Review: BLEED, A Mixtape Of Horror Genres

Tripp Rhame's Bleed is a backwoods horror film, and with a prologue set in the 70s, you keep expecting the Sawyer clan to rear their ugly heads at any moment. However, it very quickly becomes a bit more than that.

The setup is Horror Movie 101: pregnant Sarah (Chelsey Crisp) and husband Matt (Michael Steger) move out to a secluded house in your typical middle-of-nowhere hick town, where they're joined by friend Bree (Brittany Ishibashi), her boyfriend Dave (Elimu Nelson), Sarah's good-for-nothing ghost hunter brother who lives in a van (down by the river) Eric (Riley Smith) and his new-agey girlfriend Skye (Lyndon Smith). They decide to take a field trip to a nearby burned-down abandoned prison, because this is a horror film and they all need a boneheaded decision from their characters to get going.

Give credit to Rhame for being ambitious; he goes for broke, tossing in a pissed-off ghost and the usual murderous local rednecks. He also manages to wring plenty of creepy atmosphere from his setting, working against an obvious low budget. This just comes naturally; The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and others of its ilk have made backwoods locales inherently sinister forever.

For a movie called Bleed, it's surprisingly light on the red stuff, save for a few quick glimpses of things straight out of a Cenobite's wet dream. Rhame devotes most of the film's brief 78 minutes (sans credits) to setting a mood of dread, and his cast do what they can within the short runtime, effectively selling their characters' panic.

It's a hodgepodge of ideas: a backwoods/slasher/satanic cult/ghost story all rolled into one, and there's a pretty unexpected twist to its resident boogeyman, a Rasputin-looking guy that randomly pops up for some jump scares. It never fully embraces all its elements and there's very brief time to do so, only stepping into high gear as it's coming to a close, so a few things don't make a lot of sense.

Bleed is really nothing you haven't seen before, but there's still some pretty interesting elements that result from its mixtape approach; at the very least, the short runtime makes it a pretty painless watch.

 

Bleed will be released theatrically and on VOD on 25 March via Gravitas Ventures.