Blood Trail

Two grimy saddle-tramps decide to go picking around an Indian burial ground, desecrating the graves, when one of them becomes apparently possessed. Wandering the wilderness, he slaughters anyone who crosses his path and is hunted by a small group of lawmen and their Indian guide.

A serious-minded horror/western hybrid, this is pretty atmospheric and fairly suspenseful. The film does an okay job of building superstitious dread, while thankfully steering away from using too much mumbo-jumbo to tell it's story.

However, the direction could have used a bit more polish and the characters slightly cardboard. Also, it kind of loses momentum after the first half, with too many scenes that appear to have been added solely to get the film's running time over the eighty-minute mark. This probably would have been a lot better as a sixty-five minute movie.

Overall, it's not too bad. I suspect that horror fans may be a little disappointed, while western fans might be more forgiving of it's flaws.

Top-billed Adrian Pasdar appears to have been hired for about half a day's shooting.

"Blood Trail" has a good idea and some decent actors but it just doesn't come together. The plot is about some Indians and cowboys that try to find out about an ancient burial ground.

It's nice that Lion's Gate helps this movie out with a DVD release after 8 years but it wasn't worth it. It also falls into the hindering trap of "sped up motion". That means when any sort of violence or action occurs on screen, the film is "sped up" in the editing room for some unknown reason. This gives the film an air of ridiculousness. The DVD cover and the plot description make it look exciting, so don't be tricked by Lion's Gate's slick marketing.

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I'm catching up on all the on demand free movies that are due to expire within a week, which includes Blood Trail, so I've got recent experience of a lot of movies in its peer group to compare it to, and I've gotta say it's distinctly better than the pack. Definitely atmospheric, serious without being pompous, cheesy, or tongue in cheek; manages to get maximum value out of what's clearly zero budget for special effects; characters which seem to have some depth to them. Of course, the genre of the film being "American Indian Supernatural", it requires the Wise Old Indian who knows all about the spirit world, and the young bicultural Indian who has one foot in each world so can link the white guys who make up 99% of the movie with the Wise Old Indian. If nobody's done a thesis yet on the subconscious significance of Native American spirit world, with special attention to curses, in Hollywood movies, it certainly seems like a good topic.

Sometimes I wonder what's going on in people's heads about movies these days. In 2004, the French made a movie about a cowboy possessed by an evil Indian spirit titled "Blueberry" ("Renegade", US), an appallingly confusing mishmash of CGI drug hallucinations pretending to be "supernatural". That has developed a small cult audience, even though it is wretchedly written and directed and acted.

"Blood Trail" is a small, independent direct to video Western on a similar topic that has virtually no special effects. It is plain in appearance, and the actors play their roles in a plain, no frills, naturalistic style. But the tension starts almost immediately and never lets up.

The possessed cowboy here is both man and evil spirit - completely consistent with Native American mythology - so pretty much everything said about him by any of the characters is correct, which makes him - and the evil he is - rather a black hole sucking in any possible fear we could have of him. Once possessed, we only glimpse his face once or twice - underscoring the fact that he has ceased to himself and become a something other that we do not understand. For that reason, the fact that the movie refuses to tie up its loose ends is actually completely understandable. We know as little about what has happened as we knew at the beginning what would happen.

The plainness of the film is thus important - there should be no cues to the audience how to respond to all this, the film presents its material rather in the manner of a 'docudrama'.

I really liked it, and I am sorry to see it rated so low here at IMDb. I can't believe that a mess like "Blueberry" is preferred to a solid piece of film-making like this.