I feel like I am always knocking The Asylum. It seems like every movie I see from them either gets a negative or ho-hum review. In my defense, most of the movies that the company releases are not very good and I think many horror fans have come to agree that the company puts out some relatively unimpressive fare. That being said, there are always exceptions to the rule and Blood is one of them. If The Asylum would spend more time looking for good movies rather than simply trying to find ones that they can acquire for cheap, people would begin to look forward to their releases rather than react to them like a vampire to a clove of garlic.

Blood is the tale of a woman named Lix who is the creation of a scientific experiment. The result of the project is that Lix's blood, when consumed, gives way to feelings of incredible pleasure and happiness. Like many pleasurable drugs, these good feelings are followed by an intense crash and leads to addiction complete with intense withdrawal symptoms if the user attempts to stop. We meet Lix in the basement of a house of addicts where she is being held so that they can "bleed" her and sell her blood as a drug. Shortly after, she is saved by her creator named Carl and his buddy Doug. They bring Lix back to Carl's house so that she can become a normal person. Carl must battle his desire to give Lix a normal life and his desire to taste her blood and see what it feels like to be high on plasma.

Due to the blood angle, this flick has many of the trappings of a vampire movie even though it is much more than that. Aside from the fact that people drink each others blood, this is more a movie about drug addiction than creatures of the night. There are no bats, fangs, wooden stakes, or crosses to be found. An interesting spin is that every drop of blood that is taken from Lix must be replaced by seven times the amount, This poses quite a problem for Carl when he needs to find ways to replace any blood that is taken for his research. In addition to sustaining Lix, Carl must also try to keep his personal life together as his wife is not so understanding of the idea a sexy young babe with addictive blood staying in the same house as her husband and young son. There is also the issue of the three blood junkies that Carl and Doug rescued Lix from as it is almost certain that they will return for their drug source.

I really enjoyed this movie. It has a great story, impressive soundtrack, and the acting by Adrian Rawlins as Paul and Lee Blakemore as Lix is excellent. The movie lives up to its name as the red stuff drips across the screen while people are sucking from open wounds throughout (the make-up effects were done by Stuart Conran who also did Shaun of the Dead). There is also a generous amount of nudity from Blakemore as well as a twisted sex scene with the blood from an open neck wound pouring into the mouth of its willing recipient. As I mentioned at the beginning of this review, I was very surprised by the quality of this British acquisition of The Asylum and I wish that they would work on building a reputation of releasing quality genre flicks rather than tedious rip-offs of current Hollywood releases. I also wish they would come up with some cooler cover art as this DVD has one of the most unappealing/uninteresting Ringu ripoff boxes that I have seen in a while. Apparently, the original cut of this film ran 130 minutes, I'd be interested to see what was cut out. Maybe there will be a 'director's cut' in the future when this becomes the cult movie it is destined to be. (Josh Pasnak, 6/1/07)

Directed By: Charly Cantor.
Written By: Charly Cantor.

Starring: Adrian Rawlins, Lee Blakemore, Phil Cornwell, Paul Herzberg.

Picture Ratio: 1.85:1 Widescreen.

Picture Quality: The picture was okay albeit a little grainy. It was frustrating that The Asylum provided a non-anamorphic transfer. I would have loved to see this fill the screen.

Extras: Not much here aside from a few trailers for other releases from The Asylum.