Blood Fest is a huge festival in America that is dedicated to horror films and the many sub-genres in that category. However when Dax, a horror film buff and his two friends get to the festival, they find out that horror isn’t what it’s cracked up to be.
The general story is actually quite an interesting concept with so much potential, think ‘Cabin in the Woods’ meets ‘Tucker and Dale vs Evil’. However what Owen Egerton, who wrote and directed Blood Fest, implemented was B-Movie schlock and not the enjoyable kind.
The poorly written and extremely generic dialogue is played seriously, the effects for the most part, are actually pretty decent, the acting is bad but not B-Movie bad, and finally the look of the film was typical of a hundred other straight-to-DVD films that are released every year. The result of all of this is a dull film that leaves the audience with a sense of yearning for what could have been with such potential.
Blood Fest went from a realistic “horror comedy” film and added a sci-fi twist and it didn’t work at all, it just felt forced for the sake of excitement. Even then though, once you explain the science behind the science-fiction it ruins any remaining interest or curiosity. For example, not once does anyone in ‘Cabin in the Woods’ mention how they got all these monsters or how they control them. That’s because it would ruin part of the intrigue and diminish a great talking point about the film.
That’s probably the biggest issue with the film, the fact that Egerton thought he needed to explain every little strange thing that is introduced into the film. All the best sci-fi and horror films give vague details at best! This film genuinely treated it’s viewers like morons, and it would it would definitely take one to enjoy this poorly written rubbish.
A horror comedy, with no scares and no laughs, now that’s an interesting take on the genre! The twists are nonsensical and yet again, overly explained in black and white. It genuinely is frustrating that this could have been another ‘Cabin in the Woods’ but instead we’re left with this bland, derivative time sink.
2/10
