Bloodthirst review

By Simon Thompson

I will admit that my expectations were low going into BloodThirst (I mean it features Tara Reid) but having now seen it I can confirm that those said expectations should have been so far beneath sea level that you would need Jacques Cousteau and a crack team of deep sea divers to locate them.

The plot of BloodThirst can basically be described as being the end result of an unimaginative producer edict about wanting a story that combines both Mad Max and I Am Legend without any of the things which made those stories unique in the first place. In a post-apocalyptic world ruled by vampires, John Shepard (aka generic paving stone voiced gruff badass #12) is a vampire hunter trying to track down and kill the master vampire, before he himself is turned into one.

Joining John on his quest is a gaggle of survivors- who more or less all fit into your standard post-apocalyptic society party tick list- to pad out the movie’s length with a litany of tedious subplots. The two biggest problems with this movie are, first, director Michael Su clearly misunderstands the cardinal rule of filmmaking and worldbuilding, which is show, don’t tell, as from the first frame on the audience is lumbered with a rambling explanation about how the world came to be like this.

The second problem, however, is that this movie is truly dull, the script by Massimiliano Cerchi and Adrian Milnes has the characters speaking entirely in cliches, features a group of vampires about as intimidating as a cabal of late 2000s scene kids, and a narrative which offers no elements of suspense or surprise whatsoever, all of this contributing to a general atmosphere of insomnia rather than uneasiness.

To conclude, I wouldn’t even recommend BloodThirst to people looking for a so awful it’s good style experience. To me this movie represents one of the worst things a filmmaker can do, which is not only to make a bad movie but to make an uninteresting bad movie.

If you have crafted a narrative that is so unoriginal and monotonous that I would rather be watching Kevin Costner’s WaterWorld instead, then something has truly gone wrong along the way.