Family Blood

Family Blood (2018)

Dir Sonny Mallhi

Written by Vinessa Shaw, Sonny Mallhi

Starring Vinessa Shaw, James Ransone, Colin Ford

           

            It was only recently that it dawned on me that the modern wave of gloomy, glacial, uneventful indie horror films was the natural replacement for the waning fad of found-footage. Before FAMILY BLOOD, I kind of took it for granted that the recent wave of “Post-horror” films (as the movement was patronizingly dubbed by The Guardian), about which I wrote at length in my review of HEREDITARY, were, if maybe a bit misguided, at least in earnest. I might prefer a genre film that has some actual entertaining qualities to a film which is basically a slow-motion family drama with a scary soundtrack, but I assumed, mostly due to their cultural ascendancy in the last few years, that at least some people must feel otherwise. That these films were being made by people who wanted to make them and were expressing their own artistic inclination, misguided as they might be.

            Recent events, though, suggests a rather more disturbing possibility. After all, while the found-footage craze might have started with something of a formalist experiment, it flourished as producers noticed they could be made for almost nothing. Likewise, I suddenly wondered, what if the the “post-horror” wave *began* innocently, with a handful of indie wunderkinds paying tribute to DON’T LOOK NOW, but arrived as a movement for rather more sinister reasons, as producers suddenly caught on that audiences would pay for genre movies with literally no genre content at all, if they could pass themselves off as tasteful. I bet they didn’t even mind re-hiring the cinematographers “found-footage” had put out of a job, because you can shoot a perfectly professional-looking movie on a fucking iPhone now. And besides, it’s not the crew that ends up costing money: it’s the content. Found-footage was cheap because it made things so visibly illegible that you didn’t have to cough up a lot of dough for monster costumes or fake beheadings. The revelation producers had with “Post-horror” is that you don’t even have to hide your lack of content, as long as you dress it up as art.  

            I mean, how else to explain a movie as stunningly empty as FAMILY BLOOD? I refuse, refuse flat out, to believe this is a movie anyone wanted to make. This is not the kind of thing that artists make. Artists might make bad art sometimes, but even the worst of it at least betrays some flicker of human intent. This is not even the kind of thing exploitation producers used to make back in the grindhouse days to snag lowest-common denominator dollars. Those could also be bad, but at least they grasped that the point --however poorly-executed that might be in practice-- was entertainment. Maybe they didn’t have the budget to show you tits and gore and explosions, but they at least understood that’s what you would want to see. Even the most impoverished, indolent, artistically bankrupt shot-in-the-Philippines 1970s T&A trash would never dream of releasing a movie as openly unrewarding as this, and certainly no filmmaker with even a glimmer of artistic ambition would bother with something so flimsy. No, this is a movie that could only have been made for the Netflix era, that brief period in history when art was being produced not for the artist or for the audience, but for an algorithm. This is a movie made because Netflix must have content, dammit, and it really doesn’t matter what that content is, specifically, and it doesn’t matter one iota if anyone actually enjoys it, or for that matter if anyone even watches it. It just has to exist. It has to be there, so that the mathematically relevant demographics can see that they have a disorienting surfeit of content to select from, even if they would never even entertain the idea of actually selecting most of it.

            That does, unfortunately, necessitate that if this thing gets accidentally clicked on, 90 minutes of images will follow. And for some reason, I called their bluff and watched that 90 minutes. In it, director Sonny Mallhi (a producer of middlebrow horror trash and remakes going back to 2006’s THE LAKE HOUSE) and co-writer Nic Savvides propose an amazing, never-before considered high-concept hook: what if --and stay with me here—we did a vampire film, but it was a metaphor for addiction? Truly, a groundbreaking notion which has only ever been explored previously in every other vampire film ever made. But that’s not quite the whole concept, because Mallhi and Savvides came up with a crafty twist on the old canard, and amended their conceit thusly: what if we did a vampire film, but it was a metaphor for addiction, and then we took out the part where the vampires did things?

            I mean, give them this, at least; they really do put the “post” in “post-horror.” This is a movie about a vaguely-defined divorcee (Vinessa [sic] Shaw, THE HILLS HAVE EYES REMAKE, holy cow, EYES WIDE SHUT) with two kids (Colin Ford, UNDER THE DOME and Eloise Lushina, GRAYBEARD) who has been an addict. She was an addict, and she is currently in an AA-like recovery group, and that is literally as far as the movie cares to go in terms of characterization. Alas, on her way home from a meeting, somebody offers her drugs, and so obviously she takes them –I mean, what are you gonna do, refuse pills offered to you in public by some degenerate, slurring stranger? That would be rude-- and zones out in a public park, which leaves her open to vampire attack courtesy of this guy Christopher (James Ransone, The Wire, SINISTER) who converts her to vampirism, basically because he wants a girlfriend. So the rest of the movie is about her starting to crave blood and act like an addict, because you see, this is a metaphor for addiction, except not really since it actually establishes her as an addict in the text itself. So it’s not so much a metaphor as just a movie about an addict, except blood instead of crack or whatever so that we can sell it as a genre movie because let’s face it, nobody on Earth is going to be interested in this basic-ass addiction drama otherwise.

            You might think there’s more, but that’s it! She’s just an addict, and she does addict things, and her kids get angsty about her being an addict, and her new boyfriend shows her the lifestyle on account of her being an addict. That is the entire plot. Eventually the fact that Addict #1 is addict-y becomes a little too monotonous even for this movie, and the focus shifts to her son, who has to come to terms with the fact that mom is an addict. But it’s not like he’s any more complex or interesting than his mom, it’s still just a bedrock-basic, Lifetime Original Movie addiction drama except with vampires, except without vampires because almost everything interesting happens off-screen. Seriously; there’s eventually even a superpowered vampire fight, and it happens off screen. THIS AIN’T A FUCKIN’ VAL LEWTON PICTURE YOU DIPSHITS. THIS IS A VISUAL MEDIUM. SHOW ME SOMETHING.

            There are perhaps two brief but adequate spooky/stalking sequences in there, and it does get a little bit violent at the very, very end, but there’s just no movie here. This is insipid drama, and barely even horror at all. The cast mostly isn’t actively bad, but these characters are so wafer-thin that even calling them “characters” feels like a misnomer, and nobody here manages to even come close to overcoming that handicap. Even Ransone’s usual livewire nervous energy is quashed almost to nothing (it looks like he was cast entirely on the strength of vaguely resembling Jack Gyllenhall and then given the exclusive direction to “brood more”). In fact, despite being technically much more competent than many movies I watched this October, it managed to avoid the dreaded “unwatchable garbage” tag almost exclusively for the 2-4 seconds of twitchy oddness that Ransone manages to get through. There are worse movies in the world, but there can’t be many that manage to do less with what they have. WINTERBEAST may be terrible, but by God at least it tries to entertain. FAMILY BLOOD chooses not to. I would say that’s because it’s pretentious hipster faux horror that thinks entertaining is beneath it, but I don’t even believe that. I think they just figured they could get by without trying. Pretension is one thing; hell, even contempt is one thing. This just feels like not giving a shit.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2019 CHECKLIST!

For Richer or Horror

TAGLINE	Even a tagline would require more effort than this movie has in it.
TITLE ACCURACY	Family, check, blood, check.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	None
REMAKE?	None.
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Vampire, “post-horror”
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	Both Shaw and Ransone have dabbled in horror, but I wouldn’t call them icons.
NUDITY?	No
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	No
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	Animals end up getting attacked rather than the other way around
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	Vampire!
POSSESSION?	No
CREEPY DOLLS?	No
EVIL CULT?	No
MADNESS?	No
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	Human into vampire
VOYEURISM?	Nothing much, although I guess you could say than Christopher has been watching the family.
MORAL OF THE STORY	Horror movies which have metaphors are better than “horror” movies which are only metaphors.