a review of 血船

TheQuietGamer
TheQuietGamer @TheQuietGamer
血船 - 评论

A beyond cleverly titled film that takes a compelling concept and makes it work on what appears to be a rather modest budget through a series of intelligent writing decisions and some solid vampiric action. By far the best thing this gets out of being set during World War II is that it's Allied Forces protagonists are a diverse bunch with a variety of different backgrounds and nationalities, which in turn leads to a lot of distinctive personalities. Instantly intriguing though they are, I'd be lying if I said they weren't a rather standard group of stock character archetypes so you can tell who the good ones are and who is going to suck right away. Still, the plot takes the time to ensure we get to know who they are and what makes them tick so that there's a real sense of loss when one of them bites (HA!) the dust. As for the monsters themselves, the movie pulls from the Romanian mythology of the Strigoi as opposed to the more modern interpretation of the creatures popularized by Bram Stoker's Dracula. This leads to them having more animalistic appearances that are brought to life by impressive prosthetic makeup effects given the scale of the project. In fact, the production quality as a whole is really good. You can see it isn't rocking Disney money or anything, but despite, or perhaps because of, taking place in such a small location the blood and other SFX look great. It's clear that co-writer/director Justin Dix and crew put in the necessary effort to develop this beyond just the cool core premise by doing things like fleshing out the cast so that you're actually somewhat interested in them, which is something we often catch grander works in the genre failing to do. They even borrowed a wider variety of powers/abilities from the folklore than what we typically get from vampire flicks, so the blood suckers have more creepy tricks on display than merely biting necks. All of which mean this has plenty going on for itself outside of the perfectly chosen name. Honestly, it stands as one of the best features on this particular type of the undead that I've watched to date. Serving as a fine example of what can be accomplished with a simple idea should the correct amount of care and attention to detail be placed into very basics that can bolster the strength of a picture to a far greater degree than they tend to receive credit for.