Paul Morrissey returns to the streets of New York for this deadpan look at crime-riddled Alphabet City in his violent black comedy, MIXED BLOOD. As in his previous studies of decadence and decay, TRASH and FLESH, Morrissey focuses on another unlikely family, the street gang. The Maceteros are a group of underage Brazilian boys led by their incorrigible and flamboyant godmother, Rita la Punta. The Maceteros run a cocaine and heroin ring, operating out of a hole in the wall of a tenement squat. Rita runs her makeshift family with an iron fist, insisting that they be underage so that they wont be sent to jail if they kill someone, and that they alternate their drug dealing duties with a strict regimen of cleanliness and chores. Rita is especially protective of her only son, slow and sexy Thiago. When the rival gang, the Master Dancers, spurred by drug lord "the German" begins to infringe on their turf, picking off their young members one by one, a gang war ensues. With a realist vision, Morrissey infuses comedy with casual violence to depict a stylized vision of the moral and physical squalor of New York's Lower East Side, and America in general.
