Blood Cult (1985)

Posted on May 30, 2007 under Horror |

Directed by Christopher Lewis
Written by Stuart Rosenthal
Starring
- Juli Andelman
- Charles Ellis
- James Vance
- Bennie Lee McGowan
- Josef Hardt
Produced by Linda Lewis
Executive produced by Bill F. Blair

Kids these days, they need to learn their history. Up until the mid-’80s, Hollywood studios had been content to license their theatrical product to third parties for videocassette distribution. Then they finally wised up and realized the looming revenue potential in the home video market, and instead of licensing their features, they began to put together in-house video distribution divisions. As the stream of studio-produced content dried up, one distributor wondered if, for the amount he would normally pay to license a theatrical feature, he could produce an original feature-length movie and distribute it himself. Thus Blood Cult was born: Shot on twin Sony Betacams in nine days for a price tag of $27,000, it holds the singular honor of being the first feature ever made specifically for direct-to-video distribution.

And you know that if I spend the first paragraph focusing on a movie’s history, it’s because the movie itself is somewhat underwhelming. I’ve certainly seen much worse horror films, but if it weren’t for Blood Cult’s pioneer status in video distribution history, it would scarcely be memorable in any other regard.

“Must rinse… before it stains…”

The opening gives us a clear picture of where we’re headed: A darkened sorority house at night, a co-ed alone in the house taking a shower, a prowler creeping through the house with a shiny meatcleaver. You might want to consider this an homage to Hitchcock and Carpenter (director Christopher Lewis certainly wants you to, according to the DVD commentary), but even by 1985 such a setup had been wiped so clean of originality that it’s nothing but a pat little cliche. But what they lack in originality, the filmmakers certainly demonstrate in patience; it’s a full five minutes from the establishing shot of the sorority house until the prowler makes himself known to the co-ed as he tries to break down the bathroom door. A quick chop-chop-chop later, and he leaves with the co-ed’s freshly showered arm, leaving behind a small gold medallion with a dog’s head on it.

From there, we go to another sorority house a couple of nights later; a co-ed wakes in the night to find that the prowler’s there in the bedroom, having already decapitated her roommate. He doesn’t kill this one; he just beats her unconscious with her roommate’s severed head. We are now almost fifteen minutes into the movie (including a screencrawl giving the context as “Central State College” somewhere in the Midwest); you may well conclude that not exactly going to be flooded with plot here.

“Looks like the work of SpookyAssians!”

The two slasher setpieces taken care of, we can finally meet our protagonist, septagenarian Sheriff Wilbois (Charles Ellis). Wilbois is very clearly out of his depth; he’s a common-sense peacekeeper in the heartland who’s never had to deal with anything as gruesome as a serial killer. Fun fact: The script predates the distributor’s direct-to-video brainstorm by several years, and in fact had originally been written to feature an elderly Buster Crabbe (!) as the sheriff, until his death spoiled the project. Ellis is no Buster Crabbe, but he’s probably an even better fit for an ageing smalltown lawman who wants to preserve his town, the university, and his upcoming chances at reelection.

Sheriff Wilbois does have an ace in the hole: His daughter Tina (Juli Andelman) works at the university library, and thus helps her father cross-reference the occult significance of the dog-headed medallions. On the minus side, Tina’s boyfriend is Joel (James Vance), world’s ugliest grad student, who seems to like nothing better than to demonstrate Tina’s lousy taste in men by kissing her repeatedly in front of Daddy.

Tina and Joel. For the love of all that’s holy, don’t let them breed.

Right, the medallions. The dog face links them to a 17th-century witchcult which would build a frankensteined meat effigy in order to curse magistrates and other authority figures. This would be the point for Sheriff Wilbois to wonder if someone had it in for him personally, but he never does. Instead, he spends plenty of time running back and forth between the dean’s office and his own sheriff’s station, assigning never-seen deputies to guard the sorority houses while the body’s continue to pile up. (Though if you ask me, any co-ed who ventures out after dark alone while a serial killer preys on sorority girls is just doing her part to cull the herd.) The sheriff has few leads, until he notices that the book identifying the medallion says that that witchcult’s rites always took place out in the country at night, with bonfires and chanting and such. And it just so happens that his department took a complaint call from a farmer who claimed that “poachers” were lighting fires in the nearby woods in the middle of the night, and had also decapitated his dog.

If the movies you’ve seen recently have had too little padding for your tastes, this one should fill the ticket. The sheriff spends a lot of time going back and forth to the library and his office, with plenty of footage of the transit in between. (Thrill to the sensible ten-and-two steering action!) Even some of the gore scenes seem more like filler than in the standard slasher flick; when a pair of severed fingers are discovered nonsensically in somebody’s cafeteria salad, one gets the feeling that they were there not for the fear factor, but simply to give an excuse to follow a diner all the way through the long cafeteria line.

Yep, nothing reels in the chicks like a big shiny badge.

When I say that acting is at the level of community theatre, I’m not hurling an insult, I’m acknowledging where the director found most of his cast. As such, I suppose they’re adequate, though nowhere near natural. And of course, once some characters are revealed as cultists, they begin speaking in that stilted “Ooh, I’m cultist!” monotone though their previous scenes had all been well-adjusted. (Make your own Tom Cruise joke, okay?)

Though the extent to which there are cultists is left annoyingly ambiguous, as most of what we see of them comes after Wilbois, traipsing through the woods at night to find the poachers, gets hit on the head; what he sees of a cult rite is therefore either seen blearily through a concussion, or entirely an hallucination. If what we see is true, it doesn’t make much sense that a witchcult whose main distinguishing characteristic is rituals against magistrates should then handle the sheriff with kid gloves and even make overtures to him. But then, as the director admits in the commentary, a lot of this really doesn’t make sense in retrospect. And what does make sense is available on film in the older movies they cribbed from.

**“And beware the fate of Bob here, who was supposed to bring the marshmallows tonight!”**

While those of us who enjoy micro-budget genre cinema should appreciate the movement that Blood Cult engendered, it doesn’t follow that we must therefore treat this movie as “the Citizen Kane of direct-to-video.” This outing proved that it could be done, and with the right distribution strategy could be done profitably. But it took later filmmakers, following and broadening the trail, to show that it could be done well.