Bill (Iggy Pop) is an ageing rock star who has a much younger trophy wife in the shape of Isabelle (Kacey Clarke), and they are actually very affectionate and understanding with each other. She doesn't mind that though he is almost blind he still likes to go out to the surrounding countryside of their Ibiza home to try and shoot rabbits, and he's quite happy to allow her to pair off with other men of her choosing, as long as she comes back to him every night. Isabelle's current interest, aside from living off her husband's riches and swimming in his outdoor pool every chance she gets, is the gardener and pool cleaner David (Antonio Magro), but an old flame is on the way...
Blood Orange was Toby Tobias's debut feature, an updating of the film noir genre which took place under sunny Spanish skies largely on one location for budget's sake, though once you twigged where it was coming from as far as precedents were involved, it did leave a film with very few surprises. The director and writer’s chief casting coup was securing the services of Iggy Pop, the legendary wild man of rock, who by this stage had gotten his head together after years of substance abuse and was enjoying his curious position as an elder statesman of musical rebellion, dispensing wisdom on his radio show and quite happy to trade on his past reputation for projects such as this.
Although here was the biggest acting job he had ever had with regards the amount of screen time he enjoyed, whether he was actually acting was another matter since no matter what he said or did here, he was still indelibly identifiable as himself, therefore though his character was ailing in health and the circumstances were more or less diverging from the actual Iggy's lifestyle, you couldn't exactly say he was behaving in a manner that would be that much altered from watching a documentary on the man. Fair enough, you would like to think he had never murdered anyone and never would, but in each of his scenes the essential Iggy Pop-ness would shine through.
That point about not opting for murder was important in the plot for the theme would have appeared to be if you are man enough to do what this regarded as the ultimate in masculinity, which was kill something. Not swatting a fly, but shooting a rabbit, or eventually putting a bullet in a human being, which the other person in this quartet of a small cast has to be persuaded to do. He was Lucas (Ben Lamb, ostensibly the star with top billing but we knew who we wanted to see), and he shows up demanding to know what had happened to his father's inheritance money that by all rights, he thinks, should have gone to him. But as Isabelle had married the old geezer a year before he passed away, she got all the money and Lucas got zilch, which he is understandably much aggrieved about.
Now he thinks, after contact from lawyers, that he can grab back that cash, which is why he is there to confront Isabelle. She could not be more obviously trouble if she tried, and Clarke (also known as Kacey Barnfield, which was how she was credited here) got to wear a different outfit in every scene, as well as not wearing any outfit at all, though she eschewed full frontal shots meaning mainly Tobias offered a good look at her bottom. Patently there as a sex object, the actress managed to offer a smidgeon of humanity and mystery, but it wasn't a great role, as neither were anyone else's for they were playing types rather than convincing as people: two patsies, a femme fatale and the old man who may or may not be a patsy too. Shackled to far too many scenes of conversations that went nowhere, this affected the times when the snail's pace plot actually offered incident, meaning they didn't make much of an impression, and though this was B-movie short, even so it looked like a thirty minute experience stretched way beyond interest. If the twist at the end had happened halfway through, it would have been interesting to see where it would go, but by then the movie was over. Music by Walter Mair.
