Metacritic reviews

Flesh + Blood is a vivid and muscular, if less than fully startling, account of lust, savagery, revenge, betrayal and assorted other dark doings in the Middle Ages.

The battle scenes are impressive, though underpopulated, and the camerawork is fluid.

Though Flesh + Blood tells a terrific story, written by Verhoeven with his longtime collaborator Gerard Soeteman, the presentation is rough, and not just because the film is packed with gore and rape. Verhoeven doesn't believe in tasteful framing that implies nudity; he prefers the bare-assed variety, the kind that makes the body's frailty plain.

In the end, Verhoeven’s greatest irony, and the often pedestrian narrative’s most brilliant stroke, isn’t to decide in favor or against Martin. He’s of a piece with his nature, and he leaves the story as he entered it: unchanged and unbowed by the carnage he’s both witness to and agent of

It's hamstrung by leaden dialogue and the motley international cast - Python and the Grail are never that far away - but it's admirably unsentimental and by no means stupid.

Paul Verhoeven’s first English language film Flesh + Blood is bloody, cynical and unrefined, but indicative of his later satirical tendencies.

A medieval adventure-love saga in which all the cliches have been turned inside out. Instead of chivalry, the 1985 movie focuses on swinishness and brutality. Instead of love it offers lust and lechery; instead of heroism, pillage and murder. The "instead-ofs" go on and on, leaving us no one to root for and everything and everybody finally a turn-off. [10 July 1988, p.TV2]