Bloodstream (2000)

Posted on Feb 05, 2003 under Horror |

Written and directed by Dennis Devine and Steve Jarvis
Starring
- Meredith Mills
- Joe Decker
- Joey Day
- Eric Buntz
- Paul Raehpour

The three videos that Cinematrix Releasing/Unknown Productions sent me were their earliest work (Club Dead, though completed ten years later), their most popular (Amazon Warrior), and their latest (this one). You may recall that Club Dead was about the staff of a college newspaper investigating strange goings-on on around campus. If these were the only three movies they’d made, I could ascribe some cosmic significance to the fact that their latest is also about the staff of a college newspaper investigating strange goings-on on around campus. (There actually were other movies in between, but I’ll just have to pretend that there are only three so I can maintain those pretensions of cosmic significance.)

The correspondences don’t stop there, and that’s not really a good thing. Aside from the technical troubles (one of which I will harp on presently) and cheap cut corners one expects as part of a shot-on-video feature, there’s a similarity to the scripts that rubs me the wrong way; it’s the story taking the backseat to the plot. Here’s hoping you know what I’m talking about by the end of this.

At least she dressed for the occasion.

The opening takes place in a genetics lab, which is never a Good Thing, because movie scientists don’t ever work on such things as weevil-resistant corn. A lab worker (Kathryn Kaden) locking up at night arranges to smuggle a vial of something or other past the security dork. She goes to a darkened warehouse to pass it along and wanders in the dark… and wanders… and wanders… (Sure you should be at that OTHER darkened warehouse, sister?) until she meets the silhouetted person she’s supposed to meet. Who promptly slashes her throat and takes the vial.

Cut to a week later, at the Talent Night at a bar just off campus. Against a backdrop of the worst open-mike performances you’ve ever heard, a group of friends discuss the absence of Sandy, a chem major who was going to “pursue her dream” here tonight. Among them is her sister Pamela (Meredith Mills), who, despite not having seen Sandy for five years, flew in for this showcase of talent. (How depressing.) A note on Mills; she bears more than a passing resemblance to Alyssa Milano, and outclasses the rest of the cast in makeup, wardrobe, and pose. My first assumption was, with those good looks and everything, that she was in reality a porn star looking for a dramatic role in a no-budget indie. (Sorry, Meredith.) It actually turns out that she’s actually been an assistant production supervisor or other behind-the-scenes personnel on several big-budget movies, including The Corruptor and Men in Black 2; this is her debut in front of the camera. (Honestly, Meredith, it wasn’t a putdown; it was actually sort of a compliment. But you’d better not think about it too hard.)

I guess “pretty as a porn star” hasn’t really caught on…

Anyway. Sandy never shows up because she’s… the victim from the previous scene? No, that was the assistant of young British bio-gen savant Dr. Ward (Nicholas Hosking), who’s also there at the bar that night. As are a full assortment of ready-made suspects for her disappearance, actually, including a cloying bartender (Jason Stephens), the whacked-out military history prof (Jimmy Jerman, having aged quite a bit since Amazon Warrior), and a mysterious geek in the back. Plus a few of her friends, including ex-SEAL-in-the-GI-bill Tom (Joe Decker), his love/hate girlfriend and Sandy’s best friend Andrea (Joey Day), and the perpetual student/campus reporter Marty (Eric Bunton), who’s got this publicly-known unrequited thing going for Sandy. And a few others, but jeez — how many suspects do we need?

Especially since we (i.e, the audience) soon find out who took Sandy: It was the barkeep, who’s also the notorious Mayfield Mauler, the local serial killer. He’s got her locked in his trunk (hey, Sandy, great to finally meet the person everyone’s been talking about for twenty minutes), but before he can carve her up, a mysterious someone else gets to him first.

**“If you can feel this, just say ‘YEEAAAAAGGHH!!’“**

But all of Sandy’s friends don’t know that, so they spend most of the movie trying to track her down, handing out fliers, talking to stereotypically unresponsive police, and basically not moving the plot along. Meanwhile, the mystery killer is mowing them down one-by-one, and then performing some impromptu surgery (aided by some real surgical footage edited in) and removing a mysterious worm-like organism. Could this new string of killings be related to the mysterious hush-hush bio-gen projects that Dr. Ward has going on in his lab?

Well, shucks, how are we supposed to know? The characters certainly don’t; they don’t know about the worms, and think that they’re still tracking down the Maysfield Mauler. In other words, for most of the movie they’re simply running in place, getting frustrated with dead ends, saying things like, “Do you think we’ll ever see her again?”, and having the obligatory hook-ups (given the stunned look Marty gives Pamela on first meeting her, that’s a no-brainer).

And really, that’s all part of the problem that I references earlier and promised to explain: Tall on plot, short on story. There are plenty of events, and most of them even relate consequentially to later events. But there’s little dramatic sweep, little attention to unfolding an honest story. The fact that we know so early that all of the characters are barking up the wrong tree makes everything they do seem like a cheat, a filler, instead of involving them in a sequence of events which escalates their understanding of the stakes and the complexity or mystery of the situation.

“(Boy, I hope the safety’s on.)”

And given that the killer has all of the normal slasher abilities — silent footsteps as needed, dramatic backlighting, and offscreen teleportation on an overwhelming scale (note the scene where two characters drive out into the middle of nowhere for a private conversation, and he STILL manages to be right there) — frankly, they don’t stand a chance.

And now, here’s the also-promised technical problem. Thanks to the structure of the plot, there are several scenes at the end in which exposition has to be dropped steaming in our laps, and thanks to a combination of white noise on location, dramatic sotto voce delivery, and a library score turned too loud, the dialogue is absolutely impossible to hear. (The cut I saw was apparently completed in 2000, but the movie hasn’t been released yet; I’m hoping there’s still time and resources to go back and fix a flaw which goes beyond annoying and clear into crippling.)

Keeping “America’s Pastime” relevant.

Given that I’ve only seen three flicks out of the entire Cinematrix oeuvre, I know I shouldn’t draw broad conclusions, but as vices go it’s pretty tame, so I’m going to indulge it. Maybe college-based horror-suspense stories are a blind spot for the Cinematrix boys; they can’t see the deadwood in the tales they craft. (Here’s another example: Why do we have two missing/killed girls overlapping in the first ten minutes? Wouldn’t it have upped the dramatic impact and better jumpstarted the story to combine them into a single character? Observations from the outside like that are one of the few benefits of the Hollywood studio system, where there are plenty of outside observers who can point out overlooked flat tires.)