Bloodstream (1985), by Michael J. Murphy

Not long after Shogun Assassin, here I am with another revenge movie. It's a much stranger revenge movie that its Eastern counterpart. It's made by the guy who made The Hereafter, which was kind of fun, but overly long. He then made Death Run, proving he was much more versatile--and badass--than he first appeared. Bloodstream was never officially released, though there have been bootlegs of it going around for some time, and I'm sure there's some company or another out there who will take your money for a DVD-R. There may be some movies that show up on here that are of a similar nature, in that they have not been formally released (see The Tony Blair Witch Project)--including some that were never entirely finished (such as Voodoo Swamp). Bloodstream's de facto underground status makes it an enthralling phenomenon to begin with, but the fact that it is also a great movie makes it two times the awesome.

Bloodstream stars Alistair, a filmmaker who makes a horror flick also called Bloodstream. His producer, William King, is a colossal dick. He tells Alistair his movie sucks and that he should just "get a proper job." He says "proper" because this film is British. If customers at work told me to get a "proper" job instead of a "real" job, I'd be somewhat charmed rather than offended and sad. It turns out, though, that King is pulling a hoax--he tells Alistair that he won't distribute the film but does anyway after ostensibly firing him. With the aid of King's secretary Nikki, Alistair dons a skeleton costume and sets King and his closest friends and family into line so they can be killed. The deaths are suitably awful, including chainsaw decapitation and a knife rammed down someone's throat. Because Alistair is a filmmaker this movie is about snuff films. Alistair slowly becomes obsessed with making his snuff film into great art...because as it turns out, those horror movies really are bad for you...

It's easy for me to compare this film to Skullduggery, a movie which I'm sure I'll feature on here at some point. Because Bloodstream does something that Skullduggery also does. Throughout the latter film, there are additional stories that parallel the course of the main plot. There is a D&D game which plays a role in the main character's killings, and a weird medieval prologue, as well as a poorly-made stage play, that toy around with what's going on as the main character does what he does. In Bloodstream, Alistair forms an obsession with horror movies, and indeed, at least half of this movie is comprised of scenes where Alistair smokes cigarettes and watches an endlessly entertaining string of fake monster movies. They don't explain initially that these movies aren't one film, and they don't explain that these movies are not Bloodstream. I assumed that Bloodstream was the slasher movie they show at the beginning, so I was confused when suddenly scenes from a mummy movie started cropping up. Sometimes there are reflections of the main plot with Alistair in the movies Alistair watches, just as Skullduggery's D&D game nods to what we're supposed to be primarily invested. But there's another mirroring in Bloodstream, and that of course is the title. This is a horror movie about a horror movie, and both movies have the same name. It's telling that the maker of the fictional Bloodstream demonstrates a severe hatred for the film distribution industry--and ironic, then, that the movie didn't make it to release in real life. Sad, too, that it never got that message out, or that the world got to see how marvelous the movie is.

A lot of the awesomeness of this movie comes from the fictional movies it shows off. There's a mummy movie, a werewolf movie (though it looks more like a were-skunk), and some sort of medieval torture thing where an evil court jester has a strip of rubber taped to his face. If each of these movies was a full movie within Bloodstream, I'd still watch it, even if it meant it was twenty-something hours long. So much care went into these interruptions, and it is probable that they were meant as padding. Maybe their briefness facilitates my enjoyment of them. It's hard to say. They fit well--I never felt like the dichotomy between clips and skull-masked slayings was unbalanced.

Then there's the premise. In our universe, two adults would not sit down and decide that the answer to being massively ripped off resided in dressing up as a skeleton and killing people. But here, it seems to be kind of a normal thing. Remember that Nikki is not insane, and she comes up with a lot of what Alistair ends up doing. I was under the impression that she had been the one to propose bone-man justice. And that's wonderful. In terms of realism, it's almost like a superhero movie, if superhero movies tended to feature the protagonist creating mountains of corpses.

Bloodstream is one of those slashers that fully satisfies my love of slashers. And I mean full satisfaction--like inhaling really, really good chocolate, or letting oneself sip straight from a two-liter of root beer. I am a sucker for unprofessional movies about masked killers, and the A-List--the actual list that fuels this site, that is--has tons of them. Long Island Cannibal Massacre, Nigel the Psychopath, and Ogroff have a sort of mystique that only a wide variety of bladed weapons and face coverings can supply. Maybe it's the comic fan in me, and I really do have a fetish for garish costumes. Who knows. I want you to watch it and get back to me, so I can see if I'm just a weirdo.