Blu-ray Review: Deep Blood (1990)

There’s nothing like a good, fire roasted hot dog, and Raffaele Donato… or Joe D’Amato… must have thought so too as Deep Blood opens with what seems like an eternity of kids cooking hot dogs on a beach… hell, one of the scamps manages to use one as a shield to block his vision from the suns rays.
Enter: a bum… or a “native American”… yes, those quotes are denoting some of my patented, award-losing sarcasm cats n’ creeps, as this dude looks to be nothing more than an old white guy in a beaded headband arrives and tells our wiener-hungry heroes that if they do a blood oath they can bring forth an evil spirit. Sounds legit.
Moving forward a bit, that shit seems to have actually worked, as a mother and her young child stop for a swim in the middle of nowhere (speaking of “swimming”, although the characters are outside, the underwater shots of the kid swimming were filmed in a pool of some kind as you can see a giant honking pipe and the pool’s walls every single time they cut to him… which given what we see, was way more than the zero it should have been).
Anyway, Mom is attacked by an unseen menace from the depths and the water is soon filled with her inexplicably neon pink blood as junior gazes on supposedly in shock… but that mother fucker has a clearly visible grin on his face (and looks cold as shit).
I love this film.
When one of the town’s college-age kids gets munched, his friends (the gaggle of sausage-gorging youths from the beginning of this putrid picture now all growed up) become racked with remorse… or their bored… wait, it may be “gassy”… anyway they soon find themselves up against every authority figure in town as they try and convince them that the shark they have killed was not responsible for the rampant soggy murder, and the true beast in fact remains, waiting to strike again!
You won’t easily believe the acting prowess of the cast of Deep Blood. This fine group of thespians change emotions at the drop of a hat… mid scene, and sometimes they even manage to score the right mood to match whatever nonsense is tumbling out of their mouths at any given second… but it’s rare.
Admittedly this has a lot to do with the script courtesy of George Nelson Ott, who I’m certain is the hive mind of a collection of hallucinating spores who have flowered and decided to write Jaws in cuneiform which was then translated into sounds resembling, but definitely are not, human speech. An ape then took dictation and here we are…
But what of the massive shark causing all of this murky mayhem, certainly he is a wonder of special effects wizardry? This movie couldn’t manage to film a child in a shallow pond, and you expect an animatronic great white? The mother fucker is grainy-as-balls stock footage of a real shark, and briefly… very briefly… a toy or puppet of some fashion.
Speaking of all expense spared, the special features on this Blu-ray from Severin include, in total; the film’s trailer. I would love to know what the folks that starred in this are up to these days… it’s probably absolutely nothing… yeah, they aren’t doing shit. Trailer it is!
To sum it all up; if you are looking for a flick that sprinkles it’s Troll 2 Old Bay seasoning liberally upon it’s Jaws: the Revenge crab cake then this is the film for you!