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Bloody Good Time

Leah Richards — Sun, 05 Apr 2020 19:13:53 +0000

Bloody Good Time Leah Richards April 5, 2020 - 15:13

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Bloodride

Netflix, 2020

6 episodes

Of note to fans of compact bursts of un-self-serious horror, the Norwegian series Bloodride (2020; original title Blodtur) has recently been added to Netflix's streaming catalog, joining such series as Two Sentence Horror Stories (2019- ), also on Netflix; Shudder's Creepshow (2019- ) series, renewed for an upcoming second season; and, to a lesser extent, Amazon Prime Video's Lore (2017-2018) in the resurgence of the tv horror anthology. While it may not contain any masterpieces of the form, it is certainly on par with current comparable series, offering up enough occasionally gory fun to recommend it.

The stories in Bloodride, created by Kjetil Indregard and Atle Knudsen, have no connection to one another beyond the opening credits sequence, so its six episodes, all clocking in at just a few minutes on either side of half an hour, can be watched in any order. The title connects to the opening frame, such as it is, in which a seemingly empty bus with an unpleasant-looking driver is revealed to carry the souls or spirits of characters from the various episodes (each opening sequence gives slightly expanded focus to the character or characters from that particular episode). Beyond its effectively creepy aesthetic, this frame doesn't bear too much thinking about: for example, some of the spectral rider are murderers and some are victims, so it would seem to be a stretch to see this as, say, a bus to hell (which was a tempting reading after the first episode), leaving the "bloodride" to operate more as a metaphor for the viewer experience than for anything specific in the series itself. The tone of the episodes has a lot of affinity with the HBO Tales from the Crypt (1989-1996) series, minus the bad puns, as well as with the first Creepshow film (1982). While Bloodride isn't quite horror comedy, it is assertively entertaining rather than unsettling, with some of the installments even including that EC comics-style moral message found in Crypt and Creepshow, and it isn't generally bloody or graphic enough to put off the average horror viewer (though the first episode might cause animal lovers some discomfort).

Like most horror anthologies, Bloodride is uneven. Two of its best episodes bookend the series. The first, "Ultimate Sacrifice," finds Molly (Ine Marie Wilmann), her husband Leon (Bjørnar Teigen), and her daughter Katja (Emma Spetalen Magnusson) relocating, with extreme reluctance in Molly's case, from the city to one of those small towns with a dark secret that are ubiquitous in the horror genre. The mechanics of that secret drive a simple but well executed parable about greed, and the episode falls into that category of horror that engages with financial anxieties by way of the supernatural (think of the tradition of films in which the protagonists can't leave the haunted house that they purchased because they would take too much of a loss). The sixth episode, "The Elephant in the Room," takes place at an office party, the off-kilter atmosphere of which is helped by everyone wearing full-body animal costumes (it's a theme party). Paul (Karl Vidar Lende) and Kristin (Rebekka Jynge), the company's newest employees, hear about a coworker's coma-inducing accident on the job and, deciding that something untoward is going on, embark on some amateur sleuthing. "Elephant" succeeds on the strength of its leads and their tentative bonding, a little gleefully deployed gore mixed with some comedy, and some aggressively odd and off-putting moments of behavior by one of the characters, conduct of which HR would most definitely not approve. "Bad Writer," in which Olivia (Dagny Backer Johnsen) takes a writing class and is subjected to much worse than peer feedback, is not quite as strong as the first and last entries, but it overall belongs in the top rather than the bottom half of the season. Its central trope is by no means a new one, and viewers would be best served not to think too hard about the plot holes created by the narrative, but Johnsen gives a strong, appealing lead performance, Henrik Rafaelsen is effective as Olivia's ambiguously strange classmate Alex, and the story pulls off a few legitimately good twists by the end.

"Three Sick Brothers" and "The Old School" are significantly more middling offerings. The first, involving dysfunctional brothers, a hitchhiker, and a trip to the family cabin, suffers from its own reliance on a long-established plot trope (including that it is easy for the reveal in such a plot to feel like a cheat), and although it is sufficiently enjoyable in the moment, it's hard to remember specifics a week or so after watching it. While "The Old School" also treads very familiar ground—a woman named Sanna (Ellen Bendu) takes a job at a newly reopened school in the countryside and finds herself investigating an ominous mystery from decades in its past—it does so efficiently and with solid performances. It also benefits from some impressive and well shot scenery, and its ending deviates at least slightly from those of many similar tales. "Lab Rats," about ruthless CEO Edmund's (Stig R. Amdam) unsavory efforts to figure out who stole his company's new drug prototype, is the weakest of the series, and the only one that was a bit tedious to sit through. The stereotypes of the megalomaniacal, amoral businessman and the group of people trapped in a confined space so that they might begin to turn on one another don't do enough to dispel the feeling that you've seen this story too many times before. Perhaps this is in part because the story itself strains one's suspension of disbelief even for horror. The inciting incident, for example, raises the questions of (spoilers?) why exactly a seemingly successful company would possess only a single small vial of its supposedly very important new product and, more bafflingly, why Edmund offers to show it to his assembled dinner guests. What, precisely, is anyone supposed to glean from looking at an antidepressant? After this object is discovered to be missing, it's lucky for Edmund that his company has a very large, lockable glass room that seems to be used to sedate or kill rats for experiments by filling the entire thing with gas.

On the whole, Bloodride doesn't ask too much of viewers, and it doesn't achieve, except maybe in "The Elephant in the Room," memorable atmosphere at the level of Creepshow's "The House of the Head" (adapted by Josh Malerman from his short story of the same name). However, even the less successful episodes are entertaining enough, and their short length means a brisk pace that suits the types of stories that it tells. There are worse ways to help ride out a pandemic lockdown. - Leah Richards & John R. Ziegler

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From Dusk Till Dawn

Brandon Judell — Thu, 07 Jul 2016 01:59:05 +0000

From Dusk Till Dawn Brandon Judell July 6, 2016 - 21:59

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Logo has declared D.J. Cotrona one the "hottest men of horror TV," not that far behind The Walking Dead's Norman Reedus. His video clips have made top tumblr posts, and he's included on one fan's Secret Celebrity Crush page right above Marlon Brando. What's more, you can observe Cotrona doing some heavy lifting on ONTD (Oh No They Didn't), and literally hundreds of other sites are still salivating over his bare-chested shots from G.I. Joe: Retaliation, his second film with Channing Tatum. The first: Dear John.

But what's now garnering Cotrona some richly deserved international renown is The El Rey Network's From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series. (The first two seasons can be viewed on Netflix.) Here's a rather lively, quirky adaptation of the Robert-Rodriguez-directed/Quentin-Tarantino-written, over-the-top, gory vampire funfest, From Dusk till Dawn: The Movie from 1996. That cult classic of sorts features George Clooney as Seth Gecko and Tarantino as his maniacal sibling Richard. They rob, kill, and worse, yet they are freakily likable. While running from the law, the pair hook up with a religious family and wind up at the desert-based saloon, the Titty Twister, a home base for a sect of culebras, a reptile/vampire mix with a strong dash of Aztec mythology that drinks blood with the same relish Honey Boo Boo imbibes Go Go Juice (Mountain Dew and Red Bull). No olives please.

Cotrona was cast in the Clooney part, and there's a good reason aside from his chiseled torso. Both actors are strikingly attractive, engagingly unpretentious, consistently witty, and highly intelligent. J.D., a native of Connecticut, actually hit the criminal justice and political science books while on a pre-law track at Northeastern University in Boston before thespianitis hit him.

Then there's his verbal delivery. Who else, after killing a culebra waitress, can deliver with such charm, "Service sucked anyway"? Or when chatting with another blood-quaffer, "Did they Botox your face or are you always this cheerful?" And when a particularly disagreeable hemoglobin addict threatens Cotrona's character with "Before this is over, I'm going to sink my teeth into your five o'clock shadow," he responds nonchalantly with "Buy me a drink first."

Besides mouthing coy dialogue with finesse, his Seth has to shoot untrustworthy girlfriends, get stretched by cars driving in opposite directions, be punched in the face a whole lot, and shoot up heroin, but the latter only for a few episodes.

I caught up with Cotrona in Santa Fe, New Mexico, just as he was about to film the last episode of the third season, which begins airing in the fall. We sat alone in the huge craft services tent at the Eaves Movie Ranch where just a few years earlier Dennis Hopper got high while making Easy Rider (1969), Rosalind Russell nunned it up in Where Angels Go Trouble Follows! (1968), and John Wayne chowed down on some extremely rare steaks between breaks from rounding up steer for The Cowboys (1972).

Cotrona was holding his own quite well among these ghosts of the past. I noted his charismatic presence both on the tube and the screen, especially in Dusk.

"Well, thank you," Cotrona replied and then chuckled, "I've had a pretty up and down career. It's tough to get a job in this business and even tougher to have something to come out and sustain and be successful. I've been working on and off for a real long time. But, yeah, that's just the life of actor."

Certainly the success of Dusk has changed that.

"Not really," he smiled. "I mean to be honest there's like... you know, it's hard to describe, but every time you get a job, there's an outside expectation that that automatically means it's going to blow up and you'll get all of these opportunities, but that isn't necessarily the case. It's a pretty competitive profession regardless if you're doing something small or if you're doing something big. The majority of my opportunities or anybody else's that I've worked with are hard fought and won regardless of whether they have high visibility or low visibility. So for me, I just keep my head down and do the best job I can do on every opportunity I'm afforded and keep plugging away as things keep coming up."

But your following has clearly surged.

"From the show, absolutely. That is obviously a big testament to Robert. Robert and Quentin create such obvious iconic cult followings and universes specific only to them. And there's a reason if you watch the original Dusk or when you watch any of their original films really, whether they were made 5 years ago or 20 years ago, that the fans react very viscerally, even to this day because the films are just so iconic. [Rodriguez's and Tarantino's] work stands the test of time, and the fans for Dusk, for the film and the show, are absolutely no different. They are very opinionated and very passionate about all of Robert's stuff. We get a great response from them."

Were you a vampire/horror aficionado before you started playing Seth?

"I was absolutely obsessed with John Carpenter, all of his films. Not a big vampire guy. Hitchcock, yes. Loved Hitchcock. But the films I grew up on as a kid, the ones I would watch and run outside and try to recreate with my brother in the backyard, a lot of those films are films that were also close to Robert's heart. When chatting, we found a similarity in the things that excited us visually in films. So to get to come here with him and play in his sandbox is amazing because all of the visual cues we use and all of the action sequences we try to come up with and do, well, he's one of these guys that pulls from a well of filmography that gets me excited and reminds me of being a kid. So I feel like I'm 9 years old here."

There was an academic book that came out in the last decade that detailed how the Holocaust affected the sensibility of numerous horror films. Then with AIDS, the "contagious virus" theme infected dozens of movies, including the work of David Cronenberg and Todd Haynes.

"That's very interesting," Cotrona replied. "And Godzilla was a reaction to the World War II bombing."

So what is Dusk commenting on? Maybe the show, especially Season 2, is a reaction to the Trump phenomenon.

The actor laughed.

Well, there are a whole lot of struggling immigrants crossing the border in the series, and many are being victimized: some forced into prostitution and others meat chopping.

"You know it very much could be," Cotrona smiled, "and I think we'll happily wave that flag."