BLOOD IN, BLOOD OUT (1993) - 5/13/2024

A controversial title

I was running into a little bit of a problem last night when I was trying to log this on Letterboxd because the title of the film was not coming up. Now, that app tends to be very finicky with spelling and punctuation, so I figured I was doing something wrong. But after checking Hulu and IMDB multiple times for clarification, I still could not find it on Letterboxd. Then, after some thinking, I realized I could just search the cast. I went to Benjamin Bratt’s page and scrolled through his films and found the poster. But when I clicked on it, it was listed by another name: Bound by Honor.

There is not a lot I knew about this film, the fact that it was three hours long or generally what it was about. My only familiarity with it was Shea Serrano’s Twitter X avatar of Miklo and his constant praise of it over the decade plus that I’ve been following him. But here it was, finally on a streaming service to enjoy, and boy, does it rip. Does it have some stereotypical beats of an epic-style film? Yes. Does it have some clichéd tropes of inner-city films? Yes. Do parts of it not hold up? Sure, but it takes place between 1972 and 1984, so I can move past that. This is a great prison movie, this is a great L.A. movie, and it is also a great family movie. There are a lot of parts of this film that don’t work over the three hour runtime because it feels like they are adding too much detail, but it still does all work together. So why did I know so little about it?

Partially, it is because it was a sort of commercial flop that gained cult status years later. It had a $35 million budget and made back less than $5 million from theaters. How could a thrilling film like this bomb so hard? I think part of the reason was the luke-warm response from many critics calling it fine at best, coming right off the heels of Boyz n the Hood and American Me, the latter seemingly more beloved than this. There was also the general controversy surrounding the film’s name and its content.

This film was shot in 1991, but released in 1993, coming off of the LA riots of 1992 in response to the Rodney King beating. Fearing they might be responsible, the studios were incredibly hesitant about potentially rekindling any sparks of the recently subdued social fires and really took their time with the rollout and marketing, even pushing the release of it back until after the King verdict was handed down. In addition to that, the studio wanted to change the title from Blood In, Blood Out - which refers to the prison gang ritual of murdering someone to get into the gang - to Bound by Honor, fearing that the title might ensue more violence in East L.A., especially after what the city dealt with the previous year.

Now, that of course is an insane and frankly insulting thing to assume for an entire population of people, but they did it anyway. Maybe part of the reason I knew nothing about this film is because of how far the studio went to bury and change so much of it to potentially cover their own asses. However, like most unappreciated art, it would go on to have a cult-like status and gain fame in its own deserving right. I’m glad that in its second life it has been restored to its original name. Vatos locos forever.