‘Blood & Gold’ (2023): A Fistful of Fascism

Directed by: Peter Thorwarth || Produced by: Christian Becker, Pavel Muller, Mark Nolting, Amara Palacios

Screenplay by: Stefan Barth || Starring: Robert Maaser, Jordis Triebel, Alexander Scheer, Juri Senft

Music by: Jessica de Rooij, Hendrik Nolle || Cinematography: Marc Achenback || Edited by: Knut Hake || Country: Germany || Language: German

Running Time: 100 minutes

What do you get when you mix together Sergio Leone’s Dollars (1964-1966) trilogy, Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009), Julius Avery’s Overlord (2018), and Jalmari Helander’s Sisu (2022)? You might produce something akin to Blood & Gold, the latest contemporary spaghetti-western riff on a World War II-era war movie — or perhaps the reverse. Whether you think of Blood & Gold (henceforth, B&G) as more of a western or a war film will depend on your cinephile background, but those with any exposure to the aforementioned filmmakers will note the familiarity (repetition?) of this movie’s tone, setting, action style, and performances down to entire sequences that feel lifted from other better movies. To say there’s nothing wrong with taking inspiration from gutsy, visionary films would be stating the obvious, but the biggest disappointment with films like B&G is how they neither blend their obvious genre homages in particularly creative ways nor do they execute their inspirations with precision. As much as I wanted to like another Naziploitation potboiler, and one made by Peter Thorwarth especially, I couldn’t help but feel disappointed by yet another feature-length project that felt like an extended short film.

My recent interest in Thorwarth is tied to his previous directorial effort, Blood Red Sky (2021), one of my favorite Netflix Original Films and one of the better action-horror genre hybrids since Neil Marshall’s Dog Soldiers (2002). Though the man has directed seven theatrical features since 1999, I had never heard of the man prior to Sky, so that film’s high production value-mixture of a plane heist thwarted by a civilian mother who also happened to be a ferocious vampire (that’s how you subvert genre formula, Chor Nikal Ke Bhaga [2023]… ) shocked me with its emotional, visceral entertainment value.

B&G tries for a similar pulpy adventure, but its story is let down by underwritten characters, both heroic and villainous, as well as a third act that runs out of steam due to either budget constraints or a lack of creativity. The films begins well enough, introducing protagonist and Michael Shannon lookalike Robert Maaser as a Wehrmacht deserter chased down by a Waffen-SS platoon in the spring of 1945; Allied forces are closing in on the Nazi homeland and the European theatre of WWII is coming to an end, but multiple surviving Nazi factions, including Maaser’s Schutzstaffel (SS) captors, compete for access to gold stolen from a wealthy Jewish family in a nearby German village, presumably to aid in their escape from the soon to be overwhelmed Nazi German Reich.

Top: Female lead Marie Hacke tries to knife secondary antagonist Roy McCrerey in the first significant action sequence of Blood & Gold. Bottom: As an example of the film’s bloated cast, Jördis Triebel (the blonde on the left) plus some other actors whose names and characters I can’t remember, could’ve had their roles cut from the film without meaningfully affecting the overall story.

This is a fine premise for a self-contained, western-inspired WWII action fable, but B&G falls apart when examining its screenplay as a whole. Within individual scenes, the film can be a riot, such as when Maaser’s savior, a local German villager and female lead Marie Hacke, is assaulted in her farmhouse by the same Waffen-SS squad that hunted Maaser; Maaser comes out of hiding from the attic (see the parallels with Basterds and Overlord?) to intervene. A later set-piece in the town’s village square is even more exciting, where SS soldiers march Hacke’s mentally disabled brother, Connor Long, to the top of a church tower for a public hanging; Long fights back while Masser and Hacke open fire on the Nazis, leading to multiple close-quarters shootouts, fistfights, and miniature chase sequences.

Act to act, though, B&G treads water by dragging out plot-points across an engorged supporting cast, as well as a supposed primary villain (Alexander Scheer as a facially scarred SS lieutenant-colonel) whose arc goes nowhere. Thorwarth either should’ve cut a subplot from the script and tightened up the narrative’s forward momentum or expanded the film’s narrative focus across a much longer runtime. As the film stands, B&G feels like a series of loosely connected set-pieces (i.e. “cool scenes”) that are fun to watch in the moment but don’t lead into one another; this is most noticeable in the film’s climactic church sanctuary shootout, which features lackluster choreography and contrived decision-making on the part of the remaining villains so as to prolong the fight’s tension.

Perhaps Peter Thorwarth’s lack of major writing contributions to Blood & Gold’s screenplay explain its overall storytelling deficiencies compared to Blood Red Sky; this spaghetti-western Naziploitation premise reads like the kind of “B-movie-done-A” bonkers funhouse that Indiana Jones & the Temple of Doom (1984), Tremors (1990-2004), Split, or Don’t Breathe (both 2016) is, and it showcases some of that stylized flair through its grindhouse action style. In the end, however, the film’s start-and-stop rhythm recalls the inconsistent script of Rob Bowman’s Reign of Fire (2002), a creative, visually dazzling premise (dragons in the modern era!) handicapped by a questionable written blueprint that didn’t build toward much. Maybe Blood & Gold isn’t a short ballooned to a feature film, but I would at the very least describe it as more akin to the debut episode of a limited series than a satisfying movie.

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SUMMARY & RECOMMENDATION: Instead of channeling cinematic inspirations into a memorable standalone story, Blood & Gold feels like the leftover parts of other WWII genre-hybrids, functionable and even entertaining in parts, but without much character development or meaningful connective tissue to bridge its set-pieces into a cohesive whole. The film is, on second thought, not so much the next Overlord or Sisu but rather another Netflix Original feature unsure of what to do with its script.

— However… the action sequences themselves feel tight, intense, and relatable for the most part. The churchyard/town square shootout is a highlight.

—> ON THE FENCE

? So what happened to that SS officer’s face? Did he chew on another cyanide capsule prior to this movie?