Blood Simple (DVD)

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

A bar tender begins an affair with his boss' wife, boss duely finds out and lets the two know that he is on to them. Not only that, he decides to hire the private detective he had trailing them to do a little more unorthadox work i.e to kill the troublesome pair. So far so seemingly straightforward, but the greasy private detective has his own idea about the deal and double crosses the bar owner leaving him dead and the couple alive but with the evidence of murder pointing at them. The first film by the Coen brothers who went on to make 'Fargo' you can tell that the film was made quite a while ago and that it wasn't on a huge budget but it is stylishly made ...  Read the complete review