Blood Punch | Review

Blood of Your Blood: Paxson’s Comedy Horror Debut Lacks Bite

Unspooling with all the finesse of a drunken yet trenchant teenager’s expletive laden ranting at an underwhelmingly attended frat party, Madellaine Paxson’s directorial debut, the indie horror comedy Blood Punch, fails to satisfy even as it casts a wide net of genre blending.

Paxson, previously a writer of children’s television fare, directs from Eddie Guzelian’s (The Tigger Movie, 2000) screenplay, but everyone seems oblivious to how adults act and sound, whether or not in the confines of a sometimes ludicrous scenario. Since premiering in 2013 at the Austin Film Festival, the title has picked up its fair share of champions, with several sources praising the film’s wit and originality. Unfortunately, despite its ambitious twists and turns, these inklings of authenticity can be traced to notable elements from a slew of previous titles, and there’s little that actually saves this from being another derivative slog riding on the energetic fumes of its ultra-abrasive, over-the-top characters.

Milton (Milo Cawthorne) is a chemistry wunderkind, whose dreams were dashed when his meth lab was busted just prior to graduating with a lucrative degree. Now, he’s attempting to put his life in order at a rehab clinic. But one day, during group therapy, Skyler (Olivia Tennet) a fast-talking, cigarette smoking lady with a surly attitude crashes the session and frees Milton from his confines so that he can help her utilize his drug formula for a criminal scheme she’s involved in with her ex-cop boyfriend, Russell (Ari Boyland). Gathering in an isolated cabin, they lay their plans amidst jealousies and mixed feelings, eventually ending in a violent altercation. But the next morning, everything seems to have reversed to a particular moment from the day prior. Eventually, they discover they’re in some sort of time loop and must figure out how to escape it.

Kind of like the malevolent version of Groundhog’s Day, but set in The Cabin in the Woods and borrowing a few elements of Nacho Vigalondo’s Time Crimes, despite its obvious templates of reference Blood Punch sounds like it could be a lot of fun—except, it isn’t. While lead Milo Cawthorne remains the least offensive presence, his villainous cohorts deliver grimace inducing patches of silly dialogue at every turn.

Olivia Tennet, in particular, is unable to churn the pulpy, exaggerated excess of Guzelian’s desperate dialogue into the sort of campy finesse required for this to work. Every line is a bitchy rejoinder meant to craft her into an ultra femme fatale. Instead, this makes her unforgivably obnoxious, particularly since there’s nothing remotely mysterious about her or why exactly Cawthorne’s addictive personality finds her at all appealing (especially since the notion of ‘love’ factors into the equation). The sole effective sequence in the film finds the illicit lovers engaged in pre-coital relations as the blood from the recently shot corpse of Tennet’s ex drips over them.

The problem with several genre features utilizing these repetitive time warp frameworks is the desensitization creeping in on familiar sequences, especially evident here considering the desperate attempts to make these characters compelling. Since we are trapped in an inescapable and indeterminate trap with these three goons in a concept technically used several times before and to better effect, their lack of characterization is too palpable to ignore. There are ideas lodged in here with some potential—but they require a different mixture of tone and performance. Blood Punch instead plays like an instrument badly out of tune.

★★/☆☆☆☆☆