I had an opportunity to watch Brad Anderson’s Blood this weekend and have some mixed feelings as to how good or bad it was.
Trailers and reviews will lead you to believe this is just another angle at a vampire movie but honestly, this is NOT a vampire movie at all.
Jess, a mother who happens to a nurse and former addict, is going through a nasty divorce and being challenged for custody of her two children, son Owen and daughter Tyler. She moves with her kids to her family’s old farm while she can decide her next life move and deal with the divorce issues.
The kids’ dog runs off and is gone for two days and when it returns, is not the same. The crazed, rabid acting dog attacks the son, Owen, and comes close to killing him. He is taken to the hospital where is suspected to have some kind of viral illness from the bite. The dog was found not to have rabies. The illness seems to cause severe anemia and the only thing that seems to make Owen better is blood, though not through normal delivery. Owen’s hunger grows throughout the movie and his illness worsens if he doesn’t get blood. Jess is put in a situation where she has to make decisions about what she will be willing to do to cure her child and make him better. In the end it the daughter, Tyler, who finds that it is something with the land that is “in him” making him into this monster and when Owen changes and begins attacking Tyler, Jess is faced with an even more difficult choice.
There were not any scares or jumps in this movie, though in my opinion, any horror movie with a kid at its center is creepy. It was a disturbing movie in that it does paint a nasty picture of what addiction can do to an individual and a family. It also pushes the envelop on how far a parent will go to save their child.
I’m glad this didn’t turn out to be just another vampire movie. It does, however, have a supernatural horror element present but not introduced until the end of the movie. I felt that was something that needed to be inferred earlier in the movie and capitalized upon for the horror element.
The acting in this was excellent. Finlay Wojtak-Hissong as Owen gave a great performance and Michelle Moneghan as Jess was excellent and very convincing as a mother struggling against the rigors of a family torn apart, a woman on the verge of losing her children and a parent fighting to save her child. I’d recommend this movie to people who appreciate good drama but it’s not going to meet expectations of any hard-core horror fans.
James Baxter 