It’s hard to believe that just six years ago, Joe Begos released his first movie, "Almost Human," an uber-violent, ridiculously gory tale of alien abduction and body snatching that seemed like a long-lost VHS title finally seeing the light of day.
Two years later, he roared back with "The Mind’s Eye," a movie about people with telekinetic abilities that consistently one-upped David Cronenberg’s "Scanners" with a bevy of crazy-ambitious sequences.
And, then, nothing, for four long years.
“After I did "The Mind’s Eye," I found it a little difficult, well not a little difficult, it was really fucking difficult to get something made. I don’t know why that was. I was becoming really frustrated, and then I went through a lot of personal issues,” Begos said by phone during a recent interview with this writer's website, Blood, Violence and Babes.
Begos decided to start fresh with something “completely out of left field” that mirrored his struggles at the time, but wasn’t just “about a dude struggling to write a screenplay in his apartment.”
“I wanted to do something that was visually appealing,” he said, “and I wanted to challenge myself by having a story that was just one character that we follow in every single frame of the movie so that we can actually be part of her mindset. The camera becomes a part of her. You see her descent.”
The end result became "Bliss," a phantasmagoric mindfuck that follows a struggling artist, Dezzy (Dora Madison), as she succumbs to addiction in order to create her masterpiece. The catch, however, is that she also develops a penchant for devouring human flesh and drinking human blood, even that of those closest to her.
“When I wrote my first two movies, I was in my early 20s… my life experience was hanging around, smoking pot with my friends and watching movies,” he said, laughing, “so when I made movies, it was like a pothead who had watched a bunch of movies made a movie.”
“Now with 'Bliss,' I feel like I’ve actually been able to hone my chops. I’ve been through a bunch of shit. I’ve got all that stuff out of my system, now I’m kind of ready to do my, to go to the next level, to go to the next step in my filmmaking evolution, if that makes sense. So, I wanted to swing for that and see if I could make that happen. And it seems like it worked in some ways, thankfully.”
"Bliss" is filmed in a way to make viewers feel anxious and under the influence, as if they too have ingested the same drugs as Dezzy.
Begos said he carefully cultivated the movie’s propulsive energy by accelerating that sense of intoxication as Dezzy falls deeper into addiction and artistic inspiration.
His efforts would have been for naught if his leading lady, Madison ("Dexter," "Friday Night Lights" and "Chicago Fire"), didn’t commands the screen, completely losing herself in a role that’s both physically and psychologically unnerving.
Begos said their collaboration proved to be a perfect union of two artists pushing past the boundary of what they accomplished before.
“I hated the fact that I couldn’t get a movie made. I hated the way the industry was going with horror movies and just how safe everything felt. I just wanted to make something that was just raw and mean and stuck out,” Begos said. “Dora had been the star of a couple of network shows that she was no longer a part of and I think that she really wanted to change her image too from that kind of goody-two-shoes, NBC Thursday night thing, so we were always challenging each other.”
Any fan of Begos’ movies knows how important practical special effects are to his visual aesthetic.
"Bliss" is no exception; if anything, the new film exceeds expectations and includes two standout gags that left this reviewer gasping and grinning.
“I wanted to especially try and do things that hadn’t been done, not done before but done in a really long time,” Begos said.
Unlike Almost Human and The Mind’s Eye, which showcased his love of gore almost from the opening frame, Begos said Bliss required something different – patience – both of his audience and himself.
“Just because of the nature of the story, and following Dora for so long, it wouldn’t make sense for there to be any effects or set pieces early on, so when they did come, I wanted them to really fucking hit,” he said.
“You had that long build, so when they finally do come, it’s like a gut punch for the rest of the movie, so it was important that those things actually landed really hard.”
John W. Allman has spent more than 25 years as a professional journalist and writer, but he’s loved movies his entire life. Good movies, awful movies, movies that are so gloriously bad you can’t help but champion them. Since 2009, he has cultivated a review column and now a website dedicated to the genre films that often get overlooked and interviews with cult cinema favorites like George A. Romero, Bruce Campbell and Dee Wallace. Contact him at Blood Violence and Babes.com, on Facebook @BloodViolenceBabes or on Twitter @BVB_reviews.
This article appears in Oct 10-17, 2019.