BLOOD CREEK tells the story of a Nazi
occult expert searching for mystical runes in West Virginia prior to
WWII. He's a scary dude. Most Nazis are. The film FFWDs a few
decades and this Nazi occultist is now a mystical force that drinks
blood and cannot die, but is trapped on the farm by the original
owners who also have not aged a day. HENRY CAVIL (Future Superman)
plays an EMT who's searching for his brother – missing two years.
When he shows up, he learns that he's been trapped on the farm and
slowly bled in order to feed the blood Nazi.
They journey to the farm to fight the
Nazi. There are some truly wicked moments, including an awesome
sequence with zombie flesh eating horses which isn't nearly as silly
as it sounds. It's wall to wall action and some gnarley effects.
Which is where the movie loses steam. The action occurs at breakneck
speed to the point that any attempt to: develop characters, focus on
the evil of the Nazi regime or feel for the enormity of the situation
is lost.
At the end of the day, I thought it was
an original concept for a horror movie. Although, I'm an easy target
since I normally dig movies about evil Nazi's obsessed with the
occult (Raiders, Hellboy :-). So, while not executed to perfection,
it's good for at least a few good creepy moments (watch out for those
horses). Oh, and don't be scared about the fact that Shumacher
directed. Not a bat nipple in sight.
So, with this sort of title, I automatically assumed that I would probably regret and wish I had back those 90 minutes of movie watching. But then I remembered Henry Cavill and Dominic Purcell made up 90% of the movie; I could handle that. In all honestly, I actually enjoy Henry Cavill's character in the Tudors and I was caught off guard when I realized that Purcell was the 'town crazy' in Straw Dogs, whose performance I enjoyed as well.
ReplyDeleteI'm kind of surprised how much I actually enjoyed Blood Creek. It wasn't ground breaking, but I thought the general plot was cool (and not exceptionally crazy, since I believe Captain America is actually semi-based on the same concept: Crazy German's and their occult followings.)
I was given enough information to buy into the set up of the movie, but didn't feel like I had to look to the dark arts encyclopedia to figure anything out.
The overall acting was pretty good too. I was slightly annoyed with Cavill's calm/deer in the headlights persona, but eventually I found it endearing since he was just thrown into a Nazi zombie shit storm. Purcell was a badass, which was cool to see post-Straw Dogs.
Some of the effects were a bit much. Horses look awkward when they bite and drag humans around, just sayin'. And the super computerized de-layering of our villain brought me out of it a bit.
I just felt like the story was complete and interesting. Having the relationship be about 2 brothers vs. 2 lovers was kind of nice. We don't just fight for those we wanna bang, ya know. And the slight love tension between Cavill and the pretty zombie blonde wasn't perverse, just compassion for another person. I felt like the writer had a good idea and it was fairly well.
*fairly well executed*
ReplyDelete