Bleed (2016)

Number Rolled: 38

Movie Name/Year: Bleed (2016)

Tagline: Reap the flesh.

Genre: Horror, Thriller

Length: 80 minutes

Rating: TV-MA

Production Companies: Spitfire Studios

Producer: Mark Apen, Brian Brightly, Tom Hamilton, Beth Haden Marshall, Tripp Rhame

Director: Tripp Rhame

Writer: Tripp Rhame, Ben Jacoby

Actors: Chelsey Crisp, Riley Smith, Michael Steger, Lyndon Smith, Brittany Ishibashi, Elimu Nelson, David Yow, Raj Kala

Blurb from Netflix: When a group of friends decides to hunt for ghosts at a nearby abandoned prison, their expedition takes a horrifying turn.

Selina’s Point of View:

You’d think a recipe film would have at least one bonus – that it knew what it was going for. I mean, if you make cookies from a recipe, there’s just a step-by-step process. You add the appropriate ingredients and wind up with something that at least semi-resembles what you were going for. In this case, it seemed like Bleed started out trying for one recipe and wound up ending on a whole other one... I’m not even sure how that happened.

In some cases, that could mean a verging of two different trope types into something new, but not this one. It really just made the whole film feel like the creators had no idea where they wanted to go.

I wound up not knowing what anything had to do with anything else. There was a forced tone to everything that made me shake my head. I mean, people just don’t act the way the characters did in Bleed. Even taking into account panic and curiosity.

The ending didn’t clear anything up either. It joined the stories it was telling in an unsatisfying and unnecessary way. The twist wasn’t even a twist, either.

And, I don’t talk about this category often but, the soundtrack? No. The soundtrack was completely off. There wasn’t a single note of music in Bleed that made any sense for the film. Even if I would have been able to get into the story more, the music would have pulled me right out anyway.

If you add the awful acting to the rest of the issues… you don’t even really get something with promise.

Really, this film was just a mess.

Cat’s Point of View:

This movie wasn’t at all what I expected. I’m not sure what, exactly, that I did expect – just not what I actually got. I feel like I’ve seen the film before, but I know for a fact that I haven’t. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a warm feeling of nostalgia. It was more like a sensation that I was going to be sighing and rolling my eyes before long.

I wish I had been wrong, but I wasn’t.

If I was playing a drinking game based on horror movie tropes, I would have been in big trouble.

For the most part, the performances were decent. There was a bit of shaky-cam in spots, but I was thankful it wasn’t too prevalent. The soundtrack was odd – it even seemed to have a song specially made for the movie. That’s how it came across, at least, considering its feature in the opening credits. It just didn’t fit. That seemed to be the theme for most of this one – it all just didn’t fit together right.

I can’t really put my finger on why I had such a negative reaction to this film, specifically. Perhaps it was the feeling that there was more to the story – that it wasn’t a fully formed thought, and missing something. Imagine taking a stack of puzzles and then shuffling all their pieces together and then trying to ‘Frankenstein’ a picture together using bits from all of them. The disjointed and hammered together outcome might feel close to this movie.

There are far better offerings in the genre, by far. 

Languages

Speech Available: English

Subtitles Available: English, French, Spanish

Rotten Tomatoes Critic Score – 50%

Rotten Tomatoes Audience Score – 35%

Metascore - None

Metacritic User Score – None

IMDB Score – 3.6/10

Trust the Dice: Selina’s Rating – 1.5/5

Trust the Dice: Cat’s Rating – 1.5/5

Movie Trailer: