Review by Ben Bussey
Perhaps the key problem with most modern attempts at grindhouse is that they’re just too cute. All wacky camera angles, edits and music cues, bright colours, knowingly outlandish dialogue and scenarios: the bulk of these movies, from the high profile (the Machete movies) to the instantly forgotten (Bounty Killer), are delivered in a painfully contrived and self-conscious fashion, not so much giving you a sly wink as grabbing you by the shoulders with a wide-eyed tooth-baring grin and shouting “it’s a joke, get it?” directly into your face. People seem to lose sight of the fact that, a hell of a lot of the time, real grindhouse/exploitation cinema was a very, very ugly affair. Look at Thriller/They Call Her One Eye; the Female Prisoner Scorpion and Ilsa movies; hell, the likes of Last House on the Left and I Spit On Your Grave. Their relative technical crudity is one thing; the content is something else entirely, and a great many of these movies retain the power to truly shock and appall, our detached, irony-tinged contemporary perspective be damned.
I daresay fans of such bona fide nasty old school exploitation may be pleased to see at least one neo-grindhouse movie making a concerted effort to evoke that spirit of real grimness and cruelty. Taking what sounds on paper like yet another yawn-inducing bad girls in the desert movie (yep, because we’re all so anxious for more movies like Bitch Slap), writer-director Peter Grendle’s Blood Soaked is one of the nastiest pieces of work I’ve encountered for some time, in which bubblegum college kid theatrics are swiftly shoved to one side in favour of unrelenting misery and torment. Sound like a good time…? Maybe not, but maybe that’s not the point. I personally have never been a great fan of torture movies, mainly because they’re just not fun to watch (I know, real appropriate for someone who writes for a site called Brutal As Hell) – but even so, I can’t deny when they’re done well.
It all starts out simply enough. Following a brief intro setting up our antagonists Sadie (Laina Cathryn Grendle) and Katie (Hayley Derryberry) – two orphaned sisters with an appetite for destruction, hiding out in a New Mexico desert bunker – we meet our final girl in waiting, Piper (Heather Wilder), all peachy smiles as she pulls up to her new dormitory home, ready to start life as a college freshman. Planning to keep things loose with the boyfriend she left behind, it turns out Piper doesn’t take too long to try out that whole college girl sexual experimentation thing, as she quickly befriends out-and-proud Ashley (Rachel Corona), and in the aftermath of an inevitably beer-fuelled party in the desert things gradually get less-than platonic… but then, of course, those orphaned sisters show up and throw that shit headfirst into the fan. See, these sisters aren’t just totally nuts; they’re also totally Nazis, the daughters of an escaped SS scientist. And, you’ll be astonished to hear, they don’t have anything too pleasant planned for our young would-be lovers.
What I like about Blood Soaked is that it keeps you on your toes. Sure, it’s hardly the most innovative and unpredictable movie you’ll ever see, but it does take some tonal shifts that you’re unlikely to see coming. The opening twenty minutes or so of Piper and Ashley getting to know one another have a clean-cut cutesiness that’s surely no accident, making it all the more of a sucker punch when Sadie and Katie come charging into their world fists-first. From there on, we’re into textbook torture territory; imprisonment, humiliation, bullying, endless cries of anguish. Sure, we’ve seen plenty of this in the past decade, but there’s something uniquely unsettling about it here; perhaps it’s the Nazism and homophobia, perhaps it’s the fact that it’s young women torturing other young women. Either way, the ick factor is high.
However, midway through the sudden shock twist-and-turn approach maybe goes just a little too far. For the sake of avoiding spoilers I won’t divulge the full details of Sadie and Katie’s master plan, but to my mind it’s a bit of a misstep. With one plot device, Blood Soaked goes from something genuinely unpleasant into more far-fetched, cartoonish territory, which comes close to undoing much of what went before. Some rather misjudged, almost comedic music cues don’t help matters much there. Then again, this might also be deemed in-keeping with real grindhouse, which often featured such jarring shifts in tone and content. (Remember those comedy cops in Last House? Yeesh.)
As for anything else the viewer might find a bit jarring… Blood Soaked is clearly very much a microbudget DIY affair shot on basic DV, so inevitably it doesn’t look or sound all that great. As tends to go hand in hand with this, the performances are also variable at best; while the aforementioned leads do a fine job, some of the smaller supporting roles are handled rather sloppily – not helped by the sense that they’re fairly throwaway characters anyway. And as mentioned already, the musical score (largely keyboard-based from the sound of it) has its ups and downs, changing wildly from scene to scene to keep up with the persistent shifts in tone.
All that said, there’s a lot to be found here that we don’t always get from microbudget horror. Peter Grendle seems to have a more cinematic eye than many, getting some striking shots of the impressive desert setting, and by contrast getting a really squalid atmosphere from the underground bunker scenes. Like I said, I’m no great admirer of ordeal horror, but I have to admire any microbudget horror filmmakers who strive to make something more than an hour or so of disposable entertainment. Blood Soaked is a film clearly designed to get under your skin, and when all is said and done it’s successful in this; as such, it’s definitely a film that horror fans should sit up and take note of.
Blood Soaked is released to Region 1 DVD and VOD on 17 June 2014, from Wild Eye Releasing.