Here for Blood

Directed by Daniel Turres, Here for Blood follows an amateur wrestler (Shawn Roberts’ Tom O’Bannon) as he agrees take his girlfriend’s (Joelle Farrow’s Phoebe) babysitting gig so she can study for an upcoming exam – with chaos and violence ensuing after Tom and his young charge (Maya Misaljevic’s Grace) find themselves under attack by vicious cult members. It’s a thoroughly agreeable and promising setup that’s employed to underwhelming, unwatchable effect by Turres, as the filmmaker, armed with James Roberts’ screenplay, delivers an often stunningly amateurish endeavor that contains little in the way of compelling, attention-grabbing attributes – with the predominantly tedious atmosphere compounded by flat, bottom-of-the-barrel visuals and an ongoing emphasis on seriously questionable instances of humor. (The latter is especially problematic given that none of this is even remotely funny, ultimately.) And although it boasts a few appreciatively brutal interludes and a relatively strong performance by Roberts, Here for Blood‘s lackadaisical pace and painfully overlong running time ensures that it grows more and more interminable as it progresses – with the larger-than-life third act, as a result, hardly able to pack the visceral, fun punch for which Turres is clearly striving. The end result is a completely misguided and misbegotten disaster that could only have worked in the context of a genre-specific anthology, and it certainly remains quite clear that blending horror and comedy is hardly as effortless as other films have made it seem.

1/2* out of ****