Honourable mention: Blood Bags

This is a 2018 Italian horror directed by Emiliano Ranzani and I did wonder whether to run this as a ‘use of tropes’ feature or an ‘honourable mention’. In the end I plumped for the latter and this is down to the opening intertitle, which tells us about Gunther Disease suggesting it is “a rare, recessive, metabolic disease affecting heme” and that “its main symptoms include anaemia and extreme skin photosensitivity.”

If that sounds familiar, it is because Gunther Disease is a congenital form of erythropoietic porphyria and, as we know, there has been a modern tie between porphyria and the genre when Dr David Dolphin erroneously connected porphyria with the vampire – suggesting that it was the root of the folklore of vampires but because of aspects that are out of the modern media vampire playbook. Indeed, the intertitle goes on to say, “it is believed to be the origin of the vampire myth.”

throat cut

Despite that intertitle (and the procurement of blood in the film) the film then steers pretty much away from the subject becoming a slasher and creature feature more than anything. Indeed, whilst it shows a transfusion later it in no way suggests the ingestion of blood (which would not satisfy the lack of heme production). It starts, however, with a couple of thieves. Tony (Riccardo Leto) and Alex (Emanuele Turetta) pull some of the wood boarding a window and break in to an abandoned villa, looking for an easy score. Tony is grabbed, however, by a creature (or so it would seem) and has his throat cut.

Makenna Guyler as Tracy

Next we meet American student Tracy (Makenna Guyler) and her friend Petra (Marta Tananyan). Tracy is obsessed with photography, whereas Petra rather likes to meet boys and go to parties. They meet a couple of boys and, here, is where the film fails. We meet the boys but they are not seen again and the girls are less than 2-dimensional. There is some indication that Tracy is not the photographer she thinks she is (a bitchy comment by one of the boys and a remark by Petra) but nothing is done with this in terms of being a pathway to her personality. We are left with two ciphers and find it difficult to care about their fates.

Petra is soon collateral damage 

Anyway, Tracy is told about a place in the town with a lot of older buildings, drags Petra along and finds her way into the building the thieves broke into (and the outer gate being locked behind them). Once inside Petra is quickly killed and Tracy is hunted by the creature – having found the thief Alex, who is till hiding in the building. We also see a character, Vittorio (Alberto Sette), but when we first see him it is his legs and a doctor’s bag only as he tries to procure blood from a whore – the reason for obfuscating his identity never emerges and he could have been shown from the get-go.

blood bag

Given that the whore 1) has had a blood test done for him and 2) knows him, the speed in which the visit goes south, causing him to murder her and then steal her blood is a tad strange. As it turns out he is the brother of the “creature” (Mario Cellini) and helps take care of him; getting him the blood he needs for transfusions. I put creature in inverted commas because he is a sufferer of Gunther Disease. He hides from the sun in the house (and thus Tracy can get away at one point with a camera flash) and his head and face have become deformed – something that can happen, normally due to sun exposure I understand.

ballerina

The film gives us an antagonist who we could sympathise with as a victim of circumstance, but doesn’t do anything to build sympathy or empathy with any character. It fails to offer a bucket of gore, as it might have done, steers away from torture porn, but does have one really interesting moment with cracking lighting, multiple creatures and a disfigured ballerina (Enrica De Pace) that stood out as misplaced in the film and seemed to be a nightmarish vision only.

the "creature"

As I mentioned the “creature” (so named in the credits) transfuses the blood and does harvest it from the victims – so arguably a moment of vampirism, if not a vampire. But the film misses more than hits and fails to strike the right notes.

The imdb page is here.

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