Blu-ray.com has just revealed that Capelight Pictures and MPI Home Video will be releasing a brand-new Blu-ray transfer of Paul Verhoeven’s period action film Flesh+Blood. The film was released back in 1985 and stars Rutger Hauer, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Susan Tyrrell, Tom Burlinson and Jack Thompson. The new 40th Anniversary Edition Blu-ray is slated to hit retailers early next year on February 11.

The description reads,
“Director Paul Verhoeven (Basic Instinct, Total Recall) brings no-holds-barred action and sensuality to the Middle Ages. A band of mercenaries led by Martin (Rutger Hauer) triumph in battle for their leader Arnolfini. When Martin is betrayed by the tyrant Arnolfini, he seeks revenge! Martin’s mercenaries abduct Agnes (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a convent girl and the bride-to-be of Arnolfini’s son Steven (Tom Burlinson). She in turn manipulates Martin to protect her from his men. But is she feigning devotion in order to survive or has she fallen in love? Scripted by Gerard Soeteman and Paul Verhoeven this is a passionate tale of survival in a pitiless world.​”

There currently haven’t been announcements made about special features, but the technical specs are:

Video
Codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Resolution: 1080p
Original aspect ratio: 2.39:1

Audio
TBA

Subtitles
English SDH

Discs
Blu-ray Disc
Two-disc set (1 BD, 1 DVD)

Packaging
DigiBook

Playback
2K Blu-ray: Region A

Although this movie has found an audience, the underperformance of it would actually lead to Robocop since Verhoeven needed to take any directing job he could after it flopped. History was, of course, made and Verhoeven had recently given his impressions of the two notable remakes of his iconic films — Robocop and Total Recall. He was not a fan of the 2014 Robocop, saying, “The problem there, I felt, was that he was really aware that he lost all his legs and arms. He knows it from the very beginning. The beautiful thing about the original RoboCop, what makes it not just pure tragedy or whatever, is that he really does not know anymore. He gets a couple of vague flashes of memory when he goes to his old house, but RoboCop is not a tragic figure. Yes, he’s killed in the most horrible way in the beginning. But when we see him again as a robot, he doesn’t feel that. In the new one, because he remembers everything, he’s much more tragic. We wanted you to accept him at the beginning as a robotic cop. That’s what they did to him. In my opinion, I thought it was a problem to make him more tragic.”

He also felt 2012’s Total Recall remake was fancy-looking but shallow. He explained, “I felt it had a lot of special effects, but this mystery—is it true or is it not true?—I just didn’t feel that anymore. The interesting thing about the original movie is that at the end, when Rachel Ticotin says, ‘Well, kiss me quick before you wake up,’ you still don’t really know if it’s real.” 

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