Peep this; it’s the Second World War, and things are gettin’ violent as fuck! Don’t believe me? Well, those dreaded Axis powers have hucked a torpedo at a military hospital ship… resulting in a motley crew of military personal being adrift on the open sea in a lil’ life raft.
Fortunately for them, they are soon within spittin’ distance of a huge German vessel… okay, that’s not fortunate at all… but possibly a p.h. better than starving to death in a rubber raft… debatable. Anyway after an action-packed boarding of that beastly boat we get down to brass tacks; namely that the ship is mostly full of corpses… mostly… I mean there’s a pretty unreasonable amount of vampires on board as well… I mean, one would be more than enough to qualify as “unreasonable”, but there’s at least a few more than that.
So it’s Das Boot by way of the ‘Demeter’ sequence from Dracula as our harried heroes attempt to stay alive aboard that sinister ship!
Director Justin Dix (who also co-wrote the picture with Jordan Prosser) delivers something truly special with Blood Vessel, and I’m not going to make you wait until the end of this revoltin’ review to tell you I loved every fuckin’ frightful frame of this wicked wonder!
First of all we get the setting; that cold dark ship serves as a atmospheric surrogate to the trope of the ‘old dark house’ of Gothic literature as much as the Nostromo did in Ridley Scott’s Alien… it’s archaic, seen better days, and holds plenty of secrets…
And what secrets they are! The vampires in this fright flick are half-human, half-bat hybrids that truly satisfy the creature-tooth of any horror hound which are brought to life with handmade skill and artistry that makes this ol’ lover of the fang-bang set sit up and do that appreciative slow-clap shit that makes your ass know something truly fuckin’ amazing just went down!
Adding to the overall effect are a great cast, plenty of throwbacks to some true gems in the crown of the horror biz (the aforementioned Bram Stoker classic and John Carpenter’s The Thing immediately spring to mind), and a hot/cool, blue/red color scheme that brings to mind Mike Mignola and Dave Stewart’s work on Dark Horse Comic’s Hellboy… so fuckin’ ghoulishly good company indeed!
Bottom line; Blood Vessel is the World War II vampire flick you never knew you needed… but, holy shit do you ever need it; it’s suspenseful, a tad pulpy, and undeniably satisfying for lovers of creature-feature mayhem… a true winner in my outre opinion!
