Rita La Punta (Marilla Pera) leads a gang of underaged Brazillian kids in an attempt to seize control of New York’s Lower East Side drug trade from a Puerto Rican gang.
Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote:
Paul Morrissey continues to be a cinema original and his ''Mixed Blood,'' a most unorthodox look at life in the drug trade on New York's Lower East Side is successively comic, brutal, primitive and sophisticated—a comedy with the manners of a live-action cartoon for jaded adults.[1]
Morrisey's former collaborator Andy Warhol stated in ‘The Andy Warhol Diaries’ :
Paul's movie Mixed Blood is playing midnights at the Waverley...And I just loved the movie. It was everything he's done before, but it was photographed well and he seemed to know so much about the Lower East Side and the Alphabet — avenues A, B, C, and D—for someone who hadn't been in New York for so long.
Sid Smith wrote for the Chicago Tribune wrote:
Although still fairly crude, the movie has more style than Morrissey's earlier pictures, and the lovely salsa score provides a biting undertone and subtlety Morrissey once avoided. It's not a perfect picture, and sometimes it's a boring one, but ''Mixed Blood'' is a fairly successful neo-realist look at something most moviemakers wouldn't go near.