Main cast: Nathan Phillips (Nathan Sinclair), Alyssa Sutherland (Jane Prescott), Robert Taylor (Captain Malone), Christopher Kirby (Lydell Jackson), Alex Cooke (Alexander Teplov), Mark Diaco (Jimmy Bigelow), John Lloyd Fillingham (Gerard Faraday), and Ruby Isobel Hall (Mya)
Director: Justin Dix
I don’t get the marketing strategy of Blood Vessel. Why give away that there are vampires in this one, when those fang-faced wretches only show up after the one hour mark of this just-a-little-over-90-minutes affair?
Yes, this movie is about people trapped on a ship with vampires as their fellow shipmates. That premise intrigues me enough to give this a try, but I wonder whether hyping the vampires up is a smart thing to do when they show up so late. People that want to see vampire action may fidget impatiently throughout the first hour, wondering whether they have been misled or something.
Okay, the story. Set in the later end of the World War 2, we have the ragtag survivors of the kaboom-ing of a hospital vessel by the Nazis. They stumble upon a ship with Nazi trappings, but what the heck, better to be killed quickly than to die slowly of starvation and thirst, right? The ship seems empty, though, except for Mya, a creepy girl that wants to be Newt very badly. Oh, and some desiccated, rotting bodies here and there, but aside from those things, everything just looks great.
Well, these folks fit horror movie archetypes to a T, or C in this case because C is for cliché. There are the cowardly scumbag, the racist scumbag, the token black guy, the final girl, the somewhat only reliable and sane fellow that may be the last one standing if we weren’t all about the final girl these days, the one guy that talks about his loved one and shows everyone the loved one’s pic so we all know he’s going to die, and the person of authority, played by the most recognizable actor among the cast, that dies faster than one can blink shortly into the movie.
Sadly, it isn’t long before everyone turns dumb. Perhaps it is inevitable, given how these guys are from different, even opposing camps that are forced together due to circumstances, but they also display a remarkable tendency to make the worst decisions at any given situation. Even the presence of relentless cheap jump scares fail to distract them, as they senselessly bicker and turn on one another when they should be more concerned about survival.
When the vampires finally show up, I am hoping they will help give these fools the slow and painful deaths they deserve, but sadly, they are more like folks cosplaying Nosferatu on a super tight budget. It’s not fun either when they can hypnotize these fools into doing their bidding, so it’s not like there is much of a fight to be enjoyed here. Still, if I have to choose between death to these walking Halloween costume shop bargain bin and life with the fools, I’d gladly pick the former.
There isn’t much that is happening on Blood Vessel, therefore, aside from booyah jump scares and dumb antics of the main characters. The most creative aspect of this movie is the title and its double meaning, for everything else is straight out of the standard playbook of jump scares and dark corridors. Okay, the movie also subverts expectations a bit, in that the Hicks-type bloke is an idiot and the final girl isn’t a Ripley as much as she is use-free. Such subversion isn’t enjoyable when the characters involved are dummies, though.
This movie gets generously praised by many people, but I don’t find much here to appreciate. Sure, the movie can be commended for being well put together and doesn’t look like it is falling apart at the seams due to low budget, but there means little when the movie itself feels derivative and the characters are all walking eye-roll generators.
