The Blood Lands
My Review: What an exciting title, right? Surely this is some epic adventure into a nightmare world. Well,
SPOILERS FROM HERE ON OUT!, here is the entire plot of this movie in a single sentence leaving out not a single important detail: This British couple buys a house in Scotland, then a group of guys in pig masks show up during the night and chase them down, kidnap them, and dump them back in England somewhere. The end.
I
think they were going for “ooh, what a twist, they aren’t trying to kill them at all!” But who cares? I’m not okay with people stalking me to violently kidnap me either. Those people aren’t going to get up and say “Oh, those crazy fellows! Gee whiz!” and let the pig-men keep their house! The unfilmed aftermath is pretty straightforward: Police will go to the house and arrest all the guys who are now squatting there, and the people get their house back (which they’ll quickly sell, seeing as how they know now it’s a pretty bad neighborhood). Nobody wins! Everybody is unhappy.
But regardless of what a crappy plan it was, it’s just a crappy movie. It was tense and suspenseful, in the sense that the people were trying to escape through the woods and the pig-men were looking for them, but not much point in suspense by itself. There has to be a plot, and they didn’t bother with that. It just seemed like half of a movie. It seemed well-crafted, but it’s like if somebody crafted a Teletubbies movie really well. I still wouldn’t watch it. I was extra-mad because of the title and because I had been expecting ghosts (just guessing from the brief plot description). Nope, just pig men.
My Rating: 1/5 Potato Sacks.
My Movie Idea: I couldn’t really formulate any creative ideas while watching since this movie sapped all creativity from the room, but off the top of my head, if you’re gonna make “The Blood Lands”, how about some kind of epic adventure where a heavily armed ninja nun goes into a demonic underworld to recover her daughter’s soul that Satan has stolen? Also she has to battle demons (with machine guns and martial arts naturally) which we later discover are actually manifestations of her own true inner demons (she wasn’t always a nun, folks!), and in the end none of it is real, it’s just representative of the mental journey she’s going through in rehab as she gets clean to save her daughter from the abusive father who now has custody because she’s in rehab. And the very end of the movie is her in the real world doing nothing magical but standing up and being strong and getting him arrested and getting her daughter back. I mean come on, the three words of the title are the most creative thing in this movie.
