Direction, camerawork, production values, opening credits - we are readily informed that this is a very indie, very low-budget movie created by an amateur filmmaker. The assembled cast largely have few if any other credits to their names, and their performances are, in general, outright perfunctory. The bare, honest simplicity of filming locations, lighting, overlaid text and effects, sound, and music share the same slant as the writing of scenes, characters, and dialogue, and their execution: This is a B-movie, and the self-evident passion project of someone making their first feature film with the rudimentary resources available to them.
None of this precludes the possibility of 'Dense fear: Bloodline' being enjoyable, but certainly a viewer must be able to accept the feature on its level to grasp the value. Plainly, extremely inelegant and unrefined through and through as it is, I admire the effort, and in the very least notable care and intention comes across that marks writer-director Tony Gardner as a burgeoning craftsman, and not just some guy filming the fun times he and his friends are having. Though certainly keeping to the same limited, basic standard of the movie as a whole - or arguably even despite those constraints - I think the makeup, prosthetics, and effects employed to visualize the transformation are fairly decent. I appreciate that, for obvious budgetary restrictions, Gardner elected an alternative means of depicting the visceral carnage we would anticipate of a werewolf flick.
A very minor sense of tension and suspense develops in the second half as efforts to hunt the lycanthrope go sideways. While close-ups of the beast do the flick no favors, the creature is suitably realized - and, let's face it, still better than what we've gotten in some features with more operating capital. I think the blood and gore are done well, not least of all given what Gardner was working with. The narrative is thin, yet the goal was clearly just to make a low-grade werewolf flick, and that objective is met.
It's rough, uneven, far from perfect, and even at only 82 minutes, perhaps longer than it needs to be. Even so, ultimately it's reasonably entertaining. With all due emphasis on the fact that one needs to be able to recognize the nature of the production - if you can do that, then this isn't half bad. 'Dense fear: Bloodline' is no essential cinema classic, but it's a great representation of what can be accomplished with little more than passion, and is a modestly worthwhile watch if you come across it.
