Here for Blood (2022)

Because she needs at least half an evening off juggling part-time jobs and learning for her college exams, student Phoebe (Joelle Farrow) convinces her boyfriend, underpaid and dumb but buff and tenacious pro-wrestler Tom O’Bannon (Shawn Roberts), to fill in for at least half a shift of babysitting while she spends some time actually focussing on learning.

Little Grace (Maya Misaljevic), the kid in question, is good as long she gets her dose of digital entertainment, so things shouldn’t go too far off the rails.

Alas, a group of masked weirdos invades the home of Grace’s parents, and attack Tom during an attempt to abduct the kid.

Given Tom’s joyful enthusiasm for physical violence, their plan - if you want to call it that - doesn’t go terribly well for the bad guys. Unfortunately, these aren’t just your garden variety home invaders but members of a cult worshipping some nasty entities from the Outside, so Tom is soon beset not just by armed assholes for him to beat up but also needs to cope with undead, possessed and very hard to kill guys for him to chop up. Things become rather high stakes for him personally as well, once Phoebe and two of her friends arrive to take over the other half of the babysitting gig; though Phoebe turns out to be a decent hand with a meat cleaver.

After a somewhat rough first fifteen minutes or so, where the jokes don’t hit and the filmmaking feels rather lacklustre in a particularly indie horror kind of way, Daniel Turres’s gory horror comedy hits its stride the moment the violence starts. Suddenly, drab camerawork turns exciting, indifferent editing effective, and the series of quips and one-liners may stay stupid but also becomes actually funny.

Turres is very, very good at milking his practical effects budget for all it is worth, and even though there’s clearly no possibility to do much beyond doing great make-up jobs on men of varying beefiness, the film does so with a surprising amount of hilariously nasty imagination. Enough of it, proceedings never descend into the realms of cheap gore comedy where the same gag is repeated far too often; instead Here for Blood demonstrates an impeccable sense of timing and pacing, where no incident is kept with for too long, and no scene hangs on for too long because somebody in the production was a afraid of ending a sentence instead of keeping it going (he wrote in a run-on sentence).

Unlike how one might probably imagine a Canadian movie to be, this is a decidedly, nay proudly, low-brow affair that puts a considerable amount of cleverness into being likeably dumb without ever becoming the nasty kind of low-brow that wants to bring back fascism. This is as fun as a movie full of decapitation, mutilation, squirting blood and a wrestler body-slamming a guy’s head to mush can be; it enjoys being that sort of thing, and will probably look at you funny if you complain about it being what it is. It’s too polite a film to feed naysayers to an ever hungry very old head, though. Probably.