It’s that ghoulish time of year again, where all the CRaziEs come out and horror fans get to bask in their element; which includes watching horror movies on those brisk October nights. Over the years, yours truly bestowed upon you 13 Halloween Horror movie reviews. Last year, 7 Deadly Horror flicks were put on display. Some were classics! Others were decent. A few were so bad that one had to watch them anyway. This month, 6 Sinful Films are being unearthed to help guide my loyal readers through their tireless search in finding a worthwhile horror flick during the Halloween season. Watch at your own entertainment risk my lovely corpses!
(Note: These reviews will differ from my usual style. All horror movies are selected at random, so some could, and will, blow goats)
Blood Oath may look like it was constructed in the over-saturated slasher 80’s, but in actuality, it was created in the mid-2000s. So we’re assuming the filmmakers were paying homage (hopefully) to the decade of horror cliches and “so bad they’re good” B-movies.
Like most 80’s gore-fests, the story centers around a group of kids who decide to investigate a local legend far-off in the woods during a camping trip (feel free to yawn). And naturally, the legend is legit. A figure that is a rip-off of Leatherface, with a stalking style of Jason Voorhees, wields a monster farm-tool with a thick blade in-and-around a broken-down house where the urban legend originated from. Two couples are trapped in the house and fight for their survival against the crafty figure; that is apparently a disfigured woman, yet has the strength of the Friday the 13th icon.
If you really need to know the details of the film’s urban legend, it centers around a deformed child who was kept hidden by her parents, for the locals urged them to kill the oddity upon her birth. Obviously that crazy baby survived, grew up, and now roams the woods mutilating anyone who ventures in her area.
Anytime a horror antagonist has a go-to weapon of sorts, things just seem more suspenseful. In the early Nightmare on Elm Street installments, the fear built around avoiding Freddy’s razor-glove added some of that said suspense to the chase sequences. In later sequels, Freddy’s glove-kills were scaled back and the punch-line kill shot suffered from a lack of terror and excitement. With that said, the Norman Bates on steroids figure on display here does show a little variety as it uses brute strength to crush skulls and spines every now and then. And once the tortuous kills start to ramp up, you’ll look forward to every gruesome and painful death.
Again, since this low-budget production is riddled with laughable 80’s movie-making for the genre, we’re still assuming a lot of this was done on purpose. The acting is retched as it encompasses guys who would never be considered cool today (if ever). The girls are typical hysterical messes but they understand their role and do bless us with gratuitous boob shots and over-the-top acting. So if you go into this knowing that this is going for tongue-in-cheek campy slasher homage – showcasing the good and the bad of the genre from twenty-five years ago – this isn’t a bad watch for the season.
RATING: A slasher novelty act that runs gory red
Review by Joe Belcastro
