Flasz On Film

What have you come here for? Are you… here for blood?

Good! Because Here for Blood has got you covered. It has blood, gore, prosthetics and screams. Lots of screams. And most importantly, it has good old-fashioned fun.

But that’s not all because, for a movie that wouldn’t be too far off being terminally braindead, Here for Blood also happens to be smart enough to become a bit more of a self-aware experience capable of looking upon itself as a genre piece and to subvert the template of a perennial home invasion slasher.

The movie does so using a handful of ingeniously simple tricks. Immediately upon opening, you are greeted with a predictably familiar set of images. A woman jogging alone at night comes back home and because she’s listening to music, she is unable to hear that someone’s in the house. Without much ado, she eventually stumbles upon a masked intruder – who looks a bit like a cross between Eric Draven and Michael Myers who hasn’t been skipping chest day at the gym for the last five years at least – after which her life ends in bloodshed, with a few shots directly lifted from John Carpenter’s Halloween. We then proceed to meet Phoebe (Joelle Farrow), a student who’s been asked to babysit someone tonight, which is where you think you know where things are going already. The problem is that Phoebe is swamped with her university work, so she asks her boyfriend to fill in for her. Which is where the template subversion begins because even the parents of little Gracie (Maya Misaljevic) are a bit taken aback when instead of Phoebe they are greeted by a man… whose shoulder we will be strapped to as a gaggle of deranged masked maniacs descends on the house with a mission to kill and maim.

What they don’t know is that the babysitter man, Tom (Shawn Roberts), is not a petite male replacement for Jamie Lee Curtis gearing to become an unlikely survivor in a struggle against forces he’s not equipped to tackle. He’s a professional wrestler who’s built like a brick shithouse, who babysits because underneath all this muscle he has a heart of gold, and he also wouldn’t turn up his nose to some money. After all, professional wrestling in regional circuits is not exactly a lucrative venture. You should know how much of a grind it is if you have seen The Wrestler.

And this simple character swap from a tiny and fragile woman to a massive hunk of muscle is what subverts our own expectations. Suddenly, we are not anxious about what’s about to happen. We are not cowering in fear as the masked invaders slowly advance on the house where Tom is doing his best entertaining a sassy kid. No! We are excited! We want to see what happens. We need the massacre to ensue because the balance of power has been tipped.

Therefore, Here for Blood offers a rare opportunity to flip the slasher script and playfully position the villains at a disadvantage because they are up against a physically intimidating action hero whose confidence in his ability matches his actual physical prowess. Imagine if Michael Myers accidentally stepped into the house where instead of Laurie Strode, Arnold Schwarzenegger was found entertaining the kids. You wouldn’t be worried about Arnie’s wellbeing. You’d cheer him on and perhaps would eventually start feeling for those poor pesky villains who are about to be outmatched by someone who’s clearly not in their weight category. And who also happens to be extremely comfortable in his own skin.

Consequently, this subversive home invasion slasher becomes a a prey-becomes-the-hunter exercise where Shawn Roberts, aka the next best thing if you need John Cena but your budget is too tight to afford him, chops, mauls and dismembers black-clad masked doofuses who clearly have no idea how to handle a physical threat of this size.

And even that’s not the end because the movie only gets wilder as it goes along. After all, the filmmakers (Daniel Turres who directed the film and James Roberts who wrote it) seem perfectly aware that a horror movie needs stakes and suspense to effectively execute on its premise and to ride the line between horror and comedy without succumbing to completely safe parody. Consequently, Here for Blood goes into supernatural territory and becomes a bit of a genre mishmash where on top of conventional masked assailants, the movie starts throwing progressively more ridiculous adversaries at Tom, Gracie and Phoebe who appears with a bunch of friends at some point. And it’s still just as fun to see how they don’t even blink when their severely maimed invaders begin to come back from the dead with glowing eyes, weird cult leaders show their faces and a talking hungry skull is thrown into the mix for good measure.

It’s wild, corny, and trashy in just the right way. In fact, Here for Blood is a perfect midnight movie to watch with a rowdy crowd of genre hounds who would cheer profusely at the screen whenever they see a fountain of fake blood spurting from a decapitated mannequin. This is the kind of movie you’re in – a fun romp that knows how to walk the line between self-aware ridiculousness and serious commitment to the genre. It’s fresh and sassy enough to make up for its glaring shortcomings in other, more technical departments. After all, if the movie can hold you in a state of suspended disbelief, it honestly doesn’t matter that some elements of traditional direction and acting work would come across as flat and amateurish, or that the story proper makes very little sense. It doesn’t have to!

All Here for Blood sets out to accomplish is to conjure wild entertainment with a self-aware and subversive slant and it fulfils this mission with ease. Shawn Roberts is an anti-scream king who makes the villains squeal in pain and the audience cheer in excitement at the simple realization that it’s immensely fun to see what happens when Halloween meets Commando. And what happens is mayhem where you eventually feel sorry for the masked maniacs as you wait for their fingers to be hacked off and for their faces to be squashed like watermelons under Tom’s pro wrestling techniques. It’s a bonkers ride that’s ridiculous, subversive and fun enough to make you forget it is also a thoroughly low-fi endeavour put together with more loving care than actual technical acumen.