By David Dent
Some of you will have heard of the 16th Century Hungarian noblewoman Elizabeth Báthory, who allegedly tortured and killed hundreds of girls and bathed in their blood to keep her young. But what you probably don’t know is that the so named ‘Bloody Countess’ spent part of her life in Yorkshire; at least that’s what Bryan Norris would have you believe. It’s also the line spun to entice AirBnBers to try something different; a holiday rental with a murderous past.
Four women have rented the accommodation for what they hope will be a relaxing holiday; what they haven’t counted on is that their destination is also a museum to the memory of Bathory (the accent dropped going forward), a tour around which they are obliged to suffer courtesy of the enthusiastic landlord/tour guide Martin (Michael Geary), under the watchful eye of a painting of the Countess herself. Also on the tour are a bunch of already pissed lads on a stag weekend, who have, supposedly, double booked the rental. While the lads agree to stay in another local house, the girls elect to remain at the Bathory residence where, left to their own devices, they inadvertently – through the death of one of their number, Ambereen (Claudia Gregory) – trigger the resurrection of Elizabeth. Their troubles multiply when they find that they’re unable to leave the house; any attempt to escape finds them right back in the room they left.
The concept of The Bloodline of Bathory is high; everything else remains pretty low, but by no means unenjoyable. Basically played for laughs (and there’s no other way of executing so hokey a setup) within a location that’s almost too cramped to contain all of the cast, the first half’s overall silliness gives way to a slightly more fraught second, with some pretty good makeup and VFX from the ever resourceful Lumapix Creative Studios, who’ve brought some icky class to many a low budget production. Many of the cast, including star and producer Natasha Tosini, are regulars of the British Fantastic Film sausage factory, and bring the usual excitable performances you expect from this kind of thing. Overall this has more wit than many of its genre stablemates.
Bloody Flicks 