Nazis, flesh-eating zombies, lesbians, and homicidal psycho babes...you get all that and more in the gristle 'n' grue-packed BLOOD SOAKED (2014), now on DVD from Wild Eye Releasing.
Not to say that it's a great film or anything--but it is lively. And if you like "over the top", writer-director Peter Grendle seems to be doing his best to deliver.
Mild-mannered Piper (Heather Wilder) is just settling into life at a new college when she meets Ashley (Rachel Corona), a free-spirited lesbian who practically sweeps her off her feet. There's an interesting catfight which takes place early on during an outdoor keg party, with Ashley getting physical with another girl who doesn't respond well to being propositioned. This leads to Piper and Ashley going off by themselves into the surrounding desert for some getting-to-know-you alone time.
But their fun excursion turns to terror when they encounter a very different pair of girls--sisters Sadie (Laina Cathryn Grendle) and Katie (Hayley Derryberry), a couple of extremely bloodthirsty blondes who have been living in an underground bunker ever since the death of their father, a Nazi scientist who was conducting experiments to create a race of zombie slaves.
That's about all I want to give away about the plot, especially since that's about all we need to know in order to sit back and enjoy the warped, splattery horror that this premise just can't help but generate.
Piper, bless her heart, gets captured by Sadie and Katie and chained up in their bunker of horror where bad things happen to her amidst wall-to-wall zombies whom the girls keep well-fed with the freshly-dismembered bodies of passing motorists. Her attempts to escape are suspensefully staged, with the occasionally shocking plot turn to keep us off-balance.
Eventually Piper manages to get a call out with her cell phone, but when her mom and boyfriend show up, things don't go quite as she'd hoped. This leads to a pretty violent and, yes, "blood soaked" finale in which...oops, there I go giving away too much.
Heather Wilder does a good job with all the constant crying and screaming she has to do after things suddenly turn way, way horrific for her character early in the film. The rest of the cast are all capable, especially Rachel Corona as Ashley and Laina Cathryn Grendle and Hayley Derryberry as the monstrous but somehow perversely appealing Sadie and Katie.
The film definitely has that low-budget look but is well directed with some nice photography. Director Grendle makes the odd choice of switching from color to black-and-white less than half and hour into the movie, which is fine with me since I love black-and-white but which may be a bit disconcerting for some viewers.
BLOOD SOAKED is too just-plain freaky to be taken seriously in any way, which is good because if it were any more realistic it would be unbearably depressing. As it is, it's a free-for-all of over-the-top carnival-ride horror that just about any gorehound should find entertaining.
(NOTE: I reviewed a barebones screener so I can't comment on special features.)
Buy it at Amazon.com
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