Blood Creek - 3/5

When I see the name Joel Schumacher attached to anything, I get nervous. He did give us some classics like "The Lost Boys" or "Falling Down" but he also killed Batman in the 90s and gave us shitty films like "Phone Booth" and "The Number 23". Thusly, when I found out he directed a little Horror flick called "Blood Creek", I got nervous. I also got curious (curiosity killed the Matt, you know) so I rented this zombie filled Nazi themed flick to give it a shot. Its not great by any means, but I can't say that I wasn't at least somewhat pleasantly surprised with the result.

Evan misses his brother. Whilst fishing in the woods, his brother Victor, a Iraq war veteran, went missing and Evan can't seem to get past that. Two years later, with his father being a general dick and life finally moving on, Victor comes back to Evan in the middle of the night telling him to grab some serious guns and to come with him. The brothers than head to an old farm nearby where they find a family seemingly kidnapping people to feed an 80 year old German occultist that found the secret to immortality and seemingly the power to conquer the world (damn Nazis and their conquering the world shite). Of course, they are there to tear shit up for imprisoning Victor for two years but little do they know they are about to have one crazy night.

So we have Nazi occult, a vampire like villain, an ageless family, and zombies (including zombie horses which I haven't seen since "House 2") in "Blood Creek". Normally I would spell that kind of list as good times, but "Blood Creek" isn't everything it could have been. Despite some actually very sleek visual style and a concept that's fairly intriguing, this film falters quite a bit with its logic jumps in script and rather flat characters. Our brothers tend to only have sparse and rather bland dialogue (that randomly takes zips in odd directions) and some of the film's continuities are vague at best. Sometimes zombies are out to kill and other times they just kind of run around (or can actually think towards the end for brief spurts) and the story tends to leave things relatively unexplained. Luckily, "Blood Creek" has a speedier than thou pacing, a badass villain in Wirth, and some relatively solid special effects (sans the out of place CGI moments) to balance out its flaws.

"Blood Creek" is a film that needs to be taken with a grain of salt. It's not out to change perceptions of the world and if you are willing to overlook some of the forehead slapping plot progressions and weak back stories for our two heroes than one should have a fine time enjoying the macabre of this film. Its got a snazzy evil villain and hey, from the ending, it looks like we could have a helluva franchise on our hands. Its worth to viewing although I'm not sure its necessarily worth some of the praise it received. At least, Joel Schumacher didn't screw this one up too bad. He did kill Batman you know.

BONUS RANT: So if your brother who has been missing for two years randomly shows up in the middle of the night looking like Bigfoot and saying that you need to grab ammo and guns to come with him, would you do it? Evan does. I sure as hell wouldn't without some sort of explanation first. Seriously? It's logic jumps like this one that make this movie a little hard to swallow. All he had to say was, "Dude, Nazi vampire man is going to take over the world" and I'm there shotgun doting with him, no questions asked. But Evan seems pretty okay with going along without even that. Sigh. Guess we are just two different people. 

Written By Matt Reifschneider