CITY OF BLOOD (1983) Review

TODAY'S BARGAIN: CITY OF BLOOD (1983) - Standalone DVD
PRICE: $2

Directed by: Darrell Roodt
Written by: Mary-Ann Lindenstadt, Darrell Roodt
Starring: Joe Stewardson, Ian Yule, Susan Coetzer

CITY OF BLOOD is certainly an unusual horror film, mostly due to the fact that it isn't a horror movie at all. The title, cover art and synopsis on the DVD case all point to it being a South African slasher film with some sort of ancient evil stalking and slaying prostitutes. Unfortunately it's nothing of the sort.
The film starts off promising by taking us back 2000 years to witness two African tribesmen being murdered by a mysterious masked killer wielding a spiked club. It's an intriguing scene obviously designed to get your attention in the hope that you'll put up with the utter snoozefest that is the majority of the movie in the vain hope of seeing some more gore eventually. After the tribesmen meet their end we are brought forward to 1980s Johannesburg where pathologist Joe Henderson (Stewardson) is called out by his cop buddy to examine the body of a murdered prostitute. The body isn't the first and Joe is convinced that there is a serial killer roaming the streets. So far so good, but this is where things go downhill. Fast.

Back at Joe's office he finds a mysterious death certificate, completely filled out except for a name and his signature. The only problem is that Joe has no idea who the certificate is for or how it found it's way onto his desk. It turns out that a political prisoner has been killed in a bungled interrogation and certain authorities want the death covered up by having Joe sign the mystery death certificate. Joe refuses and spends the rest of the film being pressured into signing while dealing with his own dramas like his hallucinations, nightmares and his personal investigation into the prostitute deaths. He also develops a relationship with a whore named Abigail (Coetzer). By now you are totally justified in being pissed off by the film not delivering on anything that it promises, in fact the slasher / whore murder subplot makes up the smallest portion of the story, which would be fine if every aspect of the movie didn't try and pass itself of as a fucking horror movie.

Apart from the sudden shift from quasi-horror to full blown political drama there are plenty of other flaws with CITY OF BLOOD as well. The acting may be decent but the characters themselves are all boring, two-dimensional cutouts with no backstory and no character development. I assume Joe is supposed to be having some sort of moral struggle about signing the death certificate but the consequences or doing it or not doing it don't seem like all that big a deal and also; are there no other competent fucking pathologists in the country? There's an obvious anti-apartheid message shining through but the question is; what the fuck do the prostitute murders and the 2000 years previous opening scene have to do with any of it? Is the demographic for slasher movies and political dramas the same? I don't fucking think so.

Surprisingly for a DVD which cost a grand total of $2 the transfer is brilliant, it looks about as good as a DVD can. It's completely vanilla with no special features though which is to be expected. The movie is good in a technical way; it's competently shot, edited and photographed, but no amount of good editing will make up for a lousy story and shitty characters. Parts of the soundtrack were kinda neat and there were a few nicely constructed scenes (particularly this one) but the departure from horror to boring drama was a fatal mistake. There's nothing wrong with political drama but for fuck's sake don't market it as horror when it's plainly not.