Blood Hunter

One of life's chief pleasures, at least for weirdos like me, is locating films that produce a strange kind of nirvana through a highly un-calibrated combination of earnestness, lack of means, and total ineptitude. Even still, for every THE ROOM and TROLL 2, there's a turkey like BLOOD HUNTER - a project so misguided even its eccentricities can't save it from being unbearable.

Our hero is an off-brand Dracula who emigrated from Russia to Kentucky in the 1600s because it reminded him of his homeland (huh?). Working as an auto mechanic by night in what is, apparently, a 24-hour auto repair shop (wish those existed), he busies himself knocking off various troublemakers about town. The targets range from the local convenience store pedophile to a trio of guys hunting after dark, so whatever moral compass guides him, apparently this vampire's a stickler for the rules.

There are a few more things that happen but that's all that's really worth mentioning, as BLOOD HUNTER is constructed so haphazardly basically nothing in it possesses any relevance. The vampire kidnaps a woman at one point and holds her in a cave, seemingly intending to make her his bride, but she eventually just disappears from the story, having done little more than render our hero a pretty morally ambiguous character. In the special features on the Blu-ray, director Jack Shrum says his father, the writer, tends to write on a scene-level basis: he would present one scene at a time rather than a finished script, which Jack then had to string together into a haphazard simulacrum of a narrative. The project fails spectacularly, and the film feels like exactly what it is: a string of disjointed scenes cobbled together with no rhyme or reason. Often repeating itself, the movie at other times flies off on wild tangents. Either way, it produces a lack of cohesion that sucks the air out of things: even in movies like TROLL 2, there's a basic sense of progression. BLOOD HUNTER just goes around in circles, creating a maddening experience that feels far longer than its 90 minutes. Sometimes one man's trash can be another's treasure, but in this case, the proper conclusion is the one that's most obvious: BLOOD HUNTER simply stinks!