Blood Beat does something that I genuinely admire.
It dares to confuse the living fuck out of the audience for almost the entire movie. It’s low-budget and ramshackle, desperate flop sweat in every frame, but something about it feels deliberate. First-time and only-time writer/director Fabrice A. Zaphiratos can’t get a good performance out of his actors, but he knows how to tease us with some of the most off-the-wall mysteries of 1980s horror. The big one is what exactly are we dealing with here? Is it a ghost or a slasher? Or is it some kind of ghost-slasher hybird? And why does it look like an old school Japanese armored samurai out in the woods of Wisconsin? And why is at least one character dreaming about it? And why the holy hell do some of these characters have weird X-Men powers all of a sudden at the climax?
I don’t have the answers to any of these questions, but I enjoy thinking about them. See this and help me try to figure it out.
On top of all that, this is a CHRISTMAS movie. Yep. A family gathers for the big holiday and gets terrorized by what-the-hell. The lovely (seriously) special effects are pure 1980s and the lingering effect is like something that you dreamed up after getting lost in the woods and then fell asleep shivering under a tree.