What happens when a director chooses to feature a single pseudo-professonial and amateurs? Paul Morrissey's Mixed Blood (1984) is what happens.
All characters - except Carol (Linda Kerridge) - in Mixed Blood were no actors; Morrissey decided to cast them directly off the street. While various reviews are recommending acting-lessons, they seem to miss the dark beauty of Linda Kerridge's disability of making use of her acting education (assuming she did have some). She fails completely, becomes the real amateur and perishes under Thaigo's (Richard Ulacia) and Rita La Punta's (Marília Pêra) incredible performance.
I am still puzzling over how Morrissey managed to convince Kerridge into saying "I must look like hell" after she got shot in her head. This diegetic reference to her bad-acting, the weird way she pronounces her sentences and how she negatively stands out compared to the other actors blew my mind - a true display of how well Morrissey knew what he was doing.
This tensed competitive relationship between Kerridge and the rest of the cast is not the only weird contrast happening. Regarding the soundtrack, its alternated salsa-ish sound, conveys a rather happy message and when you close your eyes while watching you wouldn't imagine people dying in brutal ways, slums, an incestuous relationship between mother and son or a killer-gang consisting of children.
I think, this strange but enjoyable paradox unveils the aesthetic of being entertained by the coverage of those mentioned plot elements. At least I always enjoy when you can clearly see that right before a character dies (by falling from the roof, getting shot in the head or getting rolled over by a car) he or she is replaced by a dummy, thus perverting and de-humanising the physical reaction.
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the displayed picture can be found on Image Entertainment's DVD Special Features: Production Gallery with Commentary by Director Paul Morrissey
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