Blood Relatives

Not for everyone. Gore hounds will hate it. Those who demand 100 million in special effects or big name celebrities. Those who insist every joke be obvious or have toilet humor or be about sex.

I was pleasantly surprised by this low budget indie. It has an off kilter sense of humor that quickly grows on you. That is, if you're willing to actually listen, pay attention, and don't demand explosions and piles of bodies or you get bored.

The writer deserves to be applauded. So do all the actors, and the principal ones have pretty good comedic timing.

In some ways this reminds me of the original short film for Things We Do In the Shadows.

Right, well I sat down to watch the 2022 movie "Blood Relatives" because it was a movie that I hadn't already seen, but also because it was listed as a horror comedy.

Needless to say that I hadn't heard about this movie from writer and director Noah Segan prior to sitting down to watch it, so I didn't know what I was in for, aside from it being a vampire-based horror comedy.

And now having sat through the 88 minutes that the movie ran for, I must say that you have to look hard and long for a shred of comedy here. I didn't laugh once throughout the course of "Blood Relatives". Sure, there were elements hinting towards light comedy, but the movie never transitioned into being a comedy. So I feel somewhat cheated on that account, as I was expecting a proper horror comedy. Instead, I was given a horror drama laced with light elements of hints toward comedy.

While writer Noah Segan definitely was on to something here with the script and storyline for "Blood Relatives", then the movie sort of fell flat on the ground after a running start. Yeah, the movie was severely hindered by a really slow narrative without much of anything exciting, thrilling or fun happening. So you essentially just sit through a very slow paced roadtrip for two estranged vampire family members.

The acting performances in "Blood Relatives" was fair enough, but it was a shame that leading actor Noah Segan (actually the writer and director as well, duh!) and leading actress Victoria Moroles hadn't much solid contents to work with from the script that Noah Segan had compiled.

For a horror comedy then "Blood Relatives" was a flaccid and uneventful movie, and not a movie that I would recommend for fans of the horror comedy genre.

My rating of "Blood Relatives" lands on a three out of four stars, because the movie was rather uneventful and way too slow paced.

First off regardless of a films subject or story, anything that's written, directed and starting the same person virtually never works out well. So why 'Blood Relatives' has a 96% Certified Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, is beyond me... especially after watching the film.

Now lets talk about 'Blood Relatives'. Its largely absent of both foley and diegetic sounds, mainly consisting of just 1-on-1 dialog and the occasional Yiddish(or punk rock) ditty. Which from my perspective, makes the film just feel hollow. The acting itself and cinematography weren't bad at all, and I did appreciate the on location filming over a studio/green-screen production.

However, 'Blood Relatives' ultimately failed to deliver any meaningful substance, I'd call it neither a comedy nor horror. And again, why it has one of the highest Tomato ratings, with 22 Fresh critic reviews, is beyond me. What I can tell you though, is the theme seems to be founded in a mutual consensus of finding the film "charming". The adjective shows up in almost all critic review synopsis'. IMHO that's just a passive-aggressive way of saying it was bad!

This was very poorly written and directed, and surprisingly, just bland and boring, and not funny at all. The concept was interesting, but it missed the mark in every other department. The two leads had zero chemistry, I'm sure mostly due to writer, director and lead actor Noah Segan's failure to direct himself and Victoria Moroles properly. The only really convincing actor was C. L. Simpson as Sylvie. Moroles' and Segan's dialogue also felt forced and convoluted, with Segan's occasional high-pitched voice squealing becoming cringe. The story had nothing much out of its basic narrative to offer - nothing really suspenseful or thrilling, or that wasn't cliched and predictable. For a comedy, we never laughed once. A decent effort for actor Segan to newly dabble in filmmaking, but maybe he wore too many hats on this one.

I mean, for a directorial debut it's not that bad. But to be honest, it's kinda boring. I'm not an expert at drama, so I can't really pinpoint what made it boring. Maybe the lack of music? Maybe the lack of background story on the main character, that made the audience having a hard time to care about him? I don't know. I'm not the right person to analyze a drama movie. But I do know that a good drama is the one which doesn't make you wanna fast forward through it. And I did got tempted a few times while watching this. I don't wanna be a jerk, so I'm giving it 5 stars. But I don't recommend this movie to anyone.