Bloodstream

I have been addicted to horror for over forty years but it's only in the last six months or so that I have discovered the micro budget films of British movie maker Michael J Murphy, "Bloodstream" being my second dip into the wonderful blu-ray box set celebrating his career. And it did not disappoint! Apparently it never had an official release but was available on bootleg VHS - until now! We get gore right from the start, the flesh on a man's face starts peeling off, some zombies rip open a man's gut and start munching on his innards. Throughout it's approx 80 minute running time we are also treated to an Egyptian mummy, more zombies, psycho killers, vampires, cannibalism, an exorcism, a werewolf, sex and female nudity. The main killer, himself a film director, films his murders thus making a "snuff" movie. Despite the obvious very low budget and trashiness I really enjoyed this movie and for me that's the most important thing.

It's certainly frustrating to think about how so few no-budget horror films have the towering tenacity, the overarching ambition of glass-ceiling smashing splatter mad-hatter Michael J. Murphy's quixotic, pseudo-legendary psychodrama, 'Bloodstream' (1985) a feral, celluloid creep-out for the discerning, late-night curry crowd, a righteously frenetic cinephile wet dream while demonstratively lacking the polish and production value the extra 75 quid might have given the final product; bravely defying logic, the narratively febrile filmmaker Murphy goes off-piste, frequently taking the road less traveled and proceeds to up the cinematic ante at any given opportunity, not only shooting the main story arc of disgruntled director Alistair Bailey's grisly, not entirely unjustified revenge, the hyperbolic 'film-within-a-film' milieu works tremendously well for much of the film's 1 hr 23 minutes duration, an especially laudable feat considering the profound budgetary privations he would have to so consistently surmount. The penurious, perhaps naive, eternally hopeful neophyte horror impresario Alistair Bailey is a marvelous cipher for any number of equally frustrated genre filmmakers similarly thwarted by the malign machinations of a duplicitous producer, in this case the fabulously despotic William King who contrives by wholly devious means to contractually steal the film away from the apoplectic Alistair and later release 'Bloodstream' for a considerably increased financial reward, the ceaselessly ruthless and entirely parasitical King making for an eminently despicable nemesis! Without pausing for B-movie breath we are headily plunged into a vibrant kaleidoscopic craziness which proves singularly fascinating, this fractured, chaotically macabre movie melange, brusquely cutting from one lurid, gore-spattered non sequitur colourfully represents the increasingly disturbed mind of paranoid filmmaker Alistair Bailey, uncomfortably bringing Peeping Tom's equally deranged 16mm camera wielding maniac Carl Boehm to mind as he so methodically undertakes his brutal retribution, every grim, bloody detail of his transgressors death being captured unflinchingly on film. There's a coruscating rawness to Michael J Murphy's 'Bloodstream' which evokes the very ragged best, or delirious worst of Roberta Findlay/Ted V. Mikels psychotronic drive-in madness, its low brow, high cholesterol celluloid is blissfully bad for your health! The 'acting' is deliciously monotonous and frequently hilarious which merely increases the illicit frisson of watching an unrepentantly trashy film replete with such a withering disdain for good taste, outsider cinema like this by all rights should be celebrated for their idiosyncrasy and rewarded with a lovingly restored Blu-ray/DVD.