As in the joke about the piano-playing dog, one was probably
never supposed to ask whether the 1975 Welsh-language Gwaed ar y Ser (Blood
on the Stars) is any good, it being miracle enough that it exists at all. Lasting
only about an hour, the premise is of a serial killer knocking off the line-up
for an upcoming night’s entertainment at a village hall, the joke being that
the victims were indeed at the time relative “stars” within the tiny confines
of Welsh-language culture. The film places an uncertain foot in the folk-horror
genre, the killer himself being less malign than the local kids’ choir that he
notionally conducts, the threat from which will seemingly outlive his
inevitable arrest. But any potential creepiness is swamped by a haphazard
shooting style, scattershot jokiness and massive tonal uncertainty, devoting
too much time to a way-over-the-top lead detective, and allowing minor
characters to prattle on at pointless length. As a medium for the Welsh
language, the film spans everything from ornate oracular eloquence to English-infused
vernacular, and it dispatches with its celebrities in a varied bunch of ways,
from a live-on-air DJ opening a package containing a deadly snake, to a folk
singer whose dead body is found painted green (a sight the camera dwells on
with particular relish), to a harpist electrocuted by her own instrument (after
she leads a visitor through a gluttonous and mostly very starchy-looking cornucopia
of local delicacies). Stuffed with in-jokes and references that probably barely
resonated with its target audience (to the extent that one can imagine one)
even at the time, the film was hardly designed to meet any kind of test of time;
the bizarre fact of it popping up fifty years later on a Canadian streaming
service seems then like a crazed vindication of sorts.
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