Blood Vessel - Movie Review
What do you get when you mix a diverse crew of allied survivors, a dilapidated Nazi U-Boat, and an ancient vampire? A movie that is not half as fun as its premise.
Let’s discuss.
Blood Vessel is an Australian horror film brought to us by writer/director/sfx guru Justin Dix. Not familiar? I wouldn’t expect you to be, unless your a hardcore nerd like me that actually waits to see the sfx credits. Dix has more credits for special effects and prosthetics than he does directing. He’s done special effects and prosthetics for films like The Babadook and the Star Wars Prequels. He now owns his own SFX studio called Wicked of Oz Studios who handled the special effects for this film.
Speaking of the film…
Blood Vessel is a single location slow burn thriller / creature feature set during the tail end of World War II. A group of survivors from a downed ship floats listlessly in their lifeboat. They’re out of food and water. Their only hope is the ship they hear in the distance. Unfortunately, the ship turns out to be a Nazi vessel. Rather than die of starvation, they intend to turn themselves in, but there’s no one on board. Well, that’s not true. There’s something onboard and its surprisingly worse than the stooges of the third reich. An ancient evil is stirring in the bowls of the vessel. An evil that hungers eternal.
Sounds cool right?
Right?
Well, that’s what I thought…
…but the reality is that this film can’t decide what it wants to be.
Spoiler Time—Queue the music!
So, the ship is infested with vampires. I mean, the marketing campaign and the movie poster weren’t exactly subtle. The main vampire and probably the only thing in this movie that works is spoiled on the poster and streaming thumbnail. It’s a gorgeous practical monster effect and I expected it to be the star of the film. From everything I’d seen in the marketing, I expected a creature feature. You know what I mean. A fun romp with a big bad monster stalking our heroic / dysfunctional survivors, but what we get is an attempt to blend a wartime drama, slow burn thriller, and creature feature.
In the positive, the film looks way more expensive than I know it was. The ship is a wonderfully developed character. The set dressing and lighting is impeccable. The color red saturates the top decks of the vessel as the harbinger of the story. The set-piece corpses that litter the ship’s important rooms are decadently dressed with room spanning veins that pulsate with crimson and amber light. You’d think there was an infection element based on the fact that veins extend from the dead onto the surfaces around them, but you’d be wrong. It’s purely for aesthetic value. The problem here is that in the beginning of the film, the nurse that accompanies the men tells them not to touch the surfaces covered in these substances. It’s. built up that it’s going to be a factor later, but it never pays off. The filmmakers establish all these options to make a better narrative, but abandon it all. They refuse to settle on a set of rules for the monsters.
This is a problem that I see in a lot of low budget films, like the previously reviewed Last Shift. Without rules, there are no stakes. You need a set of rules for the monsters if you want there to be a compelling conflict. There needs to be a set list off rules that tells us what the creature is capable of and a set list of weaknesses. With vampires, the weaknesses are implied through the collected regularity of the vampire mythos in all cultures. Whereas the weaknesses are extremely common for vampires country to country, the powers and abilities vary drastically. There’s the ubiquitous Dracula-style vampires that can turn into bats, wolves, and mist that we’re used to in the Western world. In stark contrast, vampires in Southeast Asia their vampires called Krasue or Ahp are shown as floating heads whose organs hang out beneath like a gory mobile. These are just two common examples of the wide gamut of vampires to choose from.
The film’s lore building pitches the idea that these vampires are ancient Slavic creatures akin to the myth of the Strigoi. It definitely looks like the ancient depiction found in Romanian legend. In the Romanian myths, Strogoi are people whose spirits are troubled and are compelled to rise from the grave. They in turn gain the traditional powers seen in Legosi’s Dracula, but they aren’t as pretty as Bela. So, you can why I was frustrated that this Strigoi style vampire displays none of the traditional abilities.
Wait… It gets more confusing.
There are actually three vampires and all three display different abilities. There are a mom, dad, and little daughter vampire. Even though they are related by blood all there display completely different movesets. The daughter is the traditional bride of Dracula style creature. She looks cute, but she’s quick to bite. She’s like a feral bobcat moving through the ship. The dad is the big bat head guy who pretty much can only use mind control, and then there’s mom… who can create illusions. At no time is this explained. Top that off, there’s zero explanation where the daughter came from. The mom and dad are chained in giant sarcophagi and have to be released. However, the daughter killed the entire crew of the ship without anyone but the captain realizing what was going on. It’s a huge leap in logic gap. They never show the smaller sarcophagus. It would have been a cool reveal, if the little girl were likable and not obviously a vampire. You could have had one of the survivors find an opened child’s coffin and then have to race to tell their friends before its too late.
Spoiler—didn’t happen.
No, what we get is the creepy as hell, obviously a vampire little girl who speaks an ancient Slavic language that the token Russian stereotype character reveals. I mean the makeup they did on this kid made her nearly glow in the dark. We as the viewer know from minute one that she’s a gross beast, but somehow the main characters, who—lest we forget are hardened veterans of the war, aren’t suspicious of her in the least. Oh, and she fucking bites the kindly nurse character in the first couple of minutes and EVERYONE just forgets it happened. The film takes place over a few hours. When the vampires are revealed and they see their friends bitten and turned, no one remembers the nurse was bitten IN FRONT OF EVERYONE! She has a bloody bandage wrapped around her hand as a reminder, JESUS!
I’m sorry, but this level of shitty writing upsets me to no end. I can't sell a screenplay or get a deal with a publisher, but these shitty scripts are getting made that make absolutely no sense. Worse yet, the nurse being bitten gets played off as clever because she, as a vampire, is the only survivor. She makes a one liner that I think was supposed to get a chuckle at the end, but everyone in attendance for my viewing groaned. It was that bad.
That leads us into the weirdest logic / continuity gap in the film. The idea of the vampires turning people doesn’t make sense. The nurse is bitten by the little girl who bit the rest of the crew. Everyone she bites turns into mindless killing machines, but when the daddy vampire wakes up, the thralls become useless puppets who can’t function unless the master vampire is mentally dominating them. To top that off, there’s no set time for when the conversion happens. The nurse walks around for hours after being the first one bitten without turning, but the British A-hole guy turns immediately after being bitten. The Russian guy gets bit and doesn’t turn even when the Master vampire is standing inches away attempting to dominate his mind.
I really went in expecting to like this film, but it takes itself too damned serious. There’s little levity and when we do get is stereotypes and winks/nods.
There’s no wit to see here, move along.
The Russian character is overly Russian. Everything he gets shot, stabbed, eats rotten food, etc. He repeats the line “I’ve had worse.” He might as well have been saying, “In Soviet Russia…” Fill in the blank. Equally as annoying is the overly British characters, overly Australian characters, and then there’s the Americans. There’s 2 American characters, an annoying Italian cook from New York and then the token African American mechanic.
Minus 10 points from HufflePuff for killing the African American character within the first half hour. Double that deduction because that character who was likable. Played by Christopher Kirby, Lydell Jackson is the only character with half a brain. He’s the only actor who gives their lines as if they’re coming organically and not being read from a teleprompter. That’s to be expected from a genre legend like Kirby. Most will know him from his incredible performance in Iron Sky. Yeah, he’s unceremoniously killed in a throwaway scene. It’s frustrating, because leading up to his death, the film was actually pretty good. His death signifies the end of viewing enjoyment.
The first half hour of this film sets up a creepy, atmospheric—Aliens, but on a boat, movie.
Shudder has had a lot of fun films pop up as exclusives. Vicious Fun, Psycho Goreman, Mayhem, and Blood Machines come to mind. They aren’t all great films. Hell, most aren’t that good. But they’re usually fun.
I can’t recommend watching Blood Vessel, even with the incredible practical effects. It’s just not a good time. It’s not scary or fun. I can’t figure out why it got made in the first place.
Watch this film if you need something to fill the gaps between games of Candy Crush.
