Lovely white women are caught in the city of Manila by members of a blood eternal youth cult that worships a head in a red box and bleed these kidnapped victims for the properties that mix well with a potion. Jennifer Billingsley gets top billing as one of the kidnapped, Laura, her face found portraited by cult member, Baru (John Considine, who deserves better than this; I can't imagine how it must have felt chanting a religious song to a severed head in a box, and not question where your career went awry), taken as a sign from their worshipped god, Raum, that she is special. Tani Guthrie is Ranu, the wife of Raum who benefits from the blood of the captured girls whose throats her jungle minions cut with a knife during ceremonies. We witness the drinking of the blood after the collections (a leaf is applied to the wounds of the women, healing them for the time being), with Ranu relishing her eternal youth, completely unencumbered by any form of moral guilt in what her people are doing to the victims taken against their will and imprisoned on her jungle mountain fortress. Baru must confront all he has ever known and believed when he falls in love with Laura, her inability to drink the blood of other kidnapped girls she has befriended throwing everything he holds dear out of whack. Will Baru choose love for Laura or the cult he has been an active member of his whole life? Will you really care? I didn't and this movie really should be more exciting than it is. It is just plain safe and tame. I imagine a good cannibal movie, demented and warped, could've been derived from this, but the serious nature of the material (it is played so straight, that I just couldn't have fun with it) and lack of anything interesting considering the twisted idea presented before us (I mean, this is a cult that worships a head in a box and yet it never can capitalize on such a schlocky idea) just kind of dulled me into a boredom I never could recover from. I guess the actors hired and the uneventful direction (the cast cannot summon a lick of charisma and enthusiasm considering the bonkers plot, and the sluggish pace doesn't help matters) couldn't wring out any fun from the storyline. There is one great scene where Laura is punished, for not agreeing to drink, by being thrown in a prison with victims, whose beauty and youth had been drained, leaving them wrinkled and hideous, tearing away at her with their overgrown fingernails (the way the prison is dark and how they engulf her is pretty effective). Considine has a fascinating face and gives a rather decent performance, understated and soft, but Billingsley is really a boring heroine. Judith McConnell runs away with her scenes as club dancer, Claire, one of the whites kidnapped, who seems perfectly fine with her current predicament; she's really an uninhibited tramp, but because the film is so tame, her character never really can flower as a seductive trollop, which is too bad. The real star is the Philippines jungle, a setting which could have been far more sinister but at least has enough sweaty atmosphere to convey to us that civilized man/woman doesn't want to wind up here. The ending, after an escape, with Vic Diaz and the police getting involved in a hunt, winds up quite ludicrous.
Review of The Thirsty Dead
