Back in the mid-1980s, Blood Cult was released to video stores as “The first ever movie created exclusively for the home video market!” I call that a brilliant stroke of marketing savvy, since you probably wouldn’t get many tape rentals with the more honest tagline “Easily the grimiest collection of amateur footage ever recorded with a Betamax!” Advertising that your movie was filmed on a HandyCam is similar to a porn producer boasting that his films contain the “oldest porno stars!”
Ah, yes. The joys of movies filmed directly onto video. If you’ve never seen one of these, here’s a small exercise: dig out that old VHS tape of your toddler’s birthday party and pop it in the VCR. Now hit “mute” and pretend there’s an actual movie plot going down onscreen. Trust me, it’s not fun.
Blood Cult opens in “Central State College”, where several young women have recently been dismembered by a psychotic with a meat cleaver – stop me when this starts sounding familiar. A befuddled police detective must wade through equal parts of sloppy carnage and insipid people to ascertain the identity of the killer. As the cop draws nearer to his quarry, the co-eds’ body parts continue to pile up. Sheesh. I know 3rd-grade addition questions that have more surprises than this movie.
While there’s certainly nothing wrong with an independent filmmaker creating a derivative and entirely unoriginal piece of tripe, it’s rare that you’ll see a movie as creatively comatose as Blood Cult. Huge blocks of narration are spoken over the dialogue. Several scenes go on for about 30-seconds before anything happens at all. The cast is seemingly comprised of an entire diner’s worth of bowlers, bankers and bimbos. If there was a somewhat entertaining performance in this movie, I must have missed it while I was repeatedly slapping myself in the forehead with the DVD case.
Amidst the massive list of awful components: the police detective who is infinitely more interested in his upcoming election than he is with the growing pile of dead humans, the gore scenes that consist of a cleaver slicing repeatedly through the air, followed by several leering shots of the bloody meat, and I don’t even want to go into the depravity of a film that will show a Rottweiller being beheaded. That’s just wrong.
If you made a list of all the slasher flicks made in the 1980s, Blood Cult would easily earn a place at the very bottom. There’s nary a trace of cleverness, originality, intelligence or even a good scare. Think of the worst horror movie you’ve ever seen, but don’t say it out loud. Got it? Good. Blood Cult is worse.
