The great thing about DVD is that when the medium became popular in the early 2000s, a plethora of TV movies appeared on disc, offering DVD players an affordable selection of films. Virtually everything less than 10 years old was released then. Today, this means that local thrift stores are filled with films that would otherwise have disappeared from the public domain forever and been forgotten.
Blood Run is an example of such a film that remains available thanks to the early DVD craze. This direct-to-TV erotic thriller would have filled the late hours of Friday and Saturday evenings in the '90s. Erotic thrillers back then essentially came in two forms: there was real soft porn mixed with a wafer-thin murder plot. And there were real suspense films, with an above-average amount of nudity mixed into the story. Thankfully, Blood Run belongs to the latter category: a murder that briefly suggests it's going to be a slasher horror film, a bad cop vs. Good cop storyline, and a femme fatale as the main suspect. There's a bit of a copycat from Basic Instinct, which I don't mind.
The story isn't particularly original. There are some editing errors (the busy 1990s tie prints easily reveal when a scene isn't edited in the right place). No woman would swim naked and wear black nylons on the same day, unless the director requested it to heighten the erotica. The story has more than a few logic errors. And of course, there's the usual unrealism of police procedure... But overall, it's fun, very fun! The film is beautifully shot in 4:3, the action scenes are good, the outfits are fitting for the story, and the acting is unexpectedly good.
The IMDB score is very low, perhaps because this DVD, in the budget bins of the 2000s, failed to impress suspense fans. Now, 30 years later, it's a nice throwback to the '90s, a time when a thrilling movie was something you stayed home for on a Friday night. Blood Run has become a portal to time. Hence, a well-considered 8/10.
