Matrixiole Simple and well acted, it has tension enough to knot the stomach.

Kidskycom It's funny watching the elements come together in this complicated scam. On one hand, the set-up isn't quite as complex as it seems, but there's an easy sense of fun in every exchange.

StyleSk8r At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

Paynbob It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

framptonhollis Now, other people seem to find this to be a GREAT film, a MASTERPIECE, but I don't necessarily find it to be either of those things. That doesn't mean I found it to be bad, it was a quite interesting documentary short, that did genuinely disturbed me.It is a very simple premise, it is just footage that was shot inside a slaughterhouse, with some narration. It is very fascinating, although highly unsettling, although it didn't really change my life. As I said, I was highly disturbed throughout the film, and for a good purpose, but it didn't make me become a vegetarian or a vegan. I guess at this point I'll never become a vegetarian/vegan.However, just because I'm not a vegetarian/vegan doesn't mean that it won't make YOU possibly think of becoming one! I can fully understand why someone would be affected by the horrific imagery in this documentary film would start thinking way more about what they eat and how it's made.

David Everyone who wants to see the brutal reality of a slaughterhouse, at least circa 1949 in Paris, should be open to seeing this film. Although some people seem to have come away thinking this is was an anti-meat movie, that is only their point of view. Yes, you see horrific images of horses, cows and sheep butchered. It will likely turn your stomach. But I doubt this documentary was made with the intention of turning people off meat.The director focuses on the people too: the man whose own leg had to be cut off after an accident, for example. And it is clear that this business is just a job to many of the workers, and there is no moralizing about it.It is difficult to watch. But it is the truth (I guess); and really, if you think about it, the animals in this film are arguably treated better (killed quickly) than in that recent undercover PETA video of downer cows.

Macholic The film opens by showing life in a Paris suburb and the portal to a slaughterhouse with its monument of a bull in brass and then we move inside the slaughterhouse. The camera is like a fly on the wall, it sees everything but never interact or interfere with what's happening. And for anyone not raised on a farm where they did their own slaughtering, this is indeed a shocking document: A horse collapses in 1 second as it is shot with a bolt pistol in the head and a cow tumbles after a hammer with a long pipe on the hammerhead has been buried in its skull. But that is just the starter on this blood feast. The main cause being numerous calves beheaded and a row of sheeps having their throat slit and in between that animals being flayed and gutted. The slaughterhouse has its own stream in the floor, where rivers of blood is running from the slaughter. I can imagine urbanized children having nightmare for weeks after seeing this film..and their parents forsaking the meat for vegetarian delicacies after this remorseless view of the animals demise to satisfy the meat-eaters cravings. I am a vegetarian myself, not out of conviction, but because I was raised that way and as a such, I am thankfully free from dealing with the dilemma of wanting the meat but not wanting to deal with the the killing and butchery. Today death of animals has become a remote affair to most people, out of sight, out of mind. Not so when you see this film. Black and white images can indeed be gruesome, color just wouldn't have made this film worse. Even the squeamish should find the courage to view this film, just once! This is what death looks like when a real artist trains his lens on it, it is beautiful too! 10/10

dbdumonteil George Franju had one of the strangest careers in the French cinema.His shorts were revolutionary.When he began full-length features ,as contemporary of the Nouvelle Vague,he was drastically different.All his best works ("la tête contre les murs" "les Yeux sans Visage" "Thomas L'Imposteur" even his minor films such as "Pleins Feux sur l'Assassin" and his remake of Feuillade's "Judex) have a sense of mystery you would never find in his peers' works (with the exception of some of Chabrol's ones)."Le sang des bêtes" has not lost its strength even in 2006.It still stands as one of the best shorts ever done.It depicts horror: inside a slaughterhouse ,where the beasts suffer and man himself risks his life ,there's a world nobody had entered before Franju 's camera let us in.The pictures are sometimes so harrowing,so unbearable,you find yourself looking away.There's this sublime picture of a horse ,bowing before being shot.The commentary is brilliant,and the two actors who say it are to be commended.Georges Hubert uses a neuter voice,even when he describes the most terrifying of the scenes: should he depict the riverboat for sightseeing,he would not use a different tone.He makes me think of the commentary in Luis Bunuel's " Hurdes" Nicole Ladmiral,on the other hand has a warm voice ,sometimes verging on tenderness as she describes the urban lugubrious landscapes outside the slaughterhouse.Life goes one ,people fall in love,around the buildings with its sinister "steeple" which is not that of a church . Nowadays Nicole Ladmiral is forgotten:her career was short-lived and very sad.After an important part in "Journal d'un curé de Campagne ",Robert Bresson's classic, she could never find another role worthy of her talent (except for some uninteresting supporting parts on stage)and she threw herself under a train in a metro station.