• Written and directed by Alan Rowe Kelly
• Starring
  • Alan Rowe Kelly
  • Terry M. West
  • Joshua Nelson
  • Mike Lane
  • Susan Adriensen

The next generation of shocksploitation horror after such seminal classics as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and The Hills Have Eyes (1978) has split into two camps. In one, you have what has come to be known as “torture porn”: movies which feature — heck, revel in — a grimy kind of cruelty and pain. The vanguard of these movies — Hostel (2004), the Saw franchise — have had theatrical releases, though there’s no shortage of direct-to-DVD and independent examples of this subgenre, most of which take their inspiration directly from the aforementioned recent theatrical releases instead of the grandpappies of the field. You can easily spot them on the video store shelf, as their cover art uniformly uses as gritty, filthy, scratched-up style that demands that you use hand sanitizers after touching the DVD box.

“Would you be, could you be, my neighbor?”

The other camp has been pretty much confined to the indie you-it-yourself microbudget film community. Predating the theatrical interest in torture porn of the last few years, it draws more directly on the grindhouse horror of the ’70s. However, as many of these have been practically back yard productions, what shines through instead of production finesse is the simple joie de vivre of the filmmakers, who are just so gosh-darned happy to be making an homage to the the flicks that warped them decades back. (Hmm; two borrowed French expressions in a single sentence. Better watch my quota.) Because of this lightmindedness behind the camera, the result is usually a horror-comedy; the hoped-for audience reaction is “Ha ha ew ha ha ha eww ha ha ew ha.”

The Blood Shed is an example of the latter sort, and by the standards which the subgenre has built up, it’s a good one. I make the point of including that caveat (and really, the entire lengthy preamble to this review is part of that caveat) because, by the standards espoused by the broader film community, this is a movie largely without redeeming virtues: it’s almost a storyless narrative without either a protagonist or a single sympathetic character (and yes, I acknowledge that the two are separate considerations). Its main redeeming feature is that it throws out casual cruelty and transgressive sexuality like cheap taffy from a fire truck in a Fourth of July parade, and obviously that’s only a redeeming feature if that’s what you’re looking for in a movie to begin with.

Beefteena, in all of her charm.

Given the two films I cited as precedents, it will come as no surprise to you that this movie deals with an inbred cannibal clan, situated not in the far-off hinterlands, but in the wooded New Jersey exurbs. The first member of the Bullion clan we meet, and the one who gets most screentime, is Beefteena, a huge ugly mid-forties retard who thinks and acts like she’s a twelve-year-old girl (writer/director Alan Rowe Kelly, and it wasn’t until studying the credits that I could confirm she was played by a guy — a gay cross-dresser, in fact). Beefteena seems pretty harmless though plenty weird, skipping down the road with “Flatjack” — some roadkill nailed to a board with wheels that she leads along by a leash. The harmlessness kinds of fades away when neighborhood kid Andy (Sashsa Friedenberg) decides to shout insults at her and throw Flatjack in the stream. Suddenly her brothers are there to defend her, Butternut (Joshua Nelson) and Hubcap (Mike Lane). They play tug-of-war with Andy until they literally pull him apart. (Killing a pre-adolescent to open your movie? Yup, that’s transgressive. Although they did go out of their way to show that Andy was a douche; we’re introduced to him as he crushes a frog with a rock, just cuz.)

So. We’ve met the three siblings of the Bullion clan; the others are father Elvis (Terry M. West), cousin Sno Cakes (Susan Adriensen), and the mysterious Gramma (Robert Norman) who stays hidden in the upstairs of their house. They live in an ill-repaired house which is supposed to be far back in an undeveloped area (gee, so why do we hear and see cars going past their house all the time? Oops!), where they can live their lifestyle in peace — a lifestyle which includes inbreeding (you’re allowed to say “ick” when Pa starts putting the moves on Beefteena) and the occasional bit of cannibalism. Not that Pa is happy for the fresh red meat the kids bring home and stow in the “blood shed” — they’ve been under the eye of the local law enforcement for some time, thanks to a missing pair of twins from the area. (In fact, one of the investigators got too close, and is currently residing in a cage in the blood shed, bound and gagged.)

Sorry, but the country sheriff NEVER comes out ahead in these movies.

So, that’s the setup. Most of the movie that follows isn’t a story, per se, but a series of scenarios that comes to a close when enough victims die. The sheriff (Jerry Murdock) comes through to ask them about missing Andy; he discovers a human hand on the barbecue grill, and is subjected to a fate that just might be worse than death: being forcibly married to Beefteena, who’s taken a shine to him, and having one of his testicles crushed with pliers. Meanwhile, Beefteena has it in her head to sign up for a “model search” being conducted by an unscrupulous agency, and after they take her money, bitchy agency head Ms Faith (Zoe Daelman Chlanda) and photog Geoffrey (Kane Manera) demean and laugh at her through the photo shoot until her family comes to abduct them for revenge — I mean, for her birthday party.

So let’s just say that a compelling and well-structured narrative isn’t one of this movie’s strengths. What, then, does it do right — by which I mean, what does it do that it meant to do? Well, it’s technically well put together; shot on digital video, it’s well lit and well edited. The set decoration in the Bullion house and the blood shed is creative, mixing paper-mached skeletons with Christmas lights and primitive mobiles made of bottles, cans, doll parts and animal bones. Acting is pretty good, at least as far as the insane characters go (it’s probably symptomatic of something that the more normal the characters are, such as those of the Bullions’ nearest neighbors, the worse the acting is).

Beefteena, showing her second best side.

And of course, if you’re in this for the creative perversity, you’ll get what you came for. In addition to the tug-of-war and the very effective testicle-crushing, there’s also bone sawing, ear gouging, breast puncturing (don’t worry — it’s fake!), head bashing, and smile widening. Plus fat slurping. And squirrel shooting. Effective use of some actual roadkill carcasses — flies just don’t buzz around taxidermy like that — helps with the grimy, putrescent feel that’s nicely offset by the brightly colored streamers and party hats at Beefteena’s birthday dinner (a scene which echoes, but doesn’t ape, the dinner scenes of the first two Texas Chainsaw Massacre films).

It’s worse than we thought — they’re furries!

I can neither recommend this movie or attempt to dissuade you from seeing it. Hopefully I’ve given you enough of an idea of what it entails that you know whether this is the kind of movie you want to seek out, or steer clear of by a country mile.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 4, plus 1 frog and 3 squirrels
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 0
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0