Mixed Blood

Off-the-wall humor, casual or premeditated violence, and larger-than-life characters are featured in this Paul Morrisey film about drugs and two street gangs in Alphabet City, the lower east side of New York (Avenues A, B, and C). When the flamboyant and often abrasive Rita (Marilia Pera) and her dim-witted but streetwise son Thiago (Richard Ulacia) arrive in New York from Brazil, she maternally adopts the teens who live in a run-down apartment as her own and then organizes them into a gang whose first job is to intercept a shipment of drugs intended for a rival Puerto Rican group. This act sets off a gang war when the Puerto Ricans retaliate by killing one of Rita's teens. As the fighting escalates, it becomes more difficult to decipher the real attitude of director Paul Morrissey: are these serious takes from real life or are they exaggerated to achieve a decidedly black humor?