“Blood Oath” is a strange little package that starts off horribly, but quickly finds its stride as an excellent representation of early eighties slasher fare.
And what “Blood Oath” brings us is your perfectly standard representation of slasher fare. A bunch of h***y teenagers / college students (who can tell?) is out at a borrowed cabin in the woods serenely drinking, humping, and ghost-storying their way through a weekend. Eventually, the tales turn to the Krupps, a farm couple who wanted a child so desperately they were prepared to leave blood under a tree to propitiate several pagan earth god-deity-thingies. When the result ends in the young family dying off in a fiery car crash save for one who got away (via the singularly unpleasant method of flying through the windshield), they become a ghost story for everybody in the small Tennessee town.
Which means, of course, since this is a slasher movie, the kids involved will get bored with drinking and humping and pack themselves on a hiking trip to go find the last living Krupp.
Or IS she??
Though I wish that my application to join the culture police would finally go through so I could indict Buchert and crew for overuse of slasher cliches and cheesy digital decapitation, I’ve got to admit, as full-on slasher flicks go, it’s really not half bad. They have done everything exactly as it should be, and as an homage, it plays quite well. I loved watching the little backwoods creek run red with fake blood. It’s nice, every so often, to revisit those bad old days of stupid, h***y teenagers and the massive misshapen mounds of man-things that dismember them.
Though I’ll also issue an indictment for GROSS misuse of Tiffany Shepis–this chick’s the freaky genius that made half a dozen otherwise godawful movies worth watching. Reducing her to the level of brief appearance whilst attempting to give head in the back of an SUV is so egregious as to be a personal insult. If you’re going to bring her in, dammit, use her right.
And any time you find yourself watching a movie, and hear yourself say “Was that a c**k? That looked like a c**k–was that really a c**k??” you know the movie’s just gone clean off the deep end. You really should never find yourself asking this–if you’re going to bring out the c**k, folks, you should make it so plain that no one can doubt it.
The ending is, sadly, not that great–it’s fraught with confusion with a surprisingly large number of loose ends left unsettled, but this is often the case with slasher flicks.
If you want a solid example of what was big back in the eighties, then “Blood Oath” is one you’re going to want to get your hands on. But if you’d rather see something unique and challenging, then you could do far, far better.
