Blogorium Horror Review: Blood Runs Cold

 Blood Runs Cold is a not very good movie with a weird twist.Okay, the twist is less what happens in the film but what the cast and crew try very hard to pass themselves off as - an American slasher movie Things start out okay but boy does this movie get worse over the course of 74 minutes.. It does have a cool title card, though:

 Winona (Hanna Oldenburg) is an artist looking for some downtime, so her manager (Ralf Beck) sets her up in a cabin in the mountains of North Carolina. She goes into town and runs into her ex-boyfriend Rick (Patrick Saxe), his friend Carl (Andreas Rylander) and Carl's girlfriend Liz (Elin Hugoson). They go back with Winona to her cabin and have some drinks. Little do they know that a mad killer is lurking around nearby, one with a taste for human flesh...

 So are you ready for the twist? Remember how I said the film is passing itself off as an American slahser film? Notice how those names don't look or sound remotely American? That's because this film isn't even kind of American.It's Swedish. However, at every opportunity, the film tries to demonstrate that this wasn't made in Stockholm, Sweden. From the GPS to the English dictionary to the props that are mostly in English to the Budweiser to the map that I'm pretty sure would lead Winona to the middle of Raleigh  and not a remote cabin based on this address:

  Now, it could just be a coincidence, but that's such a specific combination of arbitrary information that happens to also be a real area in North Carolina (that the Cap'n happens to also be aware of) that I have to wonder if it was chosen randomly or if I just happen to be the one blogger that would know that 27601 is nowhere near the mountains in North Carolina. In fact, it's not far from where I'm writing this. But I digress, let's stick with the Blood Runs Cold and let a minor detail like that go.

 The film kind of looks good for the first thirty minutes, utilizing some interesting tracking shots and camera angles (if not perhaps relying too heavily on the latter). Blood Runs Cold is sparse on the killing after a pre-title sequence murder, waiting until nearly the halfway mark of a 74 minute film the first blood is shed on-camera. Tension builds, sometimes successfully, sometimes arbitrarily (why some characters don't see the killer when he's in plain sight more than once was a sore point for me), and there's some double gratudity, probably because slasher movies are supposed to have sex scenes, right?

This brings me to a broader point, actually; I'm not really sure what writers Tommy Wiklund, David Liljeblad, and director Sonny Laguna were trying to do with Blood Runs Cold. Was the point to prove that Swedes can make an interchangeable slasher film just like Americans can? Did they really think that just because everybody is speaking English that we wouldn't notice immediately the thick accents that come and go? Or am I digging too deep here? It's possible they just wanted to make a low budget horror movie, in which case I forgive the use of what really looks like "day for night" photography and sloppy shot selection when the killer finally gets to work. IMDB has the budget listed at around $5000, and I'll tell you it looks much better than that meager amount. They did the best with what they had, so credit where credit is due, even if Blood Runs Cold is (really) rough around the edges.

 Okay, so now that I've been as nice as I could be, I think there are a few things that need to be addressed, but are without a doubt going to spoil the second half of the film, so you've been warned.


 SPOILERY DISCUSSION OF WHY THIS IS NOT A GOOD MOVIE: For me, things really fell apart after the killer hunts down and decapitates Rick. I'll let it slide that he walks two cabins over and finds the partly cannibal, partly zombie killer munching on his friend's girlfriend. It's not so much that scene as what happens after Rick dies. Okay, so Winona wakes up, walks downstairs, has breakfast, and then finds Liz's blood all over the living room. At first it seems like this really bothers her, but then she calmly fills a bucket with water, cleans up the blood nonchalantly, and then takes the trash outside.

 So yeah, not very logical, but I really don't understand why it isn't until everyone but Winona is dead to reveal that she went to the wrong cabin. Or that the killer somehow decided to leave her alone after killing her friends for the rest of the day. It isn't until she's been standing around the house doing not much at all that the killer WALKS PAST THE WINDOW WITH AN AXE AND POINTS AT HER, like he's saying "you're next!"

 Then she finally gets nervous, then hysterical, and then calm again in what amounts to 25 tensionless minutes of "cat and mouse." By the time she got to the ice cave / lair of the killer, I really stopped caring that her manager was driving around, waiting to be killed. Sure enough, he dies, and the logic completely collapses in Blood Runs Cold. It started out with promise, but really dropped the ball by the time Winona WALKS PAST the killer because he's too busy turning the manager's corpse left and right.The film has THREE writers and that's the best they could come up with? The less said about the final ten minutes, the better. I'll be nice again and just say that nothing that happens makes sense.

 So yeah, maybe you should not watch this. Unless you get a kick out of pointing out logical fallacies like "why can't she pull down that plywood with the hammer she's holding?" I really didn't think that a movie that just barely qualifies as "feature length" would feel twice as long, but those last 20 minutes take forever to slog through.