Crew
Director – Sonny Mallhi, Screenplay – Sonny Mallhi & Nicolas Savvides, Producers – Greg Gilreath, Adam Hendricks & John Lang, Photography – Larkin Donley, Music – The Newton Brothers, Visual Effects – Clean Plate FX (Supervisor – Lukas Kunzman), Makeup Effects – Trevor Thompson, Production Design – Jessi Walsh. Production Company – Divide-Conquer Productions.
Cast
Vinessa Shaw (Ellie), James Ransone (Christopher), Colin Ford (Kyle), Eloise Lushna (Amy), Ajiona Alexus (Meegan), France-Jean Baptiste (Ms Jensen)
Plot
Ellie is a recovering addict attending AA and trying to piece life back together for her and her two children Kyle and Amy. In one of the meetings, she meets Christopher, a fellow addict. While she is in the park having nodded off, Christopher comes to her and drops some of his blood into her mouth. Afterwards, Ellie is changed and cannot stomach food and wants only blood. The children think she is slipping back into her old ways. Christopher comes insisting he can guide Ellie to a new life as a vampire.
Family Blood (2018)(2018)was the second film as director for Sonny Mallhi, who had begun work as a producer on films for Roy Lee such as The Lake House (2006) and Shutter (2008), plus other works like House at the End of the Street (2012) and At the Devil’s Door (2014), and especially for Bryan Bertino with The Strangers (2008), The Monster (2016) and The Dark and the Wicked (2020). Mallhi wrote the script for The Roommate (2011) and then made his directorial debut with the horror film Anguish (2015) and subsequent to this went on to make Hurt (2018). The film was distributed by Blumhouse.
The initial pitch for Family Blood (2018)(2018)of vampires lurking around an AA meeting sounded an amusing one. It suggested something that was similar to Larry Fessenden’s Habit (1997) with maybe a few dashes of the early scenes of Fight Club (1999) added to the mix. It unfortunately never ends up being quite that interesting.
I struggled to find some basic plausibility in the film’s set-up. It stabs in the direction of the AA (or NA process) without really doing anything to portray the people or their struggles believably. The process as seen here seems to consist of no more than people standing up to say “I’m ___, I’m an addict.” Vinessa Shaw does not seem a believable character. She is someone just beginning to get over addiction, get her life back in order and returning to the workforce, yet she seems able to magically afford a multi-storey, multi-bedroom apartment for her and her children, the sort that most working families would dream of being able to have, let alone a single parent at the bottom of the employment ladder.
James Ransone is an actor who has bubbled away in small, supporting parts, usually as ineffectual nerds or deputy types. The role he gets here is one that allows him to step over to the dark side, which he does not too badly. The film’s greatest crime though is not giving us enough of him and focusing almost entirely on the more familiar scenes of Vinessa Shaw as she undergoes transformation. There is also the rather daft effect of the vampires having a set of rotted teeth and having to wear dental caps over the top.
However, after Vinessa Shaw undergoes her transformation, Sonny Mallhi seems to lose focus. In these scenes, Family Blood (2018)(2018)could have gone several ways – as an ordinary domestic work about the horror of a mother trying to hold her family together while driven by a horrible need; or else her surrender to or struggle against a dark charismatic figure like James Ransone. However, Mallhi takes a soft focus approach where nothing much happens – well, quite a bit does in that several people are killed but Malhi never seems to raise the level much beyond a muted domestic drama where people give long, meaningful stares at one another. There is the odd perverse image like Vinessa on her hands and knees licking up the drops of blood spilled from a cut by her son.
The most interesting scenes are those at the climax where the son (Colin Ford) accidentally stakes his girlfriend (Ajiona Alexus) and is left the choice of whether to have her brought back to life as a vampire against his sister having called the police, but the scene just peters off into no real climax. None of this strikes much beyond the clean and anodyne film that we get where Sonny Mallhi seems to lack any ability to push either the depiction of addiction or vampirism over into the visceral.
Trailer here