aka Hemoglobin

• Directed by Peter Svatek
• Written by Charles Adair, Dan O’Bannon, and Ronald Shusett (based, uncredited, on the story “The Lurking Fear” by H.P. Lovecraft)
• Starring
  • Rutger Hauer
  • Roy DuPuis
  • Kristin Lehman
  • Jackie Burroughs
  • John Dunn-Hill

Tangential to the main review, I find it a trifle insulting that the title of this movie was changed from the original Hemoglobin to Bleeders for American distribution, as if we dumb Americans would never cotton to a movie whose title was so smartsy-fartsy sounding.

On the other hand, neither title is really fitting to the movie. The natural instinct would be to call it The Lurking Fear, since it is very clearly adapted from H.P. Lovecraft’s tale of the same name (though Lovecraft didn’t even get a credit), but Full Moon had already released an “official” adaptation bearing that title in 1994. And I can see why distributors wouldn’t want to risk confusion between the two movies, as the Full Moon version sucked green weenies. Not that this version is high art; it’s only barely adequate. Come with me as I try to figure out why, won’t you?

Jeepers, creepers, where’d you get those peepers…

Our prologue helpfully informs us of a 1652 edict by the King of Holland that forbade intermarriage between closely-related nobles, due to birth defects (an awfully progressive attitude, given that most European monarchs of the time were doing their best to keep their family trees from forking). However, that command didn’t sit well with noblewoman Eva Van Daam (Gillian Ferrabee), whose greatest pleasure was found between the sheets with her twin brother (also Ferrabee, with a fake moustache). Thus, she packed up her whole household and moved to “the colonies,” where presumably no one would give a second thought to her incestuous habits.

Jump forward three and a half centuries, to an unamed island off the coast of Maine (actually filmed on Grand Manan Island, New Brunswick), where John Strauss (Ron DuPuis) and his wife Kathleen (Kristin Lehman) are arriving via the ferry. John’s a sickly and fey-looking sort; it’s a good thing his wife is an all-American blonde. Just as they get there, John has a seizure and sudden nosebleed (this and the fleeting mention of congenital birth defects during the prologue are the sole justifications for the title Bleeders), and in his thrashing he accidentally knocks Kathleen’s bottle of medicine overboard. A local tells them there’s a “sort of” doctor on the other side of the island, so they hitch a ride around to the big, lonely house of… Rutger Hauer!

Hauer is Dr. Marlowe, an alcoholic doctor somewhere between recovery and denial. (Oddly enough, the stock character of a besotted doctor was also an addition to the story in 1994’s Lurking Fear.) But he does have a fully-stocked medical cabinet, so Kathleen is able to get the kappa propanol that John needs, despite Marlowe’s suspicion that the stuff’ll kill him. John is, Kathleen explains, a victim of a congenital degenerative blood disease. Although John’s earliest memories are of his hometown of Paris, where an anonymous trust took care of him, records show that he was born here on the island, and the Strausses are back to find out what they can about the family and possible treatment.

Ooh. Pritty.

Well, there’s no Strauss family on the island and old Dr. Peterson who signed John’s birth certificate is dead, but Dr. Marlowe can point out one of two things for them: The old Van Daam family, which died off in a fire seventy-five years ago, was known to have some peculiar maladies, including mismatched eyes, a feature John shares with the deformed fetus in a jar of formaldehyde that Dr. Marlowe inherited from his predecessor. (Let’s just ignore for the moment that most babies are born with neutral gray eyes and don’t really show a clear color for months after birth, okay?)

In the meantime, though, there’s much falderall going on on the island. It seems that Byrde (Joanna Noyes), the bitchier-than-hell proprietor of the island’s one hotel and its one funeral home, has been accused of using substandard wood in her coffins, and thus the entire local cemetery is being dug up for individual reburial. (“Substandard wood”? Hell, the cemetery’s an unkempt field on the edge of a seacliff, and the coffins are buried directly in holes without the benefit of any sort of protective casing, and people are worried about substandard wood?). The men are all out with the fishing fleet except for Byrde’s husband Hank (John Dunn-Hill), so the women are doing all of the exhumatory work, and old Widow Shea (Carmen Ferland) manages to have a heart attack when she sees the lid of one of the coffins moving. But since the local cemetery’s all dug up, Byrde decides they’ll bury her in the old Van Daam family plot. One would think that the widow of the late pastor would have a bigger service than four people, but what do I know?

Later than night, though, Byrde’s daughter Alice (Janine Theriault) — nice kid, kinda slow — goes back to the grave to filch the necklace the widow had been buried in to give her the means to get off the island, when a hideous something bursts up through the coffin and drags Nancy down into a tunnel below.

“This is the pits!!”

Well. John and Kathleen, still doing their detective work, head off to find Lexie Crungle (Jackie Burroughs), Dr. Peterson’s old nurse, who oddly enough lives on the ruined Van Daam lands. Lexie, they find, is a crotchety old lady in a wheelchair with a shotgun across her lap and a sign around her neck that reads “EXPOSITORY PLOT DEVICE.” She recognizes John and tells him about how he was the last of the Van Daams, and that she and the doctor had sent him away at birth under an assumed name to protect him from… But then she gets all hostile and shoos them out with the gun. John only turns around when he does the math: He’s not seventy-five years old. Lexie takes them inside and starts explaining more about the Van Daam’s wicked ways — when they’re attacked by a rubber-headed dwarf with mismatched eyes! (At least, I think it had mismatched eyes. The scene’s kind of underlit. But that’s really the punchline from the original story, so I really want those eyes to be mismatched. Even though the other mutant dwarfs that show up very clearly do not have mismatched eyes.)

While John’s getting reacquainted with his family tree, Dr. Marlowe’s been examining the mutilated corpse of a something that fell into the harbor and met the wrong end of an outboard motor. It’s misshapen, it’s hermaphroditic, and it smells of formaldehyde. And its blood cells show the same whatever-it-is that Marlowe also found in common between John and the bottled fetus. (And that is the sole justification for the alternate title Hemoglobin.)

When a child playing in the dug-up cemetery is pulled into a tunnel, the womenfolk all run to Marlowe for help; he descends with a flashlight and finds a network of tunnels decorated with bones and burial jewelry. Oh, and some murderous little dwarfs chewing on the corpses of Nancy and Byrde (who fell down the same hole Nancy did) and the little girl. Hey, Rutger, could you show some outrage? Astonishment? Fear? Something? I know your characters all clinically detached and stuff, but a couple of visible cracks in the reserve would be nice.

“Whoa — is that my paycheck?”

By the time John and Kathleen have made it back from the Van Daam ruins, Dr. Marlowe’s got it all figured out: The mutants are the Van Daams who survived the fire, who have been living off the corpses in the two cemeteries. Now that the coffins are being exhumed, they’re without a food supply, so they’re venturing out after the living. Oh, and they’ve adapted to the formaldehyde to the point that they actually need it, which explains why John always says he’s hungry but doesn’t know for what.

And just to test his theory, Marlowe has John eat a sliver of the bottled fetus to see if that will ease his cravings. While Kathleen throws up. Partly because she’s just found out that she’s pregnant, and partly because her husband’s in the other room eating a dead baby. (The love scene between then that follows not long thereafter raises some interesting questions. She’s just vomited; he’s just eaten a formaldehyde-soaked fetus. Who’s got the worse breath?)

With a storm cutting off both phone and radio communications with the mainland, Marlowe has the remaining islanders hole up in the lighthouse as the Van Daams start coming out in force at night. Will the plan to light up the lighthouse like a Christmas tree hold the mutant dwarfs at bay? Will John be able to fight his inbred instincts and stand up for his woman? Will Kathleen come to grips with the fact that her refrigerator’s going to smell like formaldehyde from now on?

Shucks, I wouldn’t ruin it for you.

You’d think, with all that this movie has going for it (at least for the literate fanboy), it would be better. After all, co-writer Dan O’Bannon has considerable Lovecraft cred (having directed The Resurrected and written the original draft of Alien, in which the critter bore a startling resemblance to Cthulhu). The setting’s certainly more gorgeous than the average direct-to-video horror film, and there are some nice touches like the fact that the inbred Van Daams use tools entirely made out of human bones. In fact, there’s the potential to be truly horrifying with the elements of the plot — after all, we’ve got incest, mutant, at least one child killed by cannibal monsters, and fetus-munching!

“My name is not ‘Pumpkinhead,’ dammit!”

But somehow, it never quite gels. We spend far too much of the first half of the movie with Byrde and Nancy, characters who are both going to be dead by the midpoint. The idea that the island is temporarily occupied almost entirely by women could have been a nifty factor, especially when breeding and reproduction are such heady themes, but absolutely nothing is done with the idea. There’s enough time in between the rare good moments to wonder things like, Just how many cadavers could there be in the cemetery of an island with a population of maybe 200, and how long could the Van Daams have been raiding that larder without demand oustripping supply?

Maybe the direction is just a little too lackluster, a little too unwilling to focus our attention and point out what is important and what is not. Maybe the three main characters are too reserved and self-controlled. Maybe the script needed an extra draft to tighten the story up (or, given that there are three credited screenwriters, maybe it had one draft too many). Whatever the reason, the finished product somehow lacks that moment of stunning horror and revulsion which is the real point of any of Lovecraft’s stories. All it’s got is some “ick” factor instead.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 12
• breasts: 5
• pasty male butts: 1
• explosions: 0
• dream sequences: 0, but 5 fragmentary flashbacks on John’s part
• ominous thunderstorms: 1
• plot-contrivance earthquakes: 2
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0