The post apocalyptic film is usually depicted with lots of wasteland with a rag tag group of humans living on the edge of extinction. THE BLOOD OF HEROES is no exception to that. Sort of. It seems that in the future there is one thing that keeps society from slipping into oblivion, jugging. Jugging is a sport that is a cross between a number of sports, football or rugby being the main source. To make it interesting there is heaps of bloody violence to make the game interesting. Every little village has a jugging team as we are introduced to the game right at the beginning of the film. Rutger Hauer plays Sallow, leader of a traveling jugging team. They scratch out a living by visiting these squalid hovels and beating the locals out of whatever they can. Vincent D'Onofrio plays Gar in an early role for the actor. He manages to convey a youthful intensity that for some reason never shows up in his later roles.

It's in this first game that they pick up an extra player, a local named Kidda (Joan Chen). When their equivalent of a quarterback, Dog Boy (Justin Monjo) is crippled during the game she takes over. That's when the training starts. We are subjected to numerous shots of Kidda getting brutalized by her own team as they show her how the game is played in the big leagues.

Unbeknownst to the rest of the team Sallow has plans to go underground. In the future the aristocrats rule with a iron fist. They have a huge underground city free from the harsh surface life. Perhaps one of the more intersting parts of the city is the low rent hotel. It's just a wall that extends hundreds of feet in the air. Beds are hung on the wall and you access the beds by an intricate series of ladders. Probably not the most private sleeping quarters, but a cool idea that is executed well. The game of jugging is elevated to supreme importance in the underground city. The professional juggers play a faster, bloodier game than anything seen up top. Sallow is aware of this. He used to be one of them and now he is going back to prove that his handpicked team can beat the best juggers in the world. It won't be easy however. Sallow loses an eye in one of the matches that lead them to the city. In a game like jugging, vision is one of the more important senses to have full function of.

Director David Webb Peoples gives us a glimpse of the future that we have seen before. By 1988 the idea had been mined to death by the Mad Max trilogy and countless imitators. THE BLOOD OF HEROES has a few things that bring it slightly above the crop of knock offs that ripped through the eighties with the ferocity of the slasher film phenomenon. One is Rutger Hauer. Even when the man is in a bad movie it seems a little better because he is there. His part as Sallow is a man who had it all and gave it up for convictions. Then there is director Peoples. This is the man who gave us the screenplays for BLADE RUNNER, TWELVE MONKEYS & UNFORGIVEN just to name a few. So the script is solid in that it's smart enough to focus on the one thing that separates this film from all the others. Jugging. You just know that he wrote all the rules to the game before doing a page of the script. It seems like a real game and there's never one of those long lost miracle rules to win the game at the last minute. It relies on what there is and nothing else.

Sure the film has problems. A lot of the night sequences are too murky making the images nonexistent. A lot of people will have problems with a movie that has such a singular focus. Most folks want a little variety in their post apocalyptic flicks. It all falls by the wayside in THE BLOOD OF HEROES. The game is all important.

The DVD is a little spare for something like this. We get 4 X 3 fullframe, Dolby Stereo and no extras. There are 17 chapters which is adequate for the running time of 91 minutes. It just seems like a flick that can tout Rutger Hauer, Joan Chen, Vincent D'Onofrio and the writer of Blade Runner would have more bang for it's buck.