The Horror Show
Blood Widow
by Jeremiah Buckhalt
My inability to read tricked me into watching Blood Widow. I thought it was called Blood Window. I’m not going to lie, that sounded much more interesting to me. I probably would’ve enjoyed Blood Window more too. Some movies just push my buttons. Blood Widow pushed all my buttons, every single one.
A Young couple Hugh and Laurie have purchased their first house. Laurie thinks they need a step forward in their relationship and that’s what this house is supposed to be. However, Hugh hopes to create the ultimate party house instead. He invites over his friends who are all cliché stereotypes: the douche, the coward, the hippie, and the slut. That night they have a party and all their hipster friends come. The neighboring building is an abandoned boarding school. The basement hides the Blood Widow, a former student who murdered someone there years ago. The Widow slowly picks them off one at a time. Meanwhile, Hugh and Laurie’s relationship is strained by the stress of moving into a new house.
My problem with new slasher films is that they are trying to create the next Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees. When a movie tries to accomplish that, the killers always fall flat. The Blood Widow wasn’t remarkable enough to be the next big slasher. She didn’t do anything that I haven’t seen before. She’s too repetitive in this movie; she decapitated three people and cut the arms off two. The best death in the whole movie involved a cat o’ nine tails. I want to see crazy over the top and violent deaths that have never been done before. Slashers also often even have unique back-stories that are either relevant to the plot or the killer’s motives. The Widow’s back-story is vaguely touched on. Someone gave her a ring and either tortured her or raped her. Then she killed him one day. It’s really unclear and that just make me uninterested. The same problem goes with her motive. I’m not sure why she was even killing these kids. She just seems to go out of her way to kill people for no reason. Let’s face it, when we watch slasher films we’re here for the killer. We care about them and secretly root for them. It’s hard to care about them when we aren’t rewarded with anything. The reward can be history, motive, or crazy kills. Some new slashers have been successful in doing this. The “Hatchet” and the “Laid to Rest Series” are some examples. The Blood Widow did have a cool costume but that’s all she had going for her.
The actors’ performances were some of the worst I have seen in some time. The Widow did great but she didn’t really have to say anything. The cast seemed to have been relatively inexperienced, as such; they overact a lot. I can appreciate actors who want to try but it gets to that degree that it feels artificial. Sometimes bad acting can be forgiven; Laid to Rest is an example. A movie needs to make up for it somewhere else. If the acting was bad but the plot was good I could have overlooked it. The overall plot of Blood Widow initially seemed to be about the relationship between Hugh and Laurie but that quickly went nowhere. It became all about survival. What made Laid to Rest interesting is that the main character was running from a killer but she was also trying to find out who she was in the process. Nothing can be perfect but movies have to be give and take. Blood Widow just took.
My main peeve with horror movies is the use of stereotypes. Sure, stereotypes can very quickly make you feel like you know a character. You see a douche bag on screen and think to yourself, “Oh, I know a guy like that.” The problem with that is that you never really get to care about the character. They never develop into anything more than those given stereotypes. I absolutely despised the hippie artist character because her veins were absolutely flowing with cliché. This probably just hits close to home because I went to art school, but not all artists are hippies. They all don’t carry around statues of Buddha, they aren’t all feminists, and they all don’t celebrate the solstice. I was so happy when she died because I didn’t have to spend the rest of the movie listening to her talk. I personally like caring about my characters instead of hating them. That way, when they die, I actually feel sad to see them go.
From when I first misread this title, Midnight Release’s “Blood Widow” has been nothing but a disappointment. The film seemed to be either poorly filmed or edited. A lot of the exterior daytime shots seemed either underexposed or overexposed. The real kicker is that all the night shots or interior shots are perfectly balanced between lights and darks and nothing is lost. Any time someone would talk on camera it felt like the master volume was turned all the way up. I noticed this little feedback noise in the background of almost every scene. Then, people off camera would be super loud by comparison.
This movie, while I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone, has some good parts too. The costume, like I said before, was great. The Widow was genuinely creepy. I also praise the use of practical effects. In my opinion, practical effects will always look more realistic than CGI. Some of the kills, while nothing new, looked great. The knife through the throat kill was the best looking, (though not my favorite kill) some convincing make-up actually blew my mind with that one! Still, I knew I should have skipped this movie when I found out it was called Blood Widow, but it was something to watch, I guess.
Billy Wayne Martin, HMS
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