Bloodline

It’s been about a year or so that Kaity has been trying to work out a schedule for us to squeeze her into a presenter slot, but she has these silly obligations with symphony orchestras that make things difficult.

Enter Covid-19.

It. Is. On.

So this week, Kaity has provided, in an .mp4 file hosted on Box, the yeah-you’ve-never-heard-of-it IMDB-says-2013-but-the-credits-say-2011 there-are-lot-of-rando-movies-with-the-same-name-but-this-is-the-one-we-showed Bloodline, directed by…directed by…umm…the star of the film.  He’s called Matt Thompson.  You haven’t heard of him. But he’s a Sacramento guy.  Born in Roseville, ten years younger than me…my God.  This movie was shot nine years ago, and he’s ten years younger than me.  Nah, I haven’t wasted my life or anything.  He was freaking 8 years old and riding a BMX around the neighborhood when I came to college.

ANYWAY

Please don’t take my dismissals of this movie as pure bitterness.

And I say that for a reason.  Kaity didn’t select this film because it was GOOD.  She selected it because she played bass (as in string quartet bass, not electric bass) on the soundtrack.

D. Kern Holoman not available for comment

But that’s the end of the film.  How does it start?

I regret that I have but one pellet to discharge for my film, I mean, at least, until I repack with saltpeter, sulphur, and charcoal…

Well, in the deep past, a few years after this thing they called the American Revolution.  It’s not remotely clear *where* it happened.  If we were to take a guess based on, say, the second 15 minutes of the film, we’d say it happened in about…Kyburz, California.  There weren’t a whole bunch of New England revolutionary dudes in Kyburz in the 1780s, so I think we have to assume that Northern California is standing in for something more New Englandy.  OK.  That’s disbelief I can suspend.

So these revolutionary dudes kill some Native Americans, and there’s an amulet going on, and, like, I dunno.  It’s supposed to set up a legend or something.

…because most car accident victims evaporate into experience points for you to collect before they float out of range, amirite?

Enter modern times. Our hero Brett “at least it’s an” Ethos is going to turn out to be a descendant of the amulet people, but for now, he’s an orphan…

They call us “the Osprey”

…who is about to matriculate to the priesthood, because that’s what his mama wanted.  Now, he’s got the whole Bible memorized (and still, he carries an impossibly small copy in his back pocket), but the priesthood looks to be the wrong thing for him, as he’s all about the boing-boing and jealous of families with kids and that kind of thing.

Pretty sure that red building turned into a ramen house

I’m pretty sure this is like 19th and S in midtown Sac.  It’s definitely a light-rail crossing, I think it’s the one I kept getting stuck at when going to my buddy’s house before he moved to the Pocket.  Just pointing this out.  We are NOT in New England.  As the Folsom Symphony Orchestra might give away.

Gavin Newsom is over-reaching on this Covid thing

But again…ignoring the fourth-wall stuff and getting back to the film, Brett’s pal Kevin (and their NYC buddy Davey – the fat guy, for the record) and Kevin’s hottie girlfriend Chelsi (spelynge opshunull) and Brett’s old crush Katie (invited on the sly by Kevin – what a pal!  No, seriously!) head out to some random cabin in the woods (by Kyburz, I’m TELLING you.  Maybe Strawberry.  It’s up the 50.  Have you been up the 50?!?  IT’S UP THE 50!) that was previously owned by Brett’s grandfather (who recently died under completely and totally unspecified circumstances) and I’ve lost the track of this sentence (surprising).  Anyway, they’re headed out to a cabin in the woods for a sort of priesthood bachelor party for Brett, and Kaity said that the film was kind of a film the sort of which are parodied by Cabin In The Woods but to be honest I think it’s more like a film the sort of which are parodied by Tucker And Dale Vs. Evil, but that’s neither here nor there.

I’m just kidding, dog-gone-it…unless you’re gonna do it

Following a bizarre encounter with a “park ranger” with his credentials cheap-ass stenciled onto a Ford F-150 and having their SUV bizarrely totaled by running into an imaginary dog (not just a dog, but an IMAGINARY DOG) (NO SERIOUSLY, SOMEHOW IT TOTALED THE SUV) (IN THE MIDDLE OF THE WOODS, SO THEY’RE CONVEEEEEEENIENTLY STRANDED) (I’M NOT KIDDING, IT WAS TOTALED BY HITTING AN IMAGINARY DOG) the kids are forced to hole up in the cabin they were going to anyway.  But they don’t have a car that they can conveniently leave in once the bowel movements hit the rotary electric air mover.

For the record, the SUV eventually disappears.  Just gone.  But seeing as you might imagine there’s going to be a good deal of death in this film, who really cares about a missing SUV?  Nobody.

I got a pair of Kings.  I Kings and II Kings, GET IT?!?  GET IT?!?

So, to be fair, for the first half of the film, outside of the imaginary dog (Imaginary Dog Corrects Owner, No One Is A Visible Boy) there’s not really any reason for us to believe that anything untoward is going on.  We’ve got kids, at a cabin, they’re playing poker of one sort (and then “poker” of another) and, you know, it’s a pretty normal weekend.

Is “Rhode Island Red” a euphemism for “belly”?

I mean, you know, until the fat fifth wheel had to wear THAT shirt.  Damn, at this point somebody GOTTA come and snuff the rooster.

Wait…you can get YOURSELF pregnant?!?

I don’t have much to say about this picture.  But this is more or less the time that the film’s classic never-to-be-forgotten line is uttered: “Kevin, check the kitchen for weapons, Katie, get your walking stick, Davey – the bedrooms.”

Katie, get your walking stick.

Immortal.

Now THAT’S Hanlon’s Razor!

Eventually, the park ranger who is totally not a park ranger (we know this thanks to the doomed-to-death hikers who set up a tent not too far from the cabin, enough about them, they’re dead) shows up and seems to know a lot more about the situation than most park rangers know.

Jim Henson’s Indiana Jones Babies are going to throw the amulet into a bar fire

He knows what this amulet on Brett’s necklace means.  And, to be fair, that’s more than Brett knows, and more than WE know by the end of the movie, but clearly it’s meaningful in some sort of ancient Indian burial ground sort of way.  I mean, we got people being killed, and then they have black eyes, and then they aren’t dead anymore but come back to destroy everybody (or in the case of the fat dude we just drop that plot line…no, seriously, we’ve got an undead fat dude who is dead and then resurrected and then just falls out of the film) and frankly, I don’t think this movie knew what was going on any more than I did.

This is a mortal sin, not a venial sin, a mortal sin in fiction.  I mean, sure, the author is supposed to know more about the characters than the reader, but the reader is supposed to know SOMETHING.

Chelsi, get your walking stick

I definitely took too many screenshots of this movie.

It’s a curse.  Watch a movie in person and you gotta search for images and hope you can find something capturing the great moments on the wasteland of Google Images.  Watch a movie on your computer in .mp4 and you keep pausing it for screenshots.  Hey, look, the blonde is crying and Beavis looks like Kevin Bacon!

I don’t understand why my glass keeps filling with scotch (ed.)

OK, so death is all around, and the fat dude is undead, and Kevin is undead, and all of a sudden Red Ledbetter shows up and he seems to know all about the amulet.  Not that he explains anything.  But he’s pretty certain that the undead dudes can’t get our protagonists if they’re in the cabin.  That makes sense, from a completely arbitrary point of view.

Oh no, it wasn’t the amulet.  It was Kevin killed Naomi Watts.

As the movie goes forward, Chelsi becomes asymptotically closer and closer to Naomi Watts.  But she’s dumb, and she dies.  Or maybe becomes undead.  Or dies.  Like, we don’t see her again, but the mythology is a bit unclear here, so…maybe there’s a sequel?

I’m pretty sure I helped Will DeBello and Doug Totten code for this

Scary screech-owl undead hiker scares Brett and Katie.  It happens.

Then, the movie ends mostly…visually, with a bunch of incongruent cops in the wilderness.  Brett stabs the suddenly undead Katie, and then she’s OK, and she’s moved from undead to unstabbed, but Brett ends up in a cop car with a black-eyed cop and this can’t at all be good.  The End.

I really don’t have much of an idea what happened here.

Look, I’ve given this movie a seriously hard time.  And it deserves it.  But – for a crappy movie, it had a TON of good things going.  First off, the score was seamless.  There was literally never a moment that you said, “wow, this score is ass.”  I credit Kaity.  But seriously, the score was of a quality that you’d expect in a $100M horror movie.  They nailed it.  Whoever composed this score knew exactly TF what they were doing.  And the Folsom Symphony Orchestra brought that vision to life.

On top of that, for as poor as the screenplay of this film was, there was a lot to like here.  The cinematography was very good.  Not the best I’ve ever seen (thanks, The Fall) but for a small-budget movie likely shot on an iPhone, it delivers WAY more than I expected, and it has iconic (if not original) shots of boots walking and the like that are NOT characteristic of your typical low-budget film.  There’s minimal CGI, but what there is is pretty seamless.

And, what I think is the biggest strength of the film, the spontaneous moments (honestly, likely not strictly scripted) are more true-to-life than you’ll ever see in a Hollywood film.  You want to see bantered B.S. between a group of college-aged students who know each other really well?  This movie nails it.  I’ve LIVED that crap.  This movie understands in the way a blockbuster never can.  A blockbuster has a writer who either never went to college (or did so 15 years ago and didn’t have any friends) imagining what it’s like to hang out with the crew and have spontaneous moments.  This movie puts a crew together and films the spontaneous moments.  I’ve probably never seen a movie understand what it’s like to be young and carefree in college as this movie does.  You know, I mean, excepting the undead black-eyed murder people.