Blood Creek
(2009 / USA)
‘‘I’ve been seventeen longer than you’ve been alive’’
A poor German family settled in mid America, to farm and live off the land, receive a visit from a man who shows them his papers, and instruction from the homeland to take him in as their paying lodger. The year is 1936, the time of Hitler’s rule and his obsession with the black arts. The farm in which this rural family reside is set upon a formidably sized symbolic rune stone. Its properties believed to hold the secrets to life eternal !. An eerie occurrence is soon experienced by the young child of the family as she witnesses their guest, Herr Richard Wirth, bring a semblance of life back to her dead bird. An early sign of the ethereal embodiment Wirth is there to attain from his union with the rune stone. Over seventy years later, the time is now and the young girl is still living with her family at the same farm, on the same land. The girl is now a young woman of seventeen years of age, and like her family they have not aged since the first formative years of the stranger arriving at their door. The area is still and the land is lifeless, but a pernicious presence lingers and its secret cannot be contained any longer !.
Evan Marshall is a parent living apart from his estranged wife and beloved children. As an emergency paramedic he works all hours and barely survives on the minimal hours of rest afforded him. His elder brother Victor has been missing for over a year, which torments their house bound father, who blames Evan for all his perceived shortcomings. Victor was a soldier who went to war for his country whilst Evan stayed on the home front.
One dark night Victor returns to awaken Evan from his short period of sleep during the early hours. He is startled by Victors almost unrecognisable state, long haired, fully bearded, barely clothed, and covered in mud and grime. Most startling of all is his bared back, cut, lacerated and apparently fed upon !. Bloodied and beaten, but with an abundant driven determination about him, Victor tells his brother to grab whatever weapons he can. Evan has many questions but refrains from asking them, doing as his brother asks as Victor hurriedly showers and cuts the tangled, overgrown hair from his head and face. Just before dawn the two of them arrive together at the outskirts of a run down farm, a place of great pain and torture perpetrated upon Victor by the Wollner family !?. Victor asks of his brother no questions but to believe in him that what lies before them is retribution upon a god forsaken homestead of evil doers, responsible for his state of being and reason for his durational disappearance. Held captive and tortured for so long he feels bound to end this family reign of blood letting for himself and others who have not survived the ordeal, and to ensure no one else falls victim !.
What follows is an unrelenting juggernaut of fast paced, well staged, Action horror, splattered across the screen with all the gusto of an artist bringing a painting to life with each evocative stroke of the brush. Herr Wirth is unleashed to feast freely upon those gathered within the constraints of the property perimeter, their only hope for keeping him at bay being the symbolically signed home stead. Its entrance and windows blood etched in ancient hieroglyph to ward off Evil !. This Evil that stands at their door is however eternal and having immediately fed upon the blood of the livestock is almost at the peak of its power. This is the representation of Hitler’s vision for the master race. An undying, unyielding Arian juggernaut, spawned from the satanic embers of Hell itself.
Wirth conjures up a malevolent maelstrom as a necromancer, resurrecting the dead around him to use against the living, in order to cross the protective boundary keeping him from his final feast. Frenzied attacks upon the house and its few remaining living occupants follow. The most incredible of all, and one of the truly staggeringly original moments in recent screen horror, is the sequence involving a horse brought back to life and sent charging into the property. The sight of a possessed killer horse raising up and kicking out as it charges into the house with evil intent towards man is unbelievably well done !. Victor and Evan blast the beast with guns and hack at it with knife and cleaver to bring it down in the most out of control on screen savagery witnessed in quite some time. How the sequence is achieved without resorting to completely fake CGI will be open to viewer conjecture and discussion long after the movie closes. The cut and thrust of the movie lies in the solid direction and well staged Action of the piece, never allowing proceedings to falter for even a moment. The story is straight forward but unpretentious in its telling from start to finish. This then is a genuine little gem of a mid budgeted movie that gives its mainstream rivals a real kicking in the value for money, entertainment stakes.Unabashed, unrelenting and under the radar movie majesty doffs its cult in the making crown with Blood Creek. If this be the House Of F
Movie Rating: 8/10
Review by Paul Cooke / Source Region 1 NTSC DVD
Blood Creek (2009)
Director Joel Schumacher
With Dominic Purcell, Henry Cavill, Michael Fassbender,
Emma Booth & Rainer Winkelvoss ührer Frankenstein you are all urged to knock at its doors. Horror has come home.
Imagine The Evil Dead (1981) meets TV’s Supernatural, as on screen bothers Victor (Dominic Purcell) and Evan (Henry Cavill) play older, wiser, and tougher variants of Sam and Dean Winchester from the Cult show.
Evan is confused, but soon catapulted into an escalating myriad of madness and malignancy as evidence of dark forces envelope them. The two brothers storm the main homestead, violently shot gun blasting one of the male family members several times, only for him to still show signs of life !?. Victor wants answers from the head of the house Otto Wollner, but what he gets is of course not at all what it appears to be. Victor is not the only victim, and his return has set in motion an irreversible event that lets forth the true Evil.
How very refreshing, an exuberant horror to rejuvenate the genre and add great credence to the oft maligned straight to DVD rental market. Joel Schumacher revisits chiller cinema for the first time since Flatliners (1990) and delivers the goods with a gusto that harkens back to his cult hit The Lost Boys (1987). This one has sharp teeth in the shape of an immortal necromancer, spawned from an eternal dark evil resurrected by order of Hitler himself, condoning his predilection for the proliferation of a pure Arian race. An exercise in pure Evil that tortures the God loving family Wollner beyond their own mortal span, tearing at the fabric of time, feeding off the innocent, and straining at the bit to be unleashed upon the modern world. Terror in the form of malignant man is benign before a keeper, but once unshackled its inherent Evil shows no remorse in its rapacious cycle of carnage !.
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