The Bleeding Game – review

Director: Sean-Michael Argo

Release date: 2018

Contains spoilers

I’ve long been a fan of Lovecraft’s mythos, and the classic writer of damned and eldritch things once touched on vampirism in his story the Shunned House. In that story he used his knowledge of the folklore from New England that had led through the nineteenth century (particularly) to exhumations of suspected vampires.

One of Lovecraft’s creation were the shoggoth; sentient, gelatinous blobs, which could form their shape as necessary and were engineered slaves of the Elder Things. Now, apparently, they are also able to be summoned by an adept and possess a human turning that human into a vampire. This is the Bleeding Game.

the sisters

It is described thusly by Mr Temple (C. Jason Bolton), who is the adept mentioned above. As he performs a ritual to call down the shoggoth, a shamanic looking occultist does a ritual to warn his three daughters, Flo (Shey Bland), Aida (Whitney Mixter) and Lizzy (Alison Tussey). Two of the sisters are half sisters, one is adopted and the family, as a whole, is dysfunctional. In the main they are none too pleased to be called into action.

a shoggoth

We also come across three guys as they are possessed, these are Jerry (Matt Yeager) who becomes “the Hound”, Buddy (Mr. Falcon) who becomes “The Shadow” and Jefferson (Imro Burnett) who becomes “the Horror”. The guys take on some awfully misplaced personas as they are possessed but are they really vampires? They are later described as “space fish monsters who become vampires who aren’t really vampires” and so perhaps we better look at what the lore is.

feeding

The shoggoths go to a bookstore to learn the rules of their existence. Looking at books there is the inevitable Twilight joke but eventually one declares that they are the Dracula as described by Stoker. They then decide (and it is proved accurate, so their reality seems to be shaped by belief) that sunlight will be a problem – indicating they are not the Dracula kind, of course, as sunlight dampened the Count’s supernatural powers only. But then they seem impervious to every other apotropaic thing in the book!

C. Jason Bolton as Mr Temple

They do, however, drink blood. However, it is not for their consumption. It turns out that Mr Temple is a lot older than he looks and has maintained his youth through blood. He is denied direct feeding by his masters and the three shoggoth consume blood and then regurgitate it into a bowl where tubes feed it into Temple. Why there is this convoluted mechanism (rather than allowing him to feed independently), I don’t really know. It becomes apparent that the sisters have dealt with what we might call 'real vampires' before and they suggest that they do not stray more than a mile from their lair.

bloodied

So, complicated lore but is it any good? Honestly, not so good. It’s sometimes a difficult balance between original idea and convolution and I don’t think this succeeded. The acting was amateurish in the main and the dialogue sucked. On the other hand it did a good job in hinting at the background enough to make it feel like the sisters had a developed backstory, without actually developing it in any great shakes. I wasn’t enamoured. 3 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

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