Bloodstream (1985) User Reviews

Low budget, high ideas

[BandSAboutMovies · 4/10 · 29 October 2021]

Michael J. Murphy made some berserk movies. I mean, Invitation to Hell is something. And this is perhaps stranger, made after Murphy got screwed over on the profits for that movie and Last Night and put 400 pounds worth of cash into this one, in which director Alistair Bailey is fired from a project by notorious VHS distributor William King, who is using his footage and not paying him. That means that Bailey feels entirely justified in wearing the disguise from the movie and filming his own sequel in which all the murder is real.

The depression that the director goes into also makes him watch too many movies - I feel attacked - and that means that we get a possession film, a post-apocalyptic movie, a zombie film and several more ripoffs including a very close to Naschy werewolf film, as well as a killer willing to see dogs on fire to prove a point. It's also the rare slasher that has a killer that uses a gun, which is interesting.

I mean, this is a movie that starts with a man tearing his own face off and has a secretary willing to screw her boss over to the point that her new boyfriend kills him. And I realize that these shot on Super 8 wonders aren't great, but man, they have heart. And intestines. And eyeballs.

A Forgotten Relic of the 80s...And For Good Reasons.

[Illyngophobia · 3/10 · 30 December 2015]

While doing work for a horror forum I'm apart of, I came across this by Michael J Murphy (who ASlashAbove dubbed the "Ted V Mikels of the UK"). Curious, I tried looking for any information I could on this, and constantly came up short; only being able to find stills or very short clips of the various death scenes.

To sum up the plot briefly; "Horror director Alistair Bailey is fired by VHS distributor William King. He believes that his film has been trashed but soon discovers that King tricked him and is planning to globally sell the movie. Bailey decides to don the same disguise as the one used by the antagonist in his film and make a new feature. Only this time the effects will be real!" On paper, the idea isn't too bad. It's the execution that killed it. The characters are fairly bland, and I forgot more than half their names up until the last twenty or so minutes of the movie--though how much of this is due to the writing or the already cheap-ish acting is anyone's guess.

As the protagonist; Alister never really won me over emotionally, or got me to take pity or sympathy on him. His situation was cruddy, sure. But he never got me to root for him when he sought revenge on those who wronged him. The same is also true for the antagonist, William. He was somewhat sleazy, but didn't do anything to make me truly dislike him--since I never got enough from Alister to really care. And in the middle we have Nikki, one of William's employees who takes pity on Alister and one of the main focus points in the movie. She's by far the more...suspect of the characters, and is sketchy at best with her intentions and may or may not be full of plot holes which will make things more difficult later.

The technical aspects are just okay at best. It's not terrible by any means, but not too great either. I would say it's similar to "555" if I had to be honest. The visuals are far more pleasant than the audio, which can kick in and out; going from being alright to sounding muffled or that they're far away (however, this could be due to the quality of the version of the movie that I found online).

The effects, including the murders, are rather mediocre at best. And for a budget that was estimated to be around £400 (assuming inflation went up 2% a year, we're talking just a bit above £910 today in 2015), it shows. While the kills were creative and ambitious, which I'll give the movie credit for, quite a few of them felt really cheap and were badly fake to where it was slightly cringe-worthy.

The most damning thing about the movie is the runtime, which is 76 minutes. This wouldn't be too bad if it wasn't for one thing, which is that a good portion of the movie is nothing but clips of what I believe are Alister's other movies or his dream sequences which don't move the plot or story further; making it feel like something out of "Sledgehammer", "Death Nurse", or even "Las Vegas Bloodbath" with how much pointless filler there is to push the story along.

How would I rate this on a scale from 1-10? I have to give it a 3. It's not an awful movie, but it's certainly really dry and flat. It's one of those movies where you see it once and sure you don't watch it again after that, barely being fitting enough to be considered a "popcorn flick". Murphy sought to make a commentary about the film industry, and it blew up in his face, as no distributor wanted anything to do with it. Irony much?

3//10

"Four pints of beer, a chicken madras and a horror video"

[Stevieboy666 · 7/10 · 18 June 2023]

I have been addicted to horror for over forty years but it's only in the last six months or so that I have discovered the micro budget films of British movie maker Michael J Murphy, "Bloodstream" being my second dip into the wonderful blu-ray box set celebrating his career. And it did not disappoint! Apparently it never had an official release but was available on bootleg VHS - until now! We get gore right from the start, the flesh on a man's face starts peeling off, some zombies rip open a man's gut and start munching on his innards. Throughout it's approx 80 minute running time we are also treated to an Egyptian mummy, more zombies, psycho killers, vampires, cannibalism, an exorcism, a werewolf, sex and female nudity. The main killer, himself a film director, films his murders thus making a "snuff" movie. Despite the obvious very low budget and trashiness I really enjoyed this movie and for me that's the most important thing.

A a feral, celluloid creep-out for the discerning, late-night curry crowd.

[Weirdling_Wolf · 9/10 · 8 February 2021]

It's certainly frustrating to think about how so few no-budget horror films have the towering tenacity, the overarching ambition of glass-ceiling smashing splatter mad-hatter Michael J. Murphy's quixotic, pseudo-legendary psychodrama, 'Bloodstream' (1985) a feral, celluloid creep-out for the discerning, late-night curry crowd, a righteously frenetic cinephile wet dream while demonstratively lacking the polish and production value the extra 75 quid might have given the final product; bravely defying logic, the narratively febrile filmmaker Murphy goes off-piste, frequently taking the road less traveled and proceeds to up the cinematic ante at any given opportunity, not only shooting the main story arc of disgruntled director Alistair Bailey's grisly, not entirely unjustified revenge, the hyperbolic 'film-within-a-film' milieu works tremendously well for much of the film's 1 hr 23 minutes duration, an especially laudable feat considering the profound budgetary privations he would have to so consistently surmount. The penurious, perhaps naive, eternally hopeful neophyte horror impresario Alistair Bailey is a marvelous cipher for any number of equally frustrated genre filmmakers similarly thwarted by the malign machinations of a duplicitous producer, in this case the fabulously despotic William King who contrives by wholly devious means to contractually steal the film away from the apoplectic Alistair and later release 'Bloodstream' for a considerably increased financial reward, the ceaselessly ruthless and entirely parasitical King making for an eminently despicable nemesis! Without pausing for B-movie breath we are headily plunged into a vibrant kaleidoscopic craziness which proves singularly fascinating, this fractured, chaotically macabre movie melange, brusquely cutting from one lurid, gore-spattered non sequitur colourfully represents the increasingly disturbed mind of paranoid filmmaker Alistair Bailey, uncomfortably bringing Peeping Tom's equally deranged 16mm camera wielding maniac Carl Boehm to mind as he so methodically undertakes his brutal retribution, every grim, bloody detail of his transgressors death being captured unflinchingly on film. There's a coruscating rawness to Michael J Murphy's 'Bloodstream' which evokes the very ragged best, or delirious worst of Roberta Findlay/Ted V. Mikels psychotronic drive-in madness, its low brow, high cholesterol celluloid is blissfully bad for your health! The 'acting' is deliciously monotonous and frequently hilarious which merely increases the illicit frisson of watching an unrepentantly trashy film replete with such a withering disdain for good taste, outsider cinema like this by all rights should be celebrated for their idiosyncrasy and rewarded with a lovingly restored Blu-ray/DVD.

Nasty low budget Brit flick

[alistairc_2000 · 10/10 · 2 May 2021]

B grade horror made with a micro budget. Murphy was the British Dholer. He just loved making movies. Never getting the success he craved not the success he deserved.

This is my forth Michael J Murphy movie. Every movie I have seen I just look at it and wish the guy had been given a budget.

So a nasty film distributor has taken the lead characters movie and is selling it around the world for a huge profit whilst the filmmaker gets nothing. Axe comes to mind. This could be Fred Friedel's life set to celluloid. Or Romero with his seminal classic Night of the Living Dead. Taken off him for peanuts and it was a major international success. What would you do.?

This film maker decides to take revenge making his own new horror movie with the previous cast and producer as his victims. It sounds awesome and if he had the budget it would have been a movie we would have seen at the movies. As it is I guess this was straight to video fare.

I love Low budget movies where they are a triumph over adversity and it is just that way with this movie. If you love low budget shlock this is for you.