Alicia Veliz – Guest Writer
Blood Vessel is a 2019 horror film that was filmed in Melbourne, Australia. It follows the survivors of a torpedoed hospital ship during World War II adrift at sea in a life raft. They have no supplies left and just when they are about to give up fate takes a quite unexpected turn on them. Maybe it was better to stay on the raft?!
The movie does turn into a genre of horror movies that I honestly was not expecting…Vampires. Although they do not call them that during the movie. They use the Romanian word for vampire which is Strigoi.
Now, here we see a great opportunity that could have been maximized upon, but this one did not hit the target. The story is something we have seen before – encountering a ghost ship and then things slowly start to unravel. Here the movie takes place during World War II and you have the perfect opportunity to use the fact that Hitler really was obsessed with the occult and used to finance his army by sending them all over the world to steal riches and ancient artefacts. It was even rumoured at one point that he had in his possession the Spear of Destiny. But, getting back on track here, maybe it is possible that Hitler would have heard about the mythology of the vampire and sent his army to look for the existence of one. See a cool plot but, painfully and disappointingly executed.
Most of the survivors I thought were just window dressing and the others were plain getting on my nerves by fighting with each other all the time. In fact, the first 10 to 15 minutes were taken up with them arguing with each other. It’s unnecessary and pulls your audience’s attention from the slow build, which would have been perfect in this case.
Lastly, the vampires. Oh my gosh I quite understand that you were trying to go for the bat motif and a more ancient looking form of the vampires. But they look very plastic to me and almost laughable. There is nothing scary about them. One aspect that I did like about them though was the special effects with their eyes. That part was kind of cool.
I really kept hoping that it would have gotten better as it went along but nope. They even ended the movie with a cheesy one liner. I would not personally recommend this movie to anyone out there because there are far better vampire flicks out there.
Rating: 5 out of 10
For my Quick Bite Review of Thriller Relic you can click here.