In the last 25 years or so the Coen Brothers have brought us some brilliant films, Fargo, Miller's Crossing and No Country For Old Men to name just three. Blood Simple is where it all started and it is terrific. It is edge of your seat stuff, it keeps you guessing until the end and is wonderfully stylistic. The film focuses around the Neon Bar in an unnamed Texas town, the bar is owned by Marty (Dan Hedaya), who suspects his wife Abby (Frances McDormand) is having an affair with Ray (John Getz), a member of his staff. He hires a private investigator, Visser (M. Emmet Walsh) to find out. He recieves bad news and asks Visser to kill them for $10,000 whilst he ...  Read the complete review

Blood Simple is a dark and bloody black comic thriller. It's sick, it's twisted, its gory and it's a near masterpiece of low budget independent filmmaking. This slightly re-edited version of the film improves it slightly. A few minutes have been excised from the middle of the movie improving the pacing over the original. But most probably won't notice the differences. (Leave it to the Coen's to give us a special edition of a movie that's ever so slightly SHORTER than the original). When Blood Simple was first released in 1984, very few people knew who Joel and Ethan Coen were. They had written a few screenplays and worked with Sam ...  Read the complete review

'Blood Simple' was the first film made by the multi-talented directing/writing/producing Coen Brothers, who have since gone onto to make such huge hits as 'Fargo', 'The Big Lebowski', and 'O Brother, Where Art Thou'. These people are clearly, therefore, not amateurs - and yet the presentation of this DVD is so poor as to be laughable. It sucks, it really does. The picture looks like something taped off Albanian TV by a guy using a coat hanger as an aireal. I kept expecting thirty seconds of Eastenders dubbed into Serbo-Croat to appear through the fuzz. To say that the image was sub-standard would be to do a gross disservice to ...  Read the complete review

One of the best film noirs to come out of an independent studio, Blood Simple has it all. The Coen brothers present a classic dark tale with characters that always seem a step behind what is happening to them, although the viewer is very much in on everything. A superb story, the pleasure of this film is in watching the characters try to extricate themselves from a variety of plot twists as they follow one after the other. A creepy bar owner hires a slimy Private Investigator to murder his two timing wife and boyfriend, but as the plot unfolds in true noir style things get slightly out of hand when the P.I. has an ulterior motive all of his own. Although not the ...  Read the complete review

note: also appears on The Student Room in part The Coen Brothers, in 2009, are both critically acclaimed and financially successful filmmakers, who finally won the Academy Award for Best Director (as well as their film winning Best Picture) for No Country for Old Men in 2008. However, their road to this point, punctuated with classics such as Fargo and The Big Lebowski, began with Blood Simple., a 1985 film that, on a $1.5m budget, is devilishly well crafted, and an effective and tense thriller. The film involves a man, Julian Marty (Dan Hedaya), having a deep suspicion that his wife, Abby (Frances McDormand) is having an affair with Ray (John ...  Read the complete review