The expressionist and often poetic cinematography of Argentinian director Carlos Hugo Christensen’s earlier noirs is replaced with a gritty brutality in broad daylight in Mãos Sangrentas (US: Bloody Hands), an outlandish and often chaotic prison break film based on an actual event at Brazil’s Anchieta Island penitentiary in 1952, which left 118 guards and convicts dead. The protagonists don’t comprise two or three courageous characters but the entire prison population, which rises up to overtake the guards outside, assassinates most of the remaining staff through extended gunfight, and flees the island to commence a long, hot fugitive journey through the Brazilian landscape. Christensen does focus on one convict in particular named Hadrian (Arturo de Córdova), perhaps an ironic reference to the Roman emperor famous for building walls, who leads a small group to freedom, even if it will be short-lived; hungry and desperate, Hadrian will see his comrades ambushed and murdered one by one (one commits suicide while famished vultures circle) which is enough to send him down a spiral of madness. Christensen’s first of many films in Brazil (he’d been forced to flee the Peronist dictatorship in Argentina), Bloody Hands is uncompromisingly raw and violent: guards are murdered by splitting axes through the head, the captain is machine gunned down in front of his toddler, men are kicked in the crotch and pounded in the face. The percussion-heavy score by Alves and Gnatalli emphasizes the jungle’s wildness which will take its toll on the fugitives, the price of freedom paid with sanity.