DVD Review: Blood Bath

Joel M. Reed's Blood Bath is so cheesy and so cheap. I don't mean that as an insult. I rather like a certain breed of cheesy-n-cheap, and to an extent Blood Bath is a fair example of this. It's unpretentious and loony, and if you're in the right mood, it's pretty entertaining.

Blood Bath is an omnibus feature inspired by Hammer and Amicus films, and as such it needs a framing device. The framing device here involves a horror filmmaker (Harve Presnell) with a secret. One night on set, he tells his actors and crew that, despite his chosen genre, he doesn't believe in the supernatural. A couple of them hang out and try to convince him to think otherwise by telling him weird, supposedly true tales. Like most framing devices, it's functional in moving the film along, and it does have a sort of twist ending, but it never really feels more than superfluous.

The meat of Blood Bath comes in the recited stories. Despite the title, the stories are low on gore (an astonishing fact, considering Reed is best known for a movie in which a woman has her brains sucked out through a straw); instead, they benefit from a refusal to take themselves seriously. There's a big streak of silly running through these tales, and by all evidence it's intentional.

Moreover, Reed's confidence in his ability to entertain via humor and ironic circumstances gains strength as the film rolls on. The first story, about a hitman whose latest assassination attempt backfires, is the weakest, as it's pitched mostly towards the serious and leans too hard on an O. Henry-style reversal ending; however, once you get to the lunatic fourth story (about a kung fu master who pays the price for selling secrets), Blood Bath is past caring about niceties like coherence or respectability.

The third tale, about a loan shark who runs afoul of a ghost whose corporeal form he inadvertently killed and must resort to drastic measures to survive being locked in a safe, is the tightest and most traditionally entertaining, and the second, about a guy who uses a magic coin to wish himself back to the Napoleonic Era only to have his romantic illusions shattered, has some amusing bits (unwashed-Frenchman jokes!) and a corker of an ending; still, the surreal madness that closes out the fourth tale is probably the shining moment for Blood Bath.

Technically, the film is quite rough (if ever a film needed wholesale ADR, it's this one), and Reed's direction never transcends mere functionality. The microbudgeted nature of this film also provides a tad too much unintentional mirth; for instance, I was greatly amused by the 'occult store' in the second tale, which consists of a small room with plain white walls and one piece of warehouse racking containing some tacky knick-knacks. It would be a stretch to call Blood Bath good filmmaking, and it's definitely a weak excuse for a horror film. It is, however, a reasonably fun diversion. Especially if beer or other alcoholic substances are within reach.

Article Author: Steve Carlson

Steve Carlson, the proprietor of The Ongoing Cinematic Education of... since 2002, neither conducts electricity nor talks to reptiles. However, he knows someone who does both.

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