Blood House – review

Director: Tony Manders

Release date: 2021

Contains spoilers

It is a shame that Blood House, a microbudget film, works poorly because we don’t get many vampiric building films and I really wanted it to work – even at a budget level. Unfortunately, as we’ll see, it is an overly long film that really does outstay its welcome.

I need to add also that I don’t think revealing the house as vampiric is too much of a spoiler as the trailer actually states it will “feed off your fears… your pain… your blood!” The last is confirmed at the end of the film.

Elizabeth is burned as a witch

So, we start in the past and Elizabeth Blood (Shirley Dodson) is dragged, presumably out of her farmhouse (and for a moment I did wonder whether Blood House was simply reference to a family name – but it's not just that), and to a stake where she will burn as a witch. As she is set alight (the fire left to our imagination bar some visual distortion aping heat) she curses her neighbours and her descendants.

shoplifters leg it

Cut to the present day and in a car sits Alice (Meg Owlett), who is the driver and who is new to the group of friends, on a first date with Harry (Matt Hemmings). In the back seat are Jade (Gemma Harlow Dean) and Sarah (Maria Hiscock). They have been out on a reunion with Josh (Richard Wilde) and Ben (John Fisher) who come running to the car and say drive as an irate shopkeeper (Richard Sheppard) chases them for shoplifting. Alice drives off but he gets a pic of the car with his phone.

Alice in the car

Now, you might be forgiven for believing that I am (bar the word reunion) describing teens who, in good horror movie style, are up to no good and as punishment face a big bad – but these are grown adults – they are in their thirties and yet there are six crammed in a car and they are shoplifting. They are also the worst bickerers, as we’ll discover, but the reason for pointing this out is that the characters don’t gel and, at best, annoy.

arriving

They stop but freak when a cop car goes by (we get the visual cue of flashing light and the sound of a siren) and drive on but after stopping again (on a country lane) the car won’t start – Alice is out of petrol. There is no mobile phone signal but Alice spotted a house a little way back, through the trees, and so they go there. The house is clearly the one from the opening and is clearly abandoned. They go in anyway and find their way to a room with a couple of paraffin lamps. There is an empty (as Harry reports) cupboard but when the next person looks there are sleeping bags in it. Then they find a bathroom, clean with electricity and hot water (though I didn’t notice them try it to discover the water temperature before announcing that). When they next look in the cupboard there are supermarket sandwiches and bottles of water.

the gang's all here

Of course, this is all pretty freaky but its cold out, so they crash but wake up at 9 the next night. They try to leave but the way they came now leads on a quick circuit where they are at the top of stairs leading back down to the room they slept in – they cannot understand the spatial distortion where they just loop on themselves changing floors without changing floors. If people take the circuit in different directions, they return to the same point without passing each other. I thought of faery and questioned should they have eaten food, but that is not a concept that was explored.

it's behind you

Then they spend ages bickering, vanishing, re-appearing and bickering more. Eventually they are picked off one by one. Why so slowly? Probably because the house feeds on fear. It also feeds on blood and here comes the potentially larger spoiler. One of their number is not what they seem and they state that “The House sustains me so that I can bring it fresh blood when it is hungry.” They also say, “The House is still hungry, it needs blood”. That person can shapeshift also and so we have not always seen interactions with the actual character but the House’s servant. The house itself is not actually there; it was burnt down in a fire (a century before) in which the servant also died, it can create itself again physically but mostly (from outside) there is no house just a field.

grabbed

The issue… Oh god it goes on and the characters are so bland, stereotyped and 2-dimensional. The men are macho – bar Harry, who is the butt of their jokes and would have stopped hanging round the others years before, except he is drawn as a wimp who wouldn’t stand up to them. The women, ones a goth who becomes essentially non-functioning, one woman used to be with Josh and is now with Ben and the other… is called Jade. There is no character development of note, nothing to make us hang our hats on. I’d say the acting was bad but it was probably not helped by the lack of characterisation and the poor dialogue.

into the vortex

This has a good nugget of an idea – a house that traps you, plays with you and devours you. However, that could have been done as a short film rather than 110 minutes. The sfx aren’t great – hands coming through a red cgi vortex (which looked like they were burnt so might have been Elizabeth Blood’s hands, but we're not told if they are) and a killer shower curtain are supplemented by occasional cgi flashes. The reason a sentient killer house would produce supermarket sandwich packets can only be answered by 'it was what the filmmakers got their hands on' when – if it would feed them at all – it would likely have been simple fare rather than branded goods. Not great. 2.5 out of 10 reflects the kernel of a good idea.

The imdb page is here.

On Demand @ Amazon US

On Demand @ Amazon UK