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Blood Relic J. Christian Ingvordsen, USA, 2005 Rating: 3.0

Posted: August 11, 2005

What do you do if you wanna make a scary movie, but all you have access to is an old airplane hangar and no budget for special effects or decent sound? Easy -- you get a handful of young women who aren't bashful about taking off their clothes and use every opportunity to display their God-given endowments. Hey, I hope that one day we can rise above these baser appetites, and reach a plane of creative achievement where each performer is allowed the freedom to push the boundaries of artistic expression. But since we ain’t there yet, I say let’s dive headfirst into the B/horror-movie genre, replete with incongruous nudity (if such a thing exists) and the charm that only a hastily assembled plot can muster.

In 1983, a pilot at a Naval Air Base goes berserk and kills several of his fellow servicemen. Oh yeah; before he did this, he went to the men’s room and puked blood on the mirror. He was also wearing a small charm in the shape of a monkey around his neck. Anyway, our resident psycho, Hank, is carted off to a mental facility. Fast-forward 22 years, and Hank is about to be released and plans to return to the air base, which is now a museum, to reclaim the monkey charm that he hid there prior to his capture. Got all that? Meanwhile, edgy Billy Drago is in financial trouble and needs his crew of young workers to finish the museum so that they can start making money.

Okay. Here’s the deal. If you wear the little monkey idol thingee, a demon possesses you and you start killing people. Sure enough, one of the workers finds the idol, and -- you guessed it -- the killings begin. But luckily, so does the nudity. Let’s give a huge shout out to Caitlin Sabins, an actress who while only in the film for about 17 minutes, manages to get naked two times and bares her ample breasts right about the time that I was losing interest in the film. You gotta play to your strengths, people! This ain't exactly Othello we're talking about here. (Later, she displays her talents again during a strip poker scene.)

Since we're on the topic of nudity, another staple of the genre is not only nudity, but as I mentioned earlier, seemingly incongruous nudity. For example, as a few of the employees are hiding in the dank hallways of the hangar, one of the women is grabbed and pulled into a room. Her friends try frantically to open the door, but something is pulling against them on the other side. When they eventually force the door open, it turns out that there's a wire around the knob, leading to a pipe in the ceiling, down to a noose where the girl hangs dead, hung by the valiant efforts of her own friends. Oh yeah, and she was topless, too.

See what I mean? Even in a scene where it seems hard to work nudity in, the director finds a way. Now, here's a B movie that knows what to do when the going gets tough. And I salute the filmmakers for sticking to the genre and not trying to make Cinderella Man out of a film with an $83.00 budget. As the employees get picked off one by one, Hank shows up and must prove that he is not doing the killing -- or he is he? Whoever has the charm is the one doing the killing. But who has the charm?

Look, I gotta hand it to Blood Relic. It is a true B movie in every sense of the word, and as I always remind you people, there is merit in accomplishing what it is you set out to do. Unless you're prepared to totally captivate me with an unbelievable story, then you better be prepared to distract me from your lame-ass story with gratuitous nudity. The makers of Blood Relic understood this. And for this reason, I shall look upon their effort with a kind eye.

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