DVD Review: Blood River

Posted on February 26, 2012 by Deaditor 2 Comments

Review by Annie Riordan

Never take a short cut through the desert. It didn’t work in The Hills Have Eyes; not the original or the remake OR any of the sequels. It didn’t work in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre; not the original, or the remake, OR any of the sequels. It didn’t work in Reeker, which had a sequel but hasn’t been remade yet – it’s been 6 whole years, wonder what’s taking so long? Anyway, my point is that taking a short cut through a barren, hellish wasteland where no one lives and cell phone signals are nonexistent is a bit like slapping a JESUS HATES FAGS bumper sticker on your car and driving 5 miles and hour through the Castro district on Gay Pride Parade day. In short: it’s stupid and you deserve all of the pain that you will undoubtedly get.

Apparently, neither whitebread 1%er Clark, nor his recently acquired and newly pregnant wife Summer bothered to consult the horror movie handbook before departing LA and striking out across the lonely back roads of the American southwest. They’re on their way to tell Summer’s parents about the baby on the way, a meeting which Clark isn’t really looking forward to for unspecified reasons. It’s not like he’s knocked up the prom queen – they’re a legit married couple, and it’s not Summer’s first go-round on the baby carousel: she’s got a kid from a previous marriage stashed back home with a baby sitter.

After a night in a squalid hotel the couple are off once more, but just fifty miles out their front tire blows harder than a breaching whale and leaves them bloodied and stranded in the middle of nowhere. Shaken but reasonably unharmed, they decide to hoof it to the nearest town, a fly speck on the map called Blood River. Any hope of finding help, water or an air-conditioned Triple AAA branch office with a fully gassed tow truck in the garage are shot to hell once they enter the city limits: Blood River is a ghost town, populated by rusty cars, dead animals and blow flies. But wait! Out of the shimmering heat mirage emerges a figure! Hey, it’s that creepy hitchhiker we passed the day before, the one in full cowboy regalia whose squint could put Clint Eastwood’s to shame! His name is Joseph, and while Summer eagerly accepts his company, Clark is wary of the stranger, who speaks in Bible verses and looks like the lost brother of Merle and Daryl Dixon.

Leaving Summer behind in the shade with a gun for protection, the menfolk strike out in search of a solution to their problem. But both Joseph and Clark know that there’s no way out of this mess, and it’s about to get a whole lot messier.

And it does. There’s blood, lies, betrayal and death. There’s corpses aplenty littering the desert floor. But who is the bad guy? Hard to say. And the story – tense, well acted and incredibly riveting nearly all the way to the end – isn’t telling. Bad things happen, but we’re not entirely sure what they are. In the end, you’re left to make up your own mind. Was this a purgatorial tale of near death redemption, or is it a Preach-A-Thon ripped straight from the Book of Matthew?

Muddy morals aside, it’s worth a watch. The film has a beautiful look, like a carcass picked clean by vultures: morbid but stunning. No less impressive is the acting. If you don’t mind having to think a little bit and apply some of your own logical assumptions, you’ll probably enjoy this gritty little psycho-thriller, which relies less on gore than it does on emotional pain.

I won’t lie – plenty of people will walk away from this pissed off and muttering: “What the fuck was THAT about?” And to them I would say: “Not sure. But it was pretty awesome to watch, you gotta admit.”