Bleeders (1997)

Please don't spend money on this.

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

it is finally so absorbing because it plays like a lyrical road odyssey that’s also a detective story.

A story that's too fascinating to pass by...

Whenever I see a movie on IMDb with a rather low rating, I immediately feel the reviews rating it 10/10 are suspect. This was the case with the review by ldorio-1 who said "A weird film, but worth seeing a second time!!!!!!". This is a review by a person who has reviewed only ONE movie on IMDb, this one! Kinda makes you think he/she must be a cast/crew member or a friend. A shame. The movie overall is OK, could have been far, far better with proper direction and decent cinematography. Looks as though it was shot on a minimal budget. Even sound suffers. I can recommend this, especially to fans of the great Rutger Hauer. 5/10.

Though it came out in what is generally considered a dead time for B cinema Hemoglobin is a film that I have quite a nostalgic interest in. I nearly saw it some 11 odd years ago, I guess it must have been right about the time it first came out and I recall seeing the first couple of minutes and being put off by talk of inbreeding. That sort of thing gave me the willies back in the day, I was a lot more prudish and so as I recall I skipped to another channel and watched Species. Fast forward to yesterday and I finally got around to watching Hemoglobin after all these years. Worth the wait I'm happy to say, plus I probably wouldn't have got a huge amount out of it had I watched it back then, its darker and more adult oriented than the sort of thing I used to groove to and most likely would have been a snooze. The plot deals with the unfortunate John Strauss, cursed by a degenerative and life threatening blood disease, a cure for which he searches on his ancestral island. Unfortunately this is a place of dark shenanigans, notably the aforementioned inbreeding whose repercussions are still present and making trouble. Its gloomy stuff, moving at a measured pace it melds dark drama with creature feature, stirs in disturbing themes and cooks the lot with solid performances and well woven atmosphere. Roy Dupuis summons appropriate sickly desperation as John, convincingly driven to far places, while Kristin Lehman handles the role of his wife with a nice feel of love and support. Genre fans will be most pleased by the inclusion of Rutger Hauer though, having a blast as an alcoholic ex doctor nonetheless able to rise to the occasion in times of need, a rundown but definitely not out performance that's gladdening to see given his occasionally rather forgettable work in other b pictures of the era. Other performers do well enough, no one really shines but they work well with the wet and dreary location. A solid if unremarkable script from genre legends Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusset (with Charles Adair) keeps the film serious minded and interesting whilst throwing out some fun character quirks, things get a bit sketchy towards the end though with character behaviour stretching beyond the characterisation and wavering tone. Mostly its solid work though and the bleak edge works well, aided by fine monster effects. The beasts are shown to just the right extent and look impressively grim, every bit the foetal distortions brought to monstrous birth that they are supposed to be and their attacks are tightly edited and intense, occasionally even bloody. Sadly the direction here isn't terribly dynamic, Peter Svatek can maintain a dark atmosphere but not much in the way of tension so the film suffers in the final block, he also fatally shies away from what could have been a fantastic bit of grotesquery, this was a film that needed real balls and they are sadly lacking, so what should have been a terrific climax falls a bit flat. Inevitably this brings into sharper relief other problems with the film, lulls in pacing, plot holes and the like, but I prefer not to dwell on them. Basically I had a fine time with this one for the most part, more unsettling than expected and well worth the wait. Inessential if you don't have much time for creature features or this era of horror in general, but otherwise I'd say its pretty well worth checking out...

There's the core of a decent horror story here, but it's buried beneath such an immovable mound of poor pacing, muddled direction and bad lighting that watching through to the end starts to become something of an ordeal. The story has a dwarfish tribe of mutants – the result of centuries of inbreeding – running around a network of tunnels beneath a sleepy New England town feeding off the embalming fluid of the corpses in the local graveyard. Ignoring the fact that, the little bleeders should have run out of available corpses somewhere around 1452, writers Adair and O'Bannion take an age to get things moving, as our hapless 'heroes,' a descendant of the mutant family with an incurable blood disease (who looks like a half-hearted goth with a hangover) and his wife crawl towards the answers they seek.The poorly descendant also has a craving, but doesn't know what it is that he craves. In fact, I'm not sure he ever really finds out what it is – although he does determine that it isn't a salad sandwich or the molestation of his missus. Maybe they explained while my brain lapsed into one of a number of stupors as it attempted to remain awake – or maybe, having grown as bored as the rest of us, the writers just didn't bother to resolve the situation.Rutger Hauer's in here somewhere, and to be honest he's the only reason I decided to watch. He's wasted here though, as a doctor who is entirely superfluous to the plot, and is clearly painting-by-numbers in order to grab his pay cheque and run – with his reputation diminished that little bit more, but his bank balance just a little bit healthier. I wonder whether he imagined it would end like this when he sat on that roof and murmured of C-beams and the Tanhausser Gate? Don't think so, somehow… The mutants, when they finally show, are by far the best thing about the film, and should have been given a lot more screen time. They're better than Rutger, that's for sure.

How many movies out there scream "Cheesy," huh? Just looking at those reviews about how fake and how bad this whole movie is makes me want to see this for myself! "Bleeders" is such a notable example of a really bad, really horrible, yet good in the terms of "entertaining, because everything reminds me of 'Manos: The Hands of Fate' and 'Future War'" kind of thing! I also love how, despite the age of this movie, it went straight underground to the point that this movie is long forgotten! If "Mystery Science Theater 3000" were ever to come back, then this is a great film to show on that show! Until then, this is a true 10 star movie and very much so! "Bleeders" - it'll make you "not" go to bed for the rest of your life! Spooky!