Bleeders

This is an average horror flick that really should be better than it is. The initial screenplay adapts Lovecraft's "The Lurking Fear" and was by Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett. The film sports a beautiful location (Grand Manan Island, Canada) that maintains that same creepy boating town vibe as their earlier DEAD & BURIED, but gets bogged thanks to flat direction from Peter Svatek. Dupuis, who also has the O'Bannon penned SCREAMERS on his resume (his mom must be proud), looks a tad out of place, more like a TWILIGHT reject with his pale skin, flowing hair and bad fashion sense. Hauer is decent in the film and actually survives. Oddly enough, half of the cast also popped up in THE SWEET HEREAFTER the same year. The film does earn points for having harm come to several children through out. Svatek must have some kind of fetish because he moved on to TV movies like BABY FOR SALE (2004) and STOLEN BABIES, STOLEN LIVES (2008).

I wrestled with myself as I took this off the shelf. "Look! O'Bannon and Shusett co-wrote it! Y'know, 'Alien' and 'Dead And Buried'. And Rutger's in it!". I still knew in my heart it was gonna stink, but I rented it anyway. And much to my surprise, it was nowhere near as awful as I feared it was going to be. Okay, it has many faults, especially the two no-name Canadian leads, a hack director, and a predictable plot which offers absolutely nothing unexpected whatsoever (which is made even worse by a DVD slick which doesn't even attempt to keep anything to itself), but I found it quite watchable just the same. I'm a sucker for Lovecraftian movies, Rutger has little more than a cameo really, but he's pretty cool in it, and there are one or two effective scares and creepy touches. So the verdict is utter trash but fun. Goes well with beer!

Bleeders is, in a single word, baffling. It features a competent cast, including the always fantastic Rutger Hauer, and a bunch of unknowns who provide us with far better performances than we generally have inflicted upon us in low-budget straight-to-video horror. The location is gorgeous - a foggy fishing island somewhere off the eastern coast of Canada. The gore and monster makeup are extremely good, too. Even the script is adequate, containing no really awful dialogue or bizarre character motivations.

Add all these elements together, and you should end up with a solid little low budget horror film. Instead... well, you get Bleeders.

Its main fault is a serious cinematic crime: it is boring. I lay the blame for this unforgiveable flaw at the feet of the director and, to a lesser extent, the composer. The whole film is terribly paced. There is never any sense of urgency or danger throughout. It seems that the director has never seen a horror or thriller film before, as he certainly has no idea how to built suspense or deliver a shock. Scenes dealing with life and death feel identical to those featuring leisurely chats about genealogy. The whole film just feels terribly flat.

The score really doesn't help. It is simply the most boring and pointless movie score I have heard in years. In the first few minutes, I was thinking it was pretty. An hour and a half later, after listening to what seemed to be the same five minutes of music on a loop, I hated it. The music, like the direction, is utterly flat. Character scenes and supposedly scary scenes are all scored the same. Like the director, the composer seemed to have no idea what a horror film score is there for. It certainly isn't supposed to be something pretty to listen to when there's no dialogue.

These two problems are bad enough, but they are compounded by the fact that Bleeders is shot on video. This constant visual reminder of the movie's cheap nature, as well as its inept direction and bland score, make the whole film feel like an episode of some dodgy TV show, destined to be axed after a single season. Only the occasional splashes of gore and explicit sex scenes mark it as being something not made for TV.

It's a terrible waste of talent and potential. Okay, the best bits of the story are stolen from Lovecraft, but it could have been a fun Lovecraft ripoff, as opposed to yet another bad one. What a pity... it really could have been good.

Now, it isn't for everybody mind you, not even every die hard horror fans; but if you like freaky monsters under the ground from origins to awful to speak aloud, then not only are you a Lovecraft fan (see Shadow Over Innsmouth), but you'll probably enjoy this movie. Not fully incorporating the Cthulhu Mythos, huge parallels are seen in the backwoods MA people, the fish like monsters and something that came from a long time ago. Surprisingly, unlike the vicious scheiBfare Lovecraft renditions that came out of the eighties, this is surprisingly well done. It has actors and actresses that don't foul up the Lovecraftian nightmare that the director has in store for the audience, and a good plot. My only question was, so what happens next.

An uncredited adaptation of the Lurking Fear, Hemoglobin (as it is titled in the current US DVD release) stars Rutger Hauer as a drunken doctor recently moved to a small New England fishing community. The arrival of John Strauss (played in near-albino fashion by Roy Dupuis) raises some interesting questions.

The basic theme of Lovecraft's story remains unchanged. A family of incest-deformed monsters live beneath the town, feeding on the dead. Of course, Lovecraft provided a description of the horror in the Lurking Fear and yet, to my knowledge, there is no adaptation that has bothered to be true to this fairly simple detail.

The movie is fairly fast paced, though the insertion of a sex scene comes off as forced and staged, interrupting the film's progression for the purpose of a few quick breast shots. The creature effects aren't that great, indeed, they are probably one of the poorer portions of the film. The footage of the underground catacombs though? That is just wonderful.

The film tries to play with atmosphere, and does us the courtesy of not waving badly made up monsters in our face. Indeed, one of the more tense scenes plays out mostly in shadow as the creatures storm the local lighthouse.