Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the direct-to-DVD section…he’s back. That’s right, the most reviled director in the history of fandom has returned, this time with a horror movie (the kind that’s usually described as ‘too shocking for theaters’). But to be fair Joel Schumacher (the man held responsible for Batman and Robin, typically seen as the worst superhero film in history) has turned in some reasonably good films (The Lost Boys and Falling Down are both seen as modern classics by some, and with good reason), and he’s probably the reason that this film is a little better than I expected it to be. Blood Creek still fits into the mold of other Lionsgate horror films, but I would be lying by omission if I didn’t say that it was the sharpest one that I had seen yet.
Evan Marshall (Henry Cavill) is the responsible type; he has a job few people would take no matter the pay (a paramedic), and takes care of people (namely, his father and his brother’s children) who have been left helpless in the absence of his missing war hero brother, Victor (Dominic Purcell), who has gone missing under mysterious circumstances. One night, Evan wakes up in his trailer to find that Victor has returned after living in the nearby forest for reasons he does not immediately explain. He does, however, persuade Evan to come back into the woods with him to confront the people who had kept Victor captive: as it turns out, a small group of farmers who had been using Victor as sustenance to keep control of a real monster, an old Nazi doctor who has been transformed by his own life-prolonging experiments into a creature that requires blood for sustenance (Michael Fassbender). Naturally, by confronting the farmers over what they did to Victor, they are also allowing the monster to escape.
It’s a little more complicated than that, as the film-makers have to do some pretty heavy legwork to justify setting this movie about Nazi experiments in West Virginia (the black arts and the Nordic landing in North America are both incorporated), and they actually include a pretty lengthy prologue to do so, but that’s the most dominant feature that links this to its low-budget brethren. Unlike other directors that are typically charged with this kind of material, Schumacher is someone who is clearly used to getting what he wants in terms of budget, and it shows. Where some directors might zoom in on their subjects to obscure the lack of a well-prepared set, Schumacher shows you the whole thing (important, because about half the movie takes place at this farm house). When some might be happy with subpar performances (that’s putting it kindly in terms of what I’ve seen from some of these), Schumacher actually gets some decent work out of Cavill, Purcell, and Emma Booth (one of the farmers who has been kept at age 17 for many years due to the experiments). While restraint and subtlety are certainly not the order of the day, this approach does help to distinguish this feature from others of a similar ilk.
Which is not to say that this is in any way a genre-transcending movie, because it isn’t. The performances and the cinematography are all reasonably good, but by the standards of this kind of picture, which has tended to strain the boundaries of what could be considered a distributable film. While due credit has to be given for introducing a potential hot coal into the horror genre (Nazis and their black arts programs), the subject matter is never given either due respect or the camp excess that one would like to see from it (for those of you who remember Frederick Forrest’s army surplus store owner from Falling Down, this comes as a bit of a surprise). In the end, the best one can say about Blood Creek is that it evidences some promise for Schumacher in the horror genre. Seeing as this is coming more than twenty years after his first foray into said material, that might be too little too late.
DVD Bonus Features
Director’s Commentary
"Blood Creek" is on sale January 19, 2010 and is rated R. Horror. Directed by Joel Schumacher. Written by David Kajganich. Starring Dominic Purcell, Michael Fassbender, Emma Booth, Henry Cavill.
