Warning: Spoilers pertaining to the movie abound.
You really haven’t seen it all until you’ve seen a wrestler elbow drop a flesh eating zombie multiple times until its head explodes. That’s that thing about “Here for Blood.” It has a ton of good ideas and a great sense of humor about itself, but it gets lost in so much filler and narrative excess. What could have been a simple and fun home invasion thriller turns in to a convoluted survival film about cults, and sacrifices, and masked killers, and anointed prophets. It’s all a movie that could have been so much better with tighter editing and fifteen minutes trimmed down.
When his girlfriend, Phoebe, is swamped with college exams; Tom O’Bannon, a rowdy pro-wrestler struggling to make ends meet, agrees to fill in as a last-minute replacement for her well paying babysitting job. Tom arrives at an isolated family home where he meets the precocious 10-year-old Grace. What starts off as a quiet night of pizza and video games quickly spirals into bloody, violent chaos as Tom and Grace find themselves fighting for their lives when an otherworldly cult of masked intruders descend on the home.
Horror movie vet Shawn Roberts is very good in the role of Tom O’Bannon the gentle giant who is struggling with his wrestling career. The circumstances work to where they’re reasonable enough that we can buy that this kind of situation would unfold. Roberts soft spoken but gruff character allows for an interesting reluctant hero, while Maya Misaljevic is very good as Grace, the game obsessed young girl he’s tasked with watching. Almost immediately, the writing doesn’t seem to place too much confidence in the whole premise of Tom defending Grace as we’re only given about twenty minutes of it before other characters are introduced. This is used as a means of upping the body count but it painfully undermines the potential for suspense and characterization for Tom and Grace.
I’d have loved to see them play off of one another more, as well as learn more about Tom’s life as a wrestler or whatnot. Writer James Roberts and director Daniel Turres never seem to have an idea on what tone they’re going for exactly as they opt for splatter horror comedy after leading us in to what would have been much better as a survival thriller. The movie could have stood at least ten minutes trimmed from its run time as the narrative becomes so much more convoluted and confusing as it went on. Why did Grace’s parents wait until she was being babysat to begin the sacrifice? Why didn’t they just bring her to their cult themselves? Why did the group of killers wait all that time in the attic waiting to grab Grace?
If Grace is “the key” to all of this hoopla then what was the point of the ritual killing in the prologue? Why didn’t they revive anyone else as a zombie? If they can possess people with incantations why not just possess Grace instead of risking botching the whole operation? “Here for Blood” has so much potential to be a good splatter survival film, but it gets so mucked up in particulars and exposition that it loses track of the momentum and drags for the final fifteen minutes. It would have been better served it everything was simplified and dialed down a notch. That said, while there are some redeeming aspects, “Here for Blood” sadly wastes a unique idea at a time where home invasion films are becoming more and more frequent.
Will have its English Premiere at FrightFest on August 25th.