All You Need is Blood

Mixing zombies or the resituated dead, toss in a story of love and redemption, and you have the “Zom com.’   Long after Shaun of the Dead made its mark on horror comedy and sales of vinyl records as a zombie defense, you have many, including Fido, the neglected Pontypool, and the recent charming Lisa Frankenstein. Slithering in like an old family argument that you thought was settled comes Bucky Le Boeuf’s and Cooper Roberts’s All You Need is Blood to munch at your heart as it does in the prologue.

Bucky Le Boeuf  (Logan Riley Brunner) is an aspiring filmmaker who wants to make arthouse films.  Art that will live beyond his life span and inspire people. To that end, he is working on a project for a local film festival that features a horror film. After receiving rejections from festivals for his film “Drops of Dew’ which is a real film.  Le Boeuf finds that his favorite director, Hans (Ron Guttman), inspired him to be at this new festival. It’s full speed ahead with a new story with his partner in on-screen filmmaking, Vish (Neel Sethi). An inspired idea is that Vish is deaf and mute. However, this element is wonderfully handled with dignity and fun throughout the film.

“The mayhem starts when Le Boeuf and Vish try to make a zombie film with a real undead…”

Linked by an odd prologue of cave people who become Zombies when discovering material from a meteorite that infects them, the same accident happens to Le Boeuf’s father, Walter (Tom Okeefe), who has become an alcoholic who is turned into a zombie. The mayhem starts when Le Boeuf and Vish try to make a zombie film with a real undead after getting some sage advice on Chicken salad fixings from the urn containing the remains of Le Boeuf’s mother. Arthouse horror with human stories is born as this is authentic, oddly the same feeling that the French New Wave of the Sixties generated.

The pair need an older female lead who can scream enter Vivian Vance (Mena Suvari) channeling her best neurotic acting class self with a nod to the brilliant real straight woman Vivian Vance, who made her name in roles and a Hollywood career with the incomparable Lucille Ball.  Added to the mix is Emma (Emma Chasse), a young aspiring female actor who has the “look for the film yet has stage fright for the camera until Bucky puts a drawing of the cat over top of the lens.