Review: BLOODED - Good Concept Made Into Drab Affair
rating: 1
A remote island, the hunters becoming the hunted, suffering psychical and mental torture at the hands of a masked enemy sounds like a Hollywood script right? If even half the events that take place in Blooded, the directorial feature of Edward Boase are true it is certainly an extraordinary story. Unfortunate then that the film is a rather drab affair, never finding it's feet as either documentary or drama. In 2005 five friends went deer stalking on the beautiful but remote Isle of Mull. One of those individuals was Lucas Bell, the face of the pro-Fox Hunting campaign in Britain, along with his best friend and hunting buddy Ben, ex-girlfriend Liv, his estranged brother Charlie and his girlfriend Eve. When the five awake, alone and naked in the freezing cold wilderness their hunting holiday quickly turned into a deadly game of cat and mouse between them and an extreme animal rights group called the Real Animal League. The footage taken by the RAL on handheld cameras would appear all over the internet with the title: If you HUNT you're FAIR GAME. Blooded tells the other side of the story featuring talking heads interviews with the victims combined with dramatic reconstruction of the extraordinary events. While watching Blooded I felt there was something too slick about the victims interviews, they just seemed too at ease in front of the camera. Sure enough it only took a trip to the IMDB to find out there are in fact two actors playing each character one in the dramatic reconstructions, one on interview yet there is no mention of this in the film. Even a fake TV interview with Lucas Bell (Neil McDermott) is made to seem completely real. Although I am sure the script is taken from real interviews it does not bode well when documentary film makers withhold such key information from it's audience. And as a result it's difficult to invest in the film as a true story when there is filter between us and the real life victims.
Blooded is just as much a failure on the dramatic front. The film spends twenty dull minutes establishing it's banal characters and their relationships before interest momentarily peaks when suddenly everyone wakes up, stripped to their underwear and in the middle of nowhere. To call the acting soap opera standard would be kind and while given the stunning local, the film is oddly televisual. At eighty minutes it may be short but Blooded could, and should have, filled an hour slot on the Discovery Channel. Blooded would have worked as a hard nosed documentary focusing on the political background of the events, the group behind it, even the internet viral itself and with something to say on the nature of extremism. Or it could have been a great horror flick that for once really could say it was based on actual events Neil Marshall would direct it with plenty of blood and scares and it would have proper characters with real relationships. The problem is that Blooded is neither of these things but a lowbrid of the two never getting close to doing justice to a fascinating story. Blooded is released in U.K. Cinema's, On Demand, and via Download tomorrow with the DVD release following on Monday