Honourable Mention: Blood Fest

Directed by Owen Egerton and released in 2018, this is a tribute to the horror genre sort of film that plays with the tropes but perhaps is a bit less clever than it thinks it is and therefore telegraphs its twist well in advance. That said it is a fun enough piece, as it goes, and has a fleeting vampire visitation, hence the honourable mention.

It starts back in time and a young lad named Dax (Tristan Riggs) is watching Halloween films with his mother (Samantha Ireland). She goes to make him chocolate milk and is attacked by a masked killer. He sees the body as his father (Tate Donovan) comes in, tells him to look away and shoots the murderer. At the end of the scene the older Dax (Robbie Kay, Bathory) wakes from a nightmare of the events. Dax is a horror fan and is intending to go to a massive horror festival – the titular Blood Fest. His dad has other ideas as the killer of his wife was one of his patients (he’s a psychiatrist) who was obsessed with horror and so snips his wristband in half, invalidating it.

Dax, Krill and Sam

Dax was going to the festival with friends Sam (Seychelle Gabriel) and Krill (Jacob Batalon). The festival is sold out but they persuade him to phone Ashley (Barbara Dunkelman), presumably an old school friend, to get him in as she is an actress and attending as she is in a horror movie – she does get him in. The festival is set over a massive area with zones dedicated to certain genres/films. However, things go quickly wrong as mastermind of the festival Walsh (Owen Egerton) sends a masked killer and several pig masked chainsaw wielding maniacs into the crowd. He has been able to make the zones deadly and real.

blood at mouth

So, for instance, the zombie area actually has zombies – in this case dead bodies, rigged with electrodes to animate them and controlled by gamers. There is also Vamp Camp – though only Krill ends up there out of our primary characters. There one of them actually confesses how Walsh created them. He imported some girls from Eastern Europe, sharpened their teeth, stimulated their adrenal gland to heighten their sexuality and make them produce pheromones (!) and then infected them with porphyria! The bad science here is overwhelming as is the idea that porphyria causes an unquenchable thirst for blood, which is the icing on the cake.

stake

The vampire lady who tells Krill this realises that he is a virgin (and he doesn’t notice the other vampires slaughtering a group of guys) and lets him go. However she does go to find him later and ends up with a wooden stake in the heart for her troubles (of course she is very much alive but a wooden stake to the heart is even more effective against the living than the dead). And that is our fleeting visitation. Not quite acting as vampires, as they have been made to be vampires, they are more created by science – even though that science is bad and makes no real-world sense.

The imdb page is here.

On Demand @ Amazon US

On Demand @ Amazon UK