Writers: Elke Blasi, Frank Sabatella
Director: Frank Sabatella
Will you make it through the night?
Blood Night begins in 1978 when (for reasons that are never explained) the young Mary Hatchet goes crazy and kills her family. She’s understandably institutionalised, but some ten years later she’s raped and made pregnant by an orderly. The baby dies during birth but Mary escapes and goes on a short lived killing spree before being shot by police. Now, some twenty years after her death, Mary is a local legend and her killing is ironically celebrated every year as ‘Blood Night’.
This year a group of students is having a Blood Night party, but beforehand they stop off at her grave and use a Ouija board… It’s only a matter of time before people start getting killed again.
Blood Night is a teen slasher, it makes that clear from the start – in the first ten minutes we have multiple killings with blood spurting all over the place. Fair enough if you like that sort of thing. But the next half hour is almost pure filler; it consists almost entirely of young people getting drunk and talking about sex. You have to wait a long time before the killings start again. Once they do things happen pretty quickly – but with no atmosphere or suspense. Unlike the pre-credit scenes we don’t actually see much of the killings, it’s mainly reaction shots and blood.
There is an attempt at a plot twist, but you’ve probably worked it out already. And the way it’s implemented makes no sense. The whole thing is almost unintentionally funny – but not quite.
Blood Night fails on all counts. Although there’s plenty of blood there isn’t enough sustained violence to satisfy fans of the slasher genre. The plot is nonsensical, all the way down the the final scene.
And it certainly isn’t scary.