Blood Trails (DVD)
Mike Phalin
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Starring Rebecca R. Palmer, Ben Price, Tom Frederic
Directed by Robert Krause
Distributed by Lionsgate Home Entertainment
There are times, usually when a relationship is becoming tired, that a one-night stand doesn’t seem to be a bad idea. It is just a quick release from the rut, and then things can go back to normal. You may never hear from that person again, but one note of caution: Don’t sleep with a nut job.
Anne (Palmer) didn’t heed these words of caution and marched off to have dangerous sex with a slightly unhinged bike cop named Chris (Price). The single night of passion didn’t turn out how Anna expected; things got a little out of control. Even with this experience behind her, Anne still attempts to break things off with her current boyfriend, Michael, but does think better of it and allows him to take her on a bike retreat in the mountains. There she confesses her betrayal only after discovering Chris has been stalking them through the woods. Who will get away? What will be left of them? Will anyone care?
No. That is the best answer. No one could give a damn what happens to any of these characters. When the audience is shown Chris has trailed them to the woods, one of our main characters is instantly killed off: Michael. He was the only one of the three main leads that had any sort of human characteristics. He felt anger, compassion and love whereas Anna never appears to show any emotion aside from fear. That’s the kind of person someone should watch for 87 minutes — an empty husk of a woman who screams constantly while riding down trails with blood on her face.
It is a sad state of affairs when you want your lead captured so she will hopefully die and a new, better character can be introduced. Not only are the figures in this film wooden, but the whole script feels lifted from many other slashers. For reasons unknown a few characters don’t even speak to Anne when they find her wounded and blacked out. If a regular Joe, let alone the two lumberjacks in this film, had seen an attractive young woman bloody in the woods, wouldn’t he at least ask, “Hey, are you OK?” Nope, nothing like that here. Maybe they were Canadian and only spoke French, but wouldn’t they try to say something in their native language to her? What the fuck?!
Chris is like a normal human version of Jason Voorhees. He can disappear, magically reappear, and nail bodies to crosses that are fifteen feet high in the air. How? Do not ask questions! You are warned now. Chris gets run over and somehow manages to drain a vehicle of fuel by pitting an axe in the oil pan?! This reminds me … Anne, baby, when you are about to use a large truck to back-over a guy who is standing in the road, LOOK AT HIM WHEN YOU DO IT! She manages to commit so many classic slasher clichés that it becomes distracting.
There is no simple amount of logic in Blood Trails. Michael gets his throat slashed by a gear on Chris’s bike for crying out loud. He jumps with the bike, turns it sideways and somehow managers to slash Michael right across the throat!!! He must have supernatural powers. That would be easy to digest if Anne were a likable person. Well, she isn’t so there isn’t much going for this film. Maybe the kills could salvage this?
There’s not much innovation here either. There’s more blood splatter and flow than there are gore effects. We see yet more blood on Anne’s face as she rides screaming (over and over and over) down the various paths in the woods. The one really good moment of gore comes toward the end after Anne is captured by Chris, but even then there’s been so much trash thrown at the viewer it becomes difficult to make good.
Blood Trails, while shitty, is at least a beautiful film to look at. The camera follows the bikers, and the various shots of the open terrain are mostly picturesque, but when you look behind the art, there’s nothing. If as much energy were used to make a script that contained the bare essentials for a decent movie AND had all this great cinematography, it probably would not have landed direct-to-DVD. As is, this film is just empty and soulless.
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1 1/2 out of 5
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