Planet Blood – review

Director: Scott Patrick

Release date: 2001

Contains spoilers

Having watched, and reviewed, the poor effort that was Blood Red Moon I decided that we should visit Scott Patrick’s earlier effort – Planet Blood.

It is a mercifully short film, available on the Mortuary of Madness set, and is, generically, an I Am Legend derivative.

Meet Justin (Brett Kelly, who was in Blood Red Moon and was in/directed the remake of Kingdom of the Vampire). He is our survivor in the vampire apocalypse and we have to ask questions here. The first to spring to mind, for instance, is... how is it that the power and water are still on? This is the immediate logical question that springs to mind. Justin speaks to a mannequin head, however, long before Will Smith became obsessed with mannequins in I am Legend .

We also notice that he hasn’t actually boarded the place up either and, guys, I know you were on a budget but Justin would have been vampire chow. He does make a tin can alarm system and then wanders out into the snow when it rattles. This leads him to being face to face with a vampire (Jody Haucke, also Kingdom of the Vampire) and whilst we don’t see fangs we do later with other vampires and rubbish fangs they are too.

He gets a radio signal from a survivor in the warehouse district and after some umm’ing and arr’ing goes to find them. En route he is attacked by vampires and, once in the warehouse, he asks the two women, Jody and Daisy (Anne-Marie Frigon), and one man, Lane (Ray Besharah), how come the vampires are attacking in the day? They don’t really know, but we do… low budget filmmaking is the answer, my friends.

Lane goes and has a cigarette, opening a door to have his smoke and then leaving it ajar! Seriously, if the Darwin Awards are still being given in this alternate reality he is up for one and, of course, the vampires get in… But they aren’t exactly a horde. There’s two groups of three and, when we cut to the ones outside, it’s the same set of actors! We also notice that head shots are awarded with a crap CGI overlay of a little blood and the death of a human necessitates throwing fake blood over glass.

However, before they are attacked we discover that the reason the apocalypse happened was due to a meteor… Again rubbishy CGI, honestly having the actor tell the story would have been better. Not that there is much acting, though Brett Kelly is ok, given what he had to work with.

The shame of this is that it should never have been tackled with so little budget, beyond anything else. I actually appreciated what Scott Patrick tried to do more than Blood Red Moon but it is still pants. 1.5 out of 10. The imdb page is here.