Brian Barnes (Clint Carney, who also wrote the film) is a major league fuck-up. He’s pissed his life away with drugs n’ drink…and now he’s decided to retreat to a remote cabin (always a shit-hot idea in a fright flick) to try and dry his ass out with the help of his pal Anna (Jaymie Valentine). Complicating matters is the constant intrusion of a local sheriff (Kelton Jones, who directed the film as well), and some pesky, and sanity threatening, hallucinations and ghosts that may just reduce Barnes to a quivering mass of jelly before the yarn unspools!
Oh Dry Blood, you magnificent, wildly uneven, bastard. For the first half of this film, you will doubtless ask yourself “Why on Earth am I trudging through this nonsense?” Scenes go on forever, Carney is a rather unlikable lead, and Valentine…well, let’s just be charitable and say her acting (and wig???) leave a shit-ton to be desired (though after the picture ends you may feel that was all intentional…I’ll leave that up to you lot to debate). To be fair, there is some decent cinematography here and there, and the location creates a nice sense of isolation…but yeah, not so good overall. But then…
After nearly an hour has gone by (out of an hour and twenty-four minute runtime) the third act kicks into gear, and holy hell does Dry Blood become an entirely different experience. The hallucinations on display are things of fucked-up beauty, and I can not stress enough how wonderfully they are realized from design to execution, and let me state here, the gore on display is nothing to sneeze at either! Along with this parade of visual effects splendor, Carney’s performance becomes totally amazing as well and becomes a thing of transcendent lunacy that has to be witnessed to be believed!
With that first hour, Dry Blood is a tough one to recommend (and in truth with that material much reduced, this could have made for one of the most kick-ass short films the horror biz had ever seen)…with that being said, every horror hound reading this really should check out the finale of this film…so ultimately, I’m going to tell you creeps to seek this one out, just be forewarned as to what you are in for.
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