BLOOD HUNTERS (Tricia Lee). 91 minutes. Opens Friday (July 7). See listing. Rating: NN
Fun fact: Blood Hunters was originally titled One Drop. Neither title is especially evocative or creepy, but then neither is the movie.
After an overdose, suburban mom Ellie Barnes (Lara Gilchrist) wakes up in an operating room, inexplicably pregnant and surrounded by corpses. How did she get here? How did everyone else die? And, um, what’s squirming around inside her?
It’s a solid horror premise, but director Tricia Lee and screenwriter Corey Brown stretch it a little too thin. They’re not without imagination or skill – their previous collaboration, Silent Retreat, was an effective thriller brought down by a clunky ending – but they’re trying to tell their ambitious story on a limited budget and the result is clearly a cheaper, more compromised version of the movie they wanted to make.
The more we learn about the mystery at the heart of the film, the sillier it seems, and the small cast – which also includes Benjamin Arthur, Torri Higginson, Mark Taylor and Julian Richings – struggles to keep the movie’s energy up.
It doesn’t help that the story demands they spend much of their time walking up and down the same hallways over and over again, reiterating plot points to one another. And though Lee does her best to keep us from noticing that the monsters lurking in the shadows look an awful lot like dancers in leotards… well, you can only suspend disbelief so far.
And as supernaturally charged hospital thrillers go, Jeremy Gillespie and Steven Kostanski’s The Void did this sort of thing so much better earlier this year.
