tantric SF, gave me the final ass kick.
Blood Machines has garnered either lots of hate as a grossed-out pile of plot-less, ham acting style dump or the perfect space opera tribute. I not so much interested in its tribute or retro aspect as in how it departs from most SF cinema depictions of spaceships in space opera sub-genre movies. Most spaceships (with the notable exception of Nostromo, Event Horizon, Lexx or Aniara more recently) are not really depicted as explicitly sentient, and I would say there is a lack not only of imagination, but of ‘wet imagination’, of corporeality in depicting a feeling, squelching, howling spaceship.
The organic – blood and flesh aspect of a biological spaceship brings me to biopunk – on a mystical cosmic, evolutionary scale, where various machinic ‘souls’. I am looking forward to spaceships where cellular and tissue aspects coexist, showing me how the universe is hosting artificial/grown entities with homeostatic millieus that pulsate, decay and mutate.
Maybe there’s more than a whiff of gender essentialism at work – rising from the fact that a lot of ships had female sounding heteronormative names (Mima), and this gets carried along in various cinematic space operas (except Millennium Falcon!). There is the cheesy lesbian undertone or even cultic Saphic love aspect to this Amazon tribe, a hidden vibration btw the spaceship protecting tribes and their eco-AI objects of care. The male characters gynophobia makes them even more of an offshoot of your Golden Age of SF captains, commanders, bounty hunters and space policemen.
It is a pity that Blood Machines is still partially stuck in a hetero male universe since there are new venues in space opera being explored by SF authors such as Benjanun Sriduangkaew – his Machine Mandate does not feature any cis males only lesbian characters, lots of sex and sleek shipminds. Both the two male pilots seem like a lot of comic relief ballast – atavistic remainders of a narcissist male hero obsessed genre that carries them on board in order to sacrifice them in the end (which is good!). The female-only tribes (‘oilsuckers‘) native to the movies exoplanet and the various ‘extracted’ mindship AIs are at the forefront of the movie. I really liked the way it reverses the Matrix Neo waking up in his pod, with the AI being extracted fully embodied in a human shape. Also the fact that the AI is somehow taking over the old mechanic co-pilot.
The AI taking this female human shape is also pretty stereotypical since it just follows that all spaceships search for the typical female white body (same as like the Ex Machine Alex Garland movie). Curious to finally seeAsian or African shipminds, that do not end embodied embody as white females. This typical pinup fembot girl is out of cult mags like MONDO2000 or Metal Hurlant comics (key SF cult comic French US book that left a long imprint) and Blood Machines never strays far from this. It is almost like these small, 21st c indie productions are the ones that the previous generations (from 1970s on) did not have the budget for, the tools or CGI acumen to do! That being said there is the Heavy Metal animation and a certain je ne sais quois, an undeniable french touch – +fose of eurotrash to it, that makes it quite a relief after the onslaught of the standard US SF. I am also excited a Romanian post FXs studio from Bucharest has been working on it – Avanpost media.
This penchant of the cyberdelic imaginary for what i would call – space fitness is also a big limitation, and restricts everything to these particular types of athletic, dancer bodies – as if one cannot fly in the universe if one is not trim, fit, flawless and more importantly streamlined. One of the interesting things is that a lot of the so-called space billionaires, beside the fact that they are mostly prone to be white, married (or divorced) and hetero white males, are also not at all what u might call owners of super sexy bodies. In fact they are completely unsexy and still they got a chance to fly high or entertain dreams of planetary escapism.
On screen one can only make into space or in the cosmos if one sports these type of healthy ‘efficient’ bodies that are increasingly being peddled both under hyper consumer capitalism and by art festivals. In order to prove one’s job dedication one has to keep this physicality on view & under control, keeping it fit at all times and under display – and under no circumstances is this body to look tired, flabby, wasted or out of shape. In Blood Machines the male spaceship hunters, hunting down rogue AI shipminds after some unspecified revolt of the machines, are definitely both unsexy and decrepit. I also like the grimness of the crusty Amazons, and the fact that they are multigenerational. Reminded me a bit of the natives of Zulawski’s Silver Globe from 1988.
At the same time there is in Blood Machines also a lot of sex magic at work, Pentagons, Pentagrams and ritualistic dance floor action. And for me this side of it was the most important – the fact that the spaceships are actually like huge interstellar beasts, whose hearts are still beating, even in a junkyard situation like stranded whales. The obvious – neo-gnostic – disembodiment of the shipmind, where the AI minds are ritualistically liberated is probably the most obvious part. These techgnostic rituals where vividly depicted, especially as Conspirituality is becoming almost a universal pop phenomenon. Erik Davis has been tracing out some of the consequences of that.
Call me a old trash SF hound, but I loved the last orgy scene where you get all these reversed crosses on the pubic hair of the embodied AIs. In a very trashy dance (end) scene these bodies are actually being choreographically and invisibly moved (even worse than in the recent remake of Suspiria) while linked to distant shipwrecks smashing into each other. There is also this glow – ‘auratic’ celeb glam to it, in a cover magazine way that puts to shame the usual very tired tropes of neo noir femme fatale cyberpunk (like the recent Reminiscence 2021 WB movie). There is a cosmic ‘satanist’ Thelema magick SF glory to this violet- magenta – lava lamp imagery, and the way space junk starts recomposing some tantric mandala is definitely one of my favorite movie endings, even if completely exxxploit, predictable and fan service (most probably).
TimeSpace Warps 