Bad Blood
(Horror/Portugal/Tartan Video/DTS)
Picture:
C Sound: B- Extras: C Film: C
If you
like Hammer & Amicus British Horror about witches in a small town and want
to see what it would be like to combine that with Edgar Allen Poe’s Fall Of the House Of Usher and Nicolas
Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, you may just
want to see Paulo Branco’s thriller Bad
Blood, a Horror film from Portugal that at least offers a different brand
in the genre. Though ambitious, the
result is actually a mixed bag of highs and lows as Rodrigo Guedes de Carvalho
tries to do many things in a surprisingly coherent way.
The
problem arises when the elements start jumbling the film towards the end and
some of the ends just don’t add up. In
addition, some of the conventions seem more dated than others, making the
time/space placement too anachronistic for its own good. A family inherits an out of the way place
that turns out to be haunted. Amusingly,
it does dated things that were made long obsolete by Kubrick’s The Shining and deservedly so. Maybe I am missing something about culture in
Portugal, but the overuse of prayer lines becomes self-satire quickly, though
the film recovers only long enough for the next snag. All in all, it’s an interesting failure.
The
anamorphically enhanced 1.85 X 1 image is soft and likely softer than intended
since this seems to stem from an issue with the video master used. Director of Photography Vitor Estevao,
A.I.P., does not gut the color or try most of the tired clichés we have seen in
the genre lately. The sound is upgraded
here to DTS and Dolby Digital 5.1, but you can hear sound limits from the
original recording in the lack of soundfield.
Dialogue recording is not bad.
The Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo is weaker.
Extras include the original theatrical trailer and a making of
featurette. Of course, the great 1975
Neil Sedaka hit that shares the name of this film never materializes.
- Nicholas Sheffo
