Blood Covered Chocolate – review

Director: Monte Light

Release date: 2022

Contains spoilers

Touching on themes of addiction and mental health, Blood Covered Chocolate is a low budget piece with lofty ideas that moves purposefully into the arthouse area. In black and white with occasional colour (mostly filters) this revels in the idea of an unreliable narrative, where the viewer must keep their wits about them.

It starts with a man, Massimo (Michael Klug), in a storage facility, entering a unit and looking at a bag stuffed with money. Then at home, Massimo looks on proudly at his 1-year sobriety chip. His girlfriend, Tien (Christine Nguyen, Haunted Hotties & Twilight Vamps), who wears her (longer) sobriety chip on a chain. They have sex and afterwards are talking about penanggalan (and the alternative Arp name).

Massimo and Tien

Massimo thinks the idea gross (she turns this back on Western folklore of the prince sexually forcing himself on a sleeping woman) and we do get a visual of the penanggalan (a sketch and later in photographic form). Tien explains that her grandmother was obsessed with her virginity and use to tell her tales of the creature to scare her (as it will suck a foetus right out of her). When the conversation turns to his parents it becomes more strained. His father ran out to Mexico and was involved in shady stuff, and his mother, Barbara (Debra Lamb, Beverley Hills Vamp & A Blood Story), is described as a succubus – Tien will see when she meets her.

shadow of the vampire

The film cuts to a dinner with her and her husband, Crate (Joe Altieri). Crate offers Tien wine – even though he is aware of her alcoholism, and makes direct mention of it. He is scornful of her job – bartender – and is generally rude and the dinner is very awkward. She takes it in her stride until she has to leave. There is then heated words within the family until Crate tells Barbara to wait in the car. We see her outside the apartment with a shadow reaching for her, à la Nosferatu, Eine Symphonie des Grauens (I’ll circle back to this later). Crate interrogates Massimo and orders him to break things off with Tien. It is clear that Crate is into some sketchy stuff and controls Massimo’s life.

penanggalan

After Barbara and Crate are gone, there is a knock at the door and a woman (Jamie Tran) is there and demands Massimo invite her in. She refuses the offer of wine, which Massimo pours on the floor, and then attacks him. She seems to be penanggalan. Tien is calling him and wonders where he has been, he has not spoken to her for seven days. He starts to say he needs to break up with her but, when she argues back, a woman he identifies as Sofia (Meghan Deanna Kingsley) sits on his knee and tells her to take a hint. Sofia is the vampire and can change form – later she takes the form of his mother when sexually tormenting him.

fading reflection

The narrative becomes splintered and we wonder as to the reality of the vampire – we get the impression that he is both drinking and using heroin and as the film focuses on his gaze, and he is a very unreliable narrator (as I alluded to earlier), we are never sure. He loses his reflection (and we see it fade) but is told that most of the folklore/tropes are wrong (stakes do not work, nor crosses or garlic and the sun is fine 9 out of 10 times). He learns to smell the truth of people, able to almost read their minds through scent.

Michael Klug as Massimo

I mentioned Nosferatu and I have seen the film described as a tribute to the classic silent movie. We do get the odd moment of shadow but, to me, this is a tribute only in that it is vampire themed. Whilst director Monte Light may have had it in mind, this is much more modern and eschews the European gothic (though there is arguably an American gothic running through it), leaning much more into the black and white New York vampire films (The Addiction and Nadja specifically). That black and white, with occasional colour, worked well and the photography is very nice. It was nice to see Christine Nguyen in a serious role within a quality project – given the films we’ve seen her in before – but it is Michael Klug who is given the task of carrying this and his effort is admirable.

Meghan Deanna Kingsley as Sofia

Whether you like this or not will very much depend on your taste for arthouse films and splintered narratives. It twists into psychedelia from time to time – replete with kaleidoscopic imagery – and whilst it does offer a trustworthy explanation at the denouement, the viewer may find themselves put off with the unreliability of our lead’s narration through the body of the film. If you are cool with that then I think there is much to get out of this and I certainly enjoyed it. 7.5 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

The film is on free services such as Tubi but can be found:

On Demand @ Amazon US

On Demand @ Amazon UK

Nieng Arp – review

Director: Kam Chanty

Release date: 2004

Contains spoilers

Given that this is a film about a krasue variant, the arp, and hails from Cambodia, this film is very much a rarity. That isn’t to say that it is a good film, but it is a rare film and this almost makes it worthwhile on its own.

It begins with a woman going into labour. We see an old woman pass by and notice the funny look in her sunglass covered eyes.

getting ready to detach

Elsewhere a girl called Maya waits on a bridge for her lover Yasith. Maya is five months pregnant, almost showing, and she and Yasith are unmarried. As she and Yasith dance, we cut back to the first woman who is in the full throes of labour and, elsewhere, the old woman lies in a room we see she has fangs and then her head and organs/digestive system detach – she is arp.

flying

The woman gives birth and the afterbirth is collected in a pot. One of the men is sent to bury it. He should also cover it in thorns to prevent a bodiless vampire getting it, or so he is told. The vampire does appear and the village folk chase it. One of the men gets a spear through the organs (the subtitles suggest she says ouch).

Maya

Yasith and Maya have had trouble with some local men. They are attacked on the way home. The men severly beat and then stab Yasith and gang rape Maya. As she lays on the ground we see that the injured arp is caught in the branches above her. She dribbles spittle that falls into Maya’s mouth, saving her but transforming her into arp as well.

students

Sixteen years later, a group of students are off doing a field trip. They arrange boarding at a house owned by Maya, where she lives with her daughter Paulika and another young girl (whose relationship to the two was not really determined). Maya is an arp – actively tracking down the men who raped her and killed Yasith (two are found without organs as the kids come to the village). Because the kids get in her way she turns her attentions to them as well. Meanwhile Paulika and student Satha fall in love but, as a daughter of an arp, she is doomed to become an arp as well.

vampire in the phone

If that all seems succinct, it is… entirely due, however, to my write up and much more so than the actual film that drags on for over two hours and is diffuse in its direction. We discover that arps, as well as flying around eating organs, can possess people and can appear through mobile phones! That said, it might only be the older arp – who Maya venerates and keeps in a casket in her basement. We also discover that the Buddha (and pendants/statues thereof) can protect folk from the arp. A local monk knows what Maya is but, rather than attack her, he tries to encourage her to meditate and fight her nature.

detaching

The effects are pretty darn rubbish and the story and direction are way too diffuse. The entire kids sub-story could virtually have been dropped and important snippets, such as Satha being the nephew of the main guy who raped Maya, are only revealed at the last minute. The acting is, generally, atrocious. However, as pointed out, a krasue orientated film is not that common and a Cambodian vampire film is even more of a rarity… just not a very good one. 2 out of 10.

At the time of review I can find no IMDb page.