Saturday, April 26, 2008

The Horror!? 48: Bloodlust! (1959/1961?)

The four oldest teenagers around, consisting of always-scared-gal aka please-make-her-stop-whining-gal, guy with glasses, alpha male and uncharacteristically tough blonde, land on an island (Where? Are they on holiday? Who knows?). They don't know that they are entering the domain of Count Zaroff Dr. Balleau, who in his stint in the Army developed a taste for bloodshed and now spends his ample free time hunting and killing people and building neat dioramas with their taxidermied remains. Alas in the end every hunter falls victim to his own prey.
If you are stealing not insignificant parts of your script from somewhere, it is not a bad idea to steal from the best, in the case of Bloodlust! the (of course superior) The Most Dangerous Game.
Bloodlust! itself doesn't add much of value to the original formula, its characters stay as empty as the acting, but it is more than a little unfair to expect a late 50s drive-in movie to deliver much psychological depth, especially if it stays as conscious of its limitations as this one.
Its tight pacing came as a pleasant surprise and kept me entertained throughout.
Also, I am not sure that I have seen any film produced before Herschell Gordon Lewis' Blood Feast that features such an amount of gore effects.

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