Reviews: Blood Punch

After a long wait, festival favorite Blood Punch is finally released on DVD and VOD on September 1st.

"Things are about to get interesting!"

Imagine a darker, more violent, disturbingly strange version of Groundhog Day on a low budget worked to its maximum effort and you end up with Blood Punch, a film that's been ignored for far too long. 

Director Madellaine Paxson takes former Power Rangers R.P.M. actors and turns their respective kiddie entertainment days into a blood soaked hundred minutes of repeated carnage blended with edgy dark humor that sets Blood Punch far ahead of the current pack of meager budgeted horror films starring lesser known actors. With a bullet and knife addled story based somewhere between the Twilight Zone and meth fueled film noir, Paxson scores big by creating a subversively humorous motion picture that will satisfy the appetites of horror fans everywhere, even though this mixes numerous genres fluidly. 

Starring a mismatched trio of actors that have worked together before, the chemistry is nearly impeccable as all three throw themselves onto the sharp blade of death time and time again. The seductively sassy Olivia Tennet does her best to work her cutesy charms while Milo Cawthorne and alpha male Ari Boyland duke it out for her affections. The three of them have a magnetic dynamic  that takes what could have been a lesser known indie flick and turns it into a mesmerizing series of events that loses some realism due to poor sound design and the annoyingly repetitive use of fade outs. Yet, Paxson does a masterful job of leaving years of children's tv writing at the cottage door as she makes large gains in the directorial department. In the hands of lesser talent, Blood Punch wouldn't be as silly, engaging, or as genuinely perverse. 

"This movie is presented by big tobacco."

Blood Punch has been sitting on the shelf since 2013 due to the lack of distribution. Finally, it's getting some proper respect with a VOD and DVD release. The team behind this unknown gem deserves some respect for trying something new in the current landscape of cash starved genre entries. If this were to cut heads with stuff like Sinister 2 or the lackluster Insidious 3, I would take this any day. Despite some strangely shot gun sequences and those pesky fades, Blood Punch has a lot of heart that will hopefully gain Paxson some indie cred and the possibility of a feature with more financial backing. It's nowhere near perfect, but stays abundantly true to the unique story they set out to tell. 

I've seen a lot of smaller films like this over the years. Sometimes you put the cart before the horse and judge a book by its cover. In the case of Blood Punch, I was expecting another brainless dud. What I ended up getting was an inventive feature by a director that deserves her due respect. Blood Punch is an amalgamated recipe of genre ideas thrown into a slow cooker of indie goodness that uniquely churns out a satisfying dish of unadulterated fun.

Score

-CG

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