Blood Street [1988]

Our first pandemic movie was Low Blow, which introduced us to Leo Fong. We guessed, rightly, that he would be a good source to return to and so our film for last Monday was Blood Street, a movie he directed, wrote, and starred in.

The film attempts to be a neo-noir except without any of the clever writing. Mostly you get a lot of dick jokes in reference to our main character's occupation as a private eye. Our film starts with an insanely long text scroll that is trying to explain the entire backstory of our plot: we're in a slightly more gang-ridden San Francisco and there are two bad guys named Aldo MacDonald and some Australian who are in a drug war. Fong, who's name in the film is Joe Wong, is approached by a very skinny lady who wants him to find her husband and seemingly offers sex in payment. Trying to explain the plot from here is actually really difficult. The film would cut to a scene, and we would get no information about where we are or who anyone is. It took us forever to identify MacDonald as a man who is always getting a massage. At one point, the film stops for a flashback about Wong's dead daughter. Unsurprisingly, MacDonald is the woman's husband and it turns out she was looking for him in order to kill him. She also has a safety deposit box full of money that Wong, uh, steals, because it's stolen money. Somehow he knows this. There are a lot of random scenes of violence and one very long scene of the Australian guy making out with a girl in a hot tub, but the plot was honestly really hard to follow even for Sarah, the Plot Follower.

Overall, this movie was a pretty solid watch. We got a lot of laughs out of the randomness, the rapid scene changes, the bad noir writing, and the bad acting. We even got a boom mic! The place where this movie falls apart somewhat is that scenes have a tendency to be so drawn out that you can easily space out for a minute and tune back in without really missing anything. Still definitely worth one watch though.

Spoon Rating: 6.5