Ask anyone to name a few classic sci-fi or sports movies, and it’s incredibly easy to do. There are films like Star Wars, Alien, or 2001: A Space Odyssey on one side, and Bull Durham, Caddyshack, or The Karate Kid on the other. Now, ask them for films that are both sci-fi AND sports movies. That’s a bit more difficult.
There’s Rollerball and Solarbabies. Real Steel and Speed Racer. Death Race 2000 and The Running Man, as well as a few others. But that’s basically it. In a way, it’s such a small list that if you are a fan of either genre, you’ve almost certainly seen them all. Or so I thought.
With the Super Bowl coming this week, I was brainstorming ideas for some kind of sci-fi, io9 angle on the biggest game in American football when I came across something called The Blood of Heroes. Released in 1989, it stars Rutger Hauer (Blade Runner), Joan Chen (Twin Peaks), Delroy Lindo (Sinners), and Vincent D’Onofrio (Daredevil). They play athletes in a post-apocalyptic wasteland who travel from city to city playing something called the Game. Which is kind of a football, hockey, and rugby hybrid played in Mad Max armor, with a dog’s skull as the ball.
Now, I’m sure some of you reading this are thinking, “Of course! Blood of Heroes. I love that movie.” Well, I’m happy for you, but that’s not me. Somehow, this movie eluded my radar for almost 40 years. Which is absolutely wild when you think of four things: I’m a huge fan of sci-fi movies, sports movies, the intersection between them, and, most importantly, I worked in a video store for most of the 1990s. How had I missed this? Maybe my store just lost its copy, but as someone who seeks these kinds of movies out, my guess is that if I hadn’t heard of it, some of you haven’t either.
Written and directed by David Webb Peoples (the writer of Blade Runner, 12 Monkeys, and Unforgiven), The Blood of Heroes is currently available to rent on Prime Video, which I did this week, and two things immediately became obvious. One, there’s a very good reason The Blood of Heroes never reached the heights of other fantastic sci-fi sports movies. And two, very few sports movies, sci-fi or not, have as much reverence for the sport in question. A sport that this movie completely creates from the ground up and sort of teaches you throughout the film.
The movie calls the sport “the Game,” though fans outside the movie call it “Jugger,” since that’s what the players call themselves. It’s a five vs. five matchup comprised of four players with various but matching weapons, who block or attack, allowing another player, “the Quick,” to compete to place the aforementioned dog’s skull on a stake. Once the skull gets put on the stake, that’s it. Game over. One point wins it all. It can end in 10 seconds or can go for the maximum amount of time: “100 stones, three times over.”
No, that last sentence doesn’t make any sense. “‘100 stones, three times over?’ What the hell is that?” That, dear reader, is the beauty of The Blood of Heroes. Here’s how much this film thinks about the reality of this sport. You’re living in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, all but devoid of technology. How would you keep time for a game? You don’t have a clock or a watch. You could just count, but that could vary from person to person. You need something standard yet accessible. So, in the film, the timekeeper makes three piles of 100 rocks and throws them at a wall. After 100 stones, you get a break. And then it’s onto the next 100 and so on.
It’s brilliant. Truly. And it, without a doubt, took more thought than the maddeningly boring plot to the film. The plot follows a man named Sallow (Hauer) and his fellow teammates as they traverse the wasteland, challenging different towns to the Game. In one town, they meet Kidda (Chen), a player who thinks she has what it takes to make the League, a mysterious professional league in a distant land.
And so Kidda joins Sallow and the team (which, as we said, includes the iconic D’Onofrio and Lindo) as they travel to multiple towns competing. Why are they doing this? What do they win? What are the stakes? We don’t know any of that. All we know is that every town competes; it’s brutal, but when it’s over, everything is fine, and there’s a lot of sex. And, oddly, there is no violence or killing after the game. Win or lose, everyone is very kind to one another afterwards, showing a level of sportsmanship you never, ever see in this kind of movie.
Eventually, Sallow takes the team to some sort of underground capital to challenge a league team, and anyone who has ever seen a sports movie where the underdog takes on the favorite can guess where that goes. It’s an incredibly basic movie with almost nothing happening throughout. Except for this almost unbelievable adherence to the code and rules of this fake game.
That’s why, while The Blood of Heroes is definitely not a good movie, I have to give it some respect. Other sci-fi movies that created their own sports don’t care to really dial in on the rules and world of the sport in question. How exactly does space football work in Starship Troopers, for example? Whereas, The Blood of Heroes is only about that. Forget the plot. Forget the characters. We’re going to make sure the audience understands this game and understands that everyone who plays it respects one another. Beyond that, everything else is secondary. Which is a bold choice that likely doomed the film to some obscurity. But, hey, if you’re looking for a sci-fi movie to watch this Super Bowl weekend, this might do the trick. And now you know it exists, too.
Assorted Musings
The Wikipedia page for this movie has some wild facts, which, if you’ve made it this far and haven’t gone there yourself, I’d like to highlight.
- While the film was called The Blood of Heroes in the U.S., in its country of origin, Australia, it was called The Salute of the Jugger.
- The Australian cut of the film has over 10 extra minutes.
- After its release, fans in multiple countries began playing the sport of Jugger.
- Yes, you read that right.
- There is a documentary about the sport called I Am Jugger, which is on YouTube here.
- Last year, a 4K remaster of the film was released with a third, even longer, workprint version of the movie. You can get it here.
The Blood of Heroes, in a very low-res version, is available to rent or purchase on Prime Video.
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