Violent Delights (2020)

 

Director: Edin Martinez

Screenplay: Edin Martinez

Cast: Ana Paulina Martinez as Alani; Guillermo Zapata as Gabriel; Ernesto Salinas as Javier; Jitzel Galicia as Lizbeth; Paola Hernandez as Claudia; Olivia Adriana Pérez as Vania

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

 

This was a disappointment. A Mexican made erotic vampire film which plays out as a melodrama in plot, it sounds absolutely to my tastes, and with respect to those involved, shows this at times only to have lost this particular viewer, whilst others may have appreciated its wavelength further. Alani (Ana Paulina Martinez) is a red headed vampire who hooks up and bites on patrons in bars and clubs, connected to another vampire named Gabriel (Guillermo Zapata) she is romantically tied to. He is an older balding lover who has an air of a Satanist even if he was not a vampire, and makes one night stands with younger men potentially more uncomfortable for appearing in the room with nothing below the belt, even when wearing an opened dressing gown, and bringing other women into the room to feed off the blood of.

Alani has her hooks into a young man Javier (Ernesto Salinas) who is an expecting father with his girlfriend Lizbeth (Jitzel Galicia), but it becomes clear Javier and Alani are falling in love much to the anger of their significant others. This is where the melodrama is there, and a thing that I wished had been more prominent through Violent Delights in the end, as whilst Gabriel is a traditional anti-God vampire, he also does not want kids. Even as an immortal vampire, this is something Alani wants. Gabriel instead prefers his theatrical side hobby to children, of an onstage feeding on victims which leaves a lot to be imagined, unless you like languid erotic pawing and reminiscences of Club Silencio from Mulholland Drive (2001), even down to wondering where the singing is coming from.

In a position, of the modern day genre film, of digital filmmaking and its own idiosyncratic chances to be distinct, Violent Delight does at least have its own distinct personality just in its huge emphasis on garish neon colours, but honestly, a lot of my issue with this is that, as a horror drama as Javier is being seduced by Alani, but will lead to a grotesque tragedy, it feels conventional and too serious at times from what the tone would ask for. And it does get grotesque, including a scene which requires a warning involving a foetus being brought to the night's air which is extreme. But barring that this does have a vampire ripping his own skin off, involving a lot of goo and Vaseline, this feel conventional even in terms of its desire to be shocking and upsetting in the final act.

It did feel like by the halfway point, I had drifted off, in mind to this being entirely subjective opinion. There is in the film something distinct to it, even in terms of its enclosed, even claustrophobic settings swallowed in the colour lighting scheme, from apartments to bars, and as an erotic vampire film, which equal opportunity nudity, that in itself even if pure titillation has its own mood setting whatever the type of film and from what era. This is a film whose most prominent scene, and the one which catches you off-guard in a good way, and sets the profane tone off in a way that should have been continued, is when Gabriel is trying to seduce and corrupt Lizbeth 's two female friends. It is not that one is turned into a vampire, wishing to feed off the other, but the joke which comes out of nowhere beforehand involving a clitoris cake of all things. It looks as delicious as it is anatomically accurate, truthfully, and that alongside a vampire ripping his own skin off should have set the tone of the film fully.

Maybe this was the case of being in the wrong mood, but there was a sense that, even when Violent Delights was being transgressive with its finale, in its death and blasphemy and the foetus scene, it was doing something obvious rather than escalating this to a tone I would have liked. The tone comes closer to the 2000s into the 2010s transgressive horror film, in its tone, than the histrionics melodrama this did hint at early on. That type of "edgy" film is not as interesting to me, this production's seriousness to its detriment as embracing a campier side as colourful as the lighting scheme would have won me over.