By Terry Sherwood
The corruption of authority figures against the vulnerable is on full display in the directorial debut, of Lawrence Jacomelli titled Blood Star. This is not a horror film but a crime thriller blending tropes from bigger budget work such as young Steven Speilberg ‘s Duel, Ridley Scott’s Thelma and Louise and the corrupt police officers from the original Macon County Line (1974).
Blood Star is essentially a game of cat and mouse on a lonely road in the new Mexico desert The culprit here is a sociopath not psychopathic Sheriff Blistein ( John Schwab) who hunts down young, pretty women who drive through his county. Blood Star opens with a prologue of a distressed tortured young woman limping down a desert road at night. She is being pursued by a vehicle which ends tragically. The picture then segues to daylight and is like a seventies exploitation film with Bobbie (Britni Camacho ) miming an aggressive song, driving through the desert in a lovely vintage Mustang. She is returning home after an abusive relationship to heal which fills the film with commentary on domestic violence
The film becomes a series of escalating encounters between Bobbie and the Sheriff as he points out his occupation is Sheriff not Officer as she addresses him. The results are she is harassed to the point of having her mobile phone confiscated preventing her from getting annoying calls from her sister and her ex-boyfriend. Bobbie ends up being shaken down for some money to pay for a cracked police light only to be denied access to payment due to an empty ATM by a dope-smoking Kid Blake (Felix Merback) at a gas station. Shades of the sixties non-conformist drug-using people doing the one-finger salute which figures in the film directed at the ‘Man’ and ‘establishment’. The battle between Bobbie and the Sheriff ramps up with some real violence with gun play including shooting out a taillight and sniper action.
The best moments of the picture are the long car ride fired waitress Amy (Sydney Blumfield) who Bobbie offers a ride. The two have a shared story of abuse at the hands of men and parents forcing an epiphany moment for Bobbie. Comments on men, authority figures and the role of ‘‘large melons” to get a man to abound before an abrupt end. Blood Star then shifts to a climactic torture mode with the intro of a persecuted mentally deficient brother Ed (Travis Lincoln Wilcox) who runs a junkyard.
Blood Star is well-directed in flow however it is hard to shake some cliches that show up. One of the biggest is the image of the Tough white guy who suddenly takes off his sunglasses abusing a non-white female in the form of Bobbie. Social commentary yes, Domestic violence yes, all horrible real issues for many yet in Blood Star they seem to telegraph the plot. The excuse for this is that the film is entertainment and people do things in any genre of film that the audience will shout at the screen, however, these seem to be done for the sake of drama.
Ludicrous moments such as Bobbie getting her beloved Mustang back from being run off the road, instead of getting in and driving like Hell to get away she takes her time. Stopping on a highway to seek aid from a truck driver with the Sheriff standing in the desert road. Instead of reversing into him, she gets out of the vehicle. Having the police vehicle revving up and trying to run her off the road was odd because the Mustang is a high-performance with muscle under the hood that could easily leave the cruiser which is not a high-speed pursuit car in its dust.
The actors all are committed to the story and do their best with a clunky story and some restrained performances. Some actors get thankless roles for window dressing like the drug-smoking cool Blake from the first gas station, the black seemingly dim-witted truck driver who tried to help Bobbie and the disgraced waitress Amy played Sydney Brumfield who should have been in the film more and would have been an interesting counterpoint to Britni Camacho’s turn as the harassed Bobbie. This is not a kind o woke agenda or gatekeeping for the genre it’s a fact of life. This is 2024, not 1974 making films like this seem dated. It seems only the white folk in the film have the brains even Amy’s Diner boss is a grizzled white guy so they have the guile and prey upon those that are of colour or not of the full facilities.
Blood Star uses the desert at night and the daylight effectively with its wonderful vistas of cactus and sand open roads that oddly have no heat ripples since New Mexico is often near the high 90’s leading to think that the daylight moments were shot in the morning. The state is also filled with Native American trading post businesses and gas stations making one wonder why these people are not in the film. I drove a high-performance convertible Mustang through the desert in New Mexico from Phoenix to Albuquerque on a recent holiday and it was quite an experience. I did not meet an aggressive law person just a lot of trucks
Blood Star screened as part of Grimmfest 2024.
Bloody Flicks 