Urban Horror Series – review

Director: Jordan Gouveia (segment)

Release date: 2021

Contains spoilers

Another short anthology film that pulls in a few short films rather than making something bespoke, this was an odd mix but it did include a vampire segment (or, at least, a vampiric segment).

That segment was called Sangre De Vida (Blood of Life) and centred around a wine tasting.

The film starts with a group of women gathered at a vineyard (one assumes) run by Marcos (Cisco Reyes) and Ivonne (Leticia Perez). He talks about how the women have been selected to help with the launch of the new wine Sangre De Vida and not only will they be involved in the launch, but they will help to prepare it too. But, for the moment, the wine is flowing and the women enjoying themselves.

tasting wine

We see snippets of conversation and also one of Marcus’ staff putting something in a glass before filling it with wine and taking it to a guest. One woman asks Ivonne how long she has been with Marcus and she responds with an answer of thirty years. The answer confounds as she looks much too young, but Ivonne counters with the idea that she is older than she looks. We also get a couple coming to the house – too early, suggests Marcus. When she (Rebekah Dean) says she wants to see who she is going to drink she is told to trust the process and they are sent away and told to return just before sunrise…

blood into goblet

So, as became clear very quickly, the women’s involvement in the preparation of the wine is to be an ingredient and the wine itself is literally the blood of life… It is a brief, but fun enough short – it is odd that there is a scene of a cut wrist and goblet – it seems wasteful, though a comment about free range rather than factory processed would have been interesting at that point – especially given some of the genre films where vampires factory process their victims…

Over all this probably gets a 4 out of 10. At the time of writing there was no IMDb page for the anthology.