If you’re looking for a decent horror film to watch during days of COVID, Blood Vessel is a good bet.
The title is so good I’m wondering if the film’s writer and director, Australian filmmaker Justin Dix, who is best known for horror film Crawlspace, didn’t write the film around the title.
In 1945, survivors of a sunken hospital ship are cast adrift on a lifeboat for days. Without food or water, the small group happens upon a Nazi ship.
Deciding it’s better to be captured by Nazis than die to hunger and thirst (Personally, I’d choose hunger and thirst over Nazis) they decide to board the ship.
When they get on board, the ship appears abandoned, but it’s not, although these hapless survivors have no idea what particular hell they’ve stumbled into. Nazis are the least of their problems.
At first, when I was watching it on Shudder, I was annoyed because I felt this would likely be a rip off of Ghost Ship, but it wasn’t.
Instead, Blood Vessel is a fun film due primarily to its strong story, but it still has room for improvement in my opinion.
NAZI GHOST SHIP
The strength of Blood Vessel is its storyline with a taut script that moved well from scene to scene.
For instance, when the castaways come upon the Nazi ship, the captain of this ragtag group decides to board it because he’s in charge. Not everyone is in agreement, but he’s calling the shots.
What’s interesting about this scene is that it sets up all the characters. By the end of this scene, I know who is who and what their agendas are. I also like many of them and am now interested in their safety.
It’s easy to get lost with more than six characters to deal with, but at this point, the scene serves two purposes. It builds character and moves the storyline along. Blood Vessel never wastes time moving from scene to scene, so it’s never dull.
Just as they board the ship, the captain is killed. Why is this important?
I think it sets the tone and places a horror marker here so that the storyline doesn’t get too mired in simply advancing the story.
It portends bad happenings for the crew too. Also, it sets up a more exciting dynamic for the others. Now no one is in charge, and they are set against each other.
The other factor I liked about this film is it paid attention to details. Many horror film directors sometimes forget that the story should flow logically, meaning the characters should be reasonable and make sensible decisions.
Even though horror is a fantasy genre, it should make as much sense as possible. But that doesn’t always happen.
I called this out in one of my reviews – The Bridge Curse. In one scene of this film, one of the main characters lingered in a college bathroom after a ghost grabbed him from underneath a bathroom stall and seriously burned his arm. Any reasonable person would’ve run out of that bathroom screaming into the night.
As the small group of castaways in Blood Vessel bicker on the ship’s deck, I’m thinking, why are none of them asking why the ship is seemingly abandoned.
Up until that moment, they didn’t have a good reason to assume it was completely abandoned. It only makes sense they’d immediately try to engage with a crew or at least expect to see someone.
But as if on cue one of them says, “You know what I think is strange. All this fighting and shouting, no one comes to see.”
This is a good point and one that had to be made. Dix didn’t have to add this in, but it calls attention to an obvious dilemma and adds an ominous moment for all of the survivors to ponder.
The film moves well from scene to scene, and Dix drops clues throughout, but not too much so that I’d figure it out too soon. At one point, I guessed exactly what was going on, but it was a satisfying moment because I had put these subtle clues together.
I also appreciated the film’s ending. Many stories excel with an interesting premise and strong beginning but get mushy in the middle, or it seems the director doesn’t really know how to end it, so it drags on or leaves an unsatisfying ending.
But not this film. It seemed like the ending was meant from the beginning and had the guts to be what it needed to be for a satisfying finale.
SOMEWHAT SCARY CREATURE
While the Blood Vessel story is unique and paces well, I wasn’t legitimately scared during the film – not even once.
Of course, I wasn’t bored and enjoyed the overall experience, but the lack of fear in a horror film is disconcerting. So what went wrong for me?
If you contrast Blood Vessel with a film like Host – six British friends summon a ghost on a Zoom call gone wrong – it’s easy to see why.
Because Host is so simple, writer and director Rob Savage relied heavily on every horror tension-building trick in the book with great reward. Through lighting, music, sound, delayed reactions and directing of the actors, he created a truly frightening experience. (Read my Host Review)
Blood Vessel didn’t do that as much. It moved through the scenes but didn’t maximize them for fear.
For instance, one of the scariest horror film conventions is based on the primordial fear that you know you’re in danger, but you don’t know exactly what’s going on. You’re in the crosshairs of a predator, but you don’t know where it is, so you can’t make an intelligent decision about where to run.
The combination of sheer terror and ambivalence about your next move is jarring. If you run, are you running toward it or away from it? All your instincts of flight versus flight are going off in rapid-fire, but both cancel each other out.
Great horror directors know how to leverage this fear to the point where we’re all squirming in our seats. I never had to stop watching the film or skip ahead to prevent myself from becoming overly frightened in Blood Vessel.
The film Scream employs this idea to perfection in its opening scenes. The scene’s star, Drew Barrymore, seemed to understand this and played it just right. It creates a satisfying combination as writing, directing and acting that all culminated into a perfect moment.
The best moment of Blood Vessel for me happened when one character was looking into a mirror. For a split second, she spies that which she is not supposed to see. Although the use of mirrors in horror films is as old as dirt, it still worked well in this case.
But after that, the film felt perfunctory like checking off a horror film to-do list.
Simply put, I wasn’t given time to be scared. As soon as I knew a character was in danger, the scene was over.
The other issue with the film is the makeup of the main monsters. While the makeup seemed rather expertly done, I think less would’ve been more.
I don’t want to give too much away in this film, but when the main creature finally showed up, it looked like a bipedal bat. While bats are basically flying rodents, which is an unappealing thought, they’ve cute little snub noses that make them look almost infantile. If you put that on a human with makeup, it doesn’t come off as scary.
If you take the ultimate scary monster, which is indisputably the xenomorph in the Alien franchise, what is it basically? That’s right – a bug. Now let’s look at another one – Jaws – that’s a fish. How about The Thing – what is that? Nobody knows. What about The Fly? Another bug. See a pattern?
It’s not easy to make a mammal scary because we’re mammals, and we have an affinity for them, but fish and bugs – not so much. Of course, there’s the werewolf, but that creature plays into another human fear – to be unwillingly changed into a monster.
So, if you take a human being and twist it into something disturbing like what happened in The Exorcist, you’ve got a more scary premise versus trying to turn a furry mammal into a monster.
Of course, there are exceptions. King Kong (1933) is a great monster, but I’m not particularly creeped out or scared of him. I had the same feeling about a film I recently watched called Monstrum, which I reviewed and recommend.
When Monstrum is finally revealed, it’s basically a pissed off Pekinese with a bad case of carbuncles and boils.
Although not visually scary, Monstrum proved to be an efficient killing machine. Its behavior made it frightening, and in the end, I had no sympathy for it, so the film’s conclusion felt more satisfying than it probably would have otherwise.
If the Blood Vessel’s makeup choice had made the main creature more human but twisted, it might have made a difference.
Also, the main creature served a purpose, but I never understood his motivations or how he came to be there. He seemed perfunctorily mean for reasons that I didn’t understand, so that might have been another lost opportunity.
A creature in a horror film is a character just like any other, so I usually want to know his or her motivations too.
FINAL THOUGHTS
I appreciated the original script and fast pace of Blood Vessel. It lacked some major scares that would’ve made it better. Also, if the main creature’s makeup had been less ambitious for the main monster, it might have helped too.
But overall, it’s a film worth seeing. I never felt bored or started flipping through my email or skipped ahead to see if I’d find better scares further along.
If you’re looking for a fun horror film with an interesting premise to watch, this one might be for you.
Let me know what you think in the comments below.
RATING: (Out of Five) 
