Realms of Blood – review

Directed by: Robert J Massetti

Release date: 2005

Contains spoilers

Realms of Blood is a series of three short stories with a wraparound. However you’d be forgiven for inwardly groaning when a voice over – welcoming the viewer to the Realms of Blood – starts in an amateurish and ultra-gravely way. That said, the theme song for the intro credits was really good thereafter.

The wraparound is fluff. A guy, Freddy (Nick Colameo), is watching a horror flick, to unstopping derisory comments by his wife Kathy (Kerry Lynn Hoffman). Suddenly the power goes out and they tell each other three scary stories. At the end there is a *shock* ending. Not a good wraparound, and how many times can one person use the word crap without drawing breath, however these wraparounds are often poor – for an example of how to do it properly see Dead of Night (1945).

The first two stories are non-vampire, we have ‘Pain Killer’ the story of an Iraqi vet who can’t stop killing. We also have ‘Cologne’, a mildly interesting tale of a nerd who can’t get a date until he tries some special cologne that has strange side effects.

We are concerned with the third story, ‘Blood Runs Cold’. To be honest it had an interesting premise – a priest, Father Crowe (Bob Glazier), has been chosen by God to kill vampires - but it suffered due to length. Ideas were thrown in that just were not properly explored or exploited and the plot was a bit of a mess. In fairness things like a rogue boom mike in shot, plus poor film quality via camcorder, didn’t help either.

Essentially Crowe is killing vampires. The only way to kill them is through a special cross (and I guess stabbing them with it as it is made out of nails). We also hear that there is something going on with his estranged daughter. He was given the cross by a down and out who was passing the burden on to him.

The cross is unexplained. One guesses it is supposed to be made from the nails that crucified Christ – though I doubt they looked like they had just been bought at a hardware store. However that is my guess and it is not explained.

We also get the story of a girl named Raven (Sheyenne Rivers, who is also in upcoming indie flick Vampire Winter). She has always dreamt of being a vampire and is pulled towards a real vampire named The Dweller (Trish Dempsey), who turns her.

Of course it turns out that Raven is Rachael, Crowe’s daughter, and she goes to him for help. This made little sense as, when given the cross Crowe was told that the down and out knew what had happened to his daughter, so why were they still estranged?

This is all a plot by The Dweller as she wants the cross – for obvious reasons – she also needs the blood of a priest to become a vampire queen. This was logic-less. Surely she could have easily got any old priest – it would have made more sense for for her to need the blood of God’s chosen warrior. Never mind.

There is a fairly effective twist at the end, though it is not too shocking and some nice bite marks, makeup wise, on Raven’s neck post attack. Unfortunately most of the other effects are poor. Yet despite all the problems there was some thought put into this, I felt, that was curtailed by length and that was a shame.

The acting is not brilliant but Rivers seems to hold her own, not a stellar performance but not too bad for the most part. The soundtrack, throughout the film is really quite good, however.

As always, with this sort of film, I am scoring the vampire segment only. The plot problems, average acting and boom mike push this to a 2 out of 10, which is a shame as with some effort they could have pulled it higher.

The imdb page is here.