Blood Legend

I may have forgotten to mention it yesterday in my review of Barely Legal Lesbian Vampires, but thanks in part to Troma Films, anytime I see a no-budget horror movie, I always instinctively assume it was made in or near New Jersey. That is sometimes a point of pride, though it certainly was a bit embarrassing when that film announced it had been filmed in Newark. I was glad, then, to see that this film was made in California, in a presumed effort to show the world that the west coast can make plenty of bad movies too.

The film follows a coven of witches, a fact that I appreciate not least because its title had led me to fear that this would be yet another dreary vampire film, as they attempt to sacrifice pretty much 90% of the cast in order to resurrect an ancient witch who’s the ancestor of one of our main characters. The movie’s a bit of an unusual one for this collection, as, while still a bad movie, it seems to have had an actual budget. The film looks clean and sharp, without all the technical problems that follow along with the DV look almost every other film in the set has, and the acting, while not exactly good, is at least on the level of a standard 80s slasher movie. The film’s quality content-wise, unfortunately, is a tad below that none-too-lofty benchmark. We get the standard collection of idiot teens that all speak and behave more like ciphers than actual people. We get an attempt at a university mythology class that’s so ineptly handled that it seems everyone in the school, professor included, is deeply retarded. We get an attempt at an ironic twist ending that is just clumsy and sad. We even get an ancient witch that kills people by transforming into a guy in a rubber monster suit, who might have feasibly done battle with Godzilla is there were but a model of Tokyo nearby.

To be fair, there are some nice moments. When the film flashes back to the ancient witch’s trial and burning at the stake, the shouts of the angry mob were pretty damn funny (Think things along the lines of “Ya, what say ya, wench!” and “Speak, ye bitch!”), and the overacting of the one hunter that randomly arrives near the end was rather amusing, but these are small moments overall in a film that is largely not worth seeing. I’m now halfway through the fourth disc, and unless Rape is a Circle or Abberdine County Conjuror impress me a lot more than their titles would indicate, it seems this will be the one that screws up the slow increase in quality each successive disc has given me thus far. It’s a shame, too. This collection was starting to go places.

Rating: *