Directed by Daniel Benedict from a screenplay he wrote with his wife Casi, the horror film The Bloody Man has some great ideas at its core, but those ideas weren’t executed in the most effective way. Benedict definitely could have used some help in the editing room, because a running time of 133 minutes is absurd for a movie like this. The Bloody Man would have greatly benefited from being around 40 minutes shorter, but even if those minutes were whittled out of the film the way it is now, there would still be room for improvement. There really should have been more work done on the concept in the scripting stage. It could have used another draft, one to help the flow of the story, to make it more focused and less drawn-out. I’m not saying The Bloody Man is a bad movie. I did enjoy watching it. But it could have been much better than it is.
There are three minutes right up front that could have been taken out. The film’s title sequence plays over shots of the vintage toys scattered around the room of the lead character, a young boy named Sam (David Daniel). This sequence helps establish that the film is set in the 1980s and that Sam is a big fan of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe – which makes sense, since Benedict made the Masters of the Universe fan film Fall of Grayskull – but we’d pick these things up without this title sequence and the story would get started 3 minutes sooner. Following these shots of toys, we get a sequence of Sam running into bad luck on his way to school, and the credits easily could have played out over this sequence instead.
The biggest selling point for this movie is the fact that it stars two people from A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, which I find to be not the best entry in the Elm Street franchise but the most entertaining. Dream Master heroine Lisa Wilcox appears in flashbacks as Sam’s late mom Laurie, while her Dream Master co-star Tuesday Knight plays Sam’s new stepmother Kim. That’s some fun stunt casting, but it’s also disappointing because it means Wilcox and Knight don’t get to share any scenes in this movie.
Sam is struggling with the loss of his mom and can’t accept that his dad Daniel (Jeremy Carr) has already found love with another woman. He doesn’t want Kim around and sees anything she does as an attempt to replace his mom, which he resents. Sam is also bullied at school by a kid named Perry (Kye Hicks), who the most perfect dopey-sounding voice a bully could have. It’s kind of jarring to hear this deep voice come from a young kid. The wonders of puberty. Unsatisfied with both his home life and his school life, Sam is all wrapped up in the story told in the small comic book that came with the last Masters of the Universe toy his mom got for him before she passed away. Excuse me, the last Barbarian Man toy she got for him. It’s clearly He-Man, but had to be referred to as Barbarian Man to fend off any potential lawsuits. This comic book tells the story of a demonic entity called The Bloody Man… an entity that Sam mistakenly summons into reality, causing a lot of trouble for himself, Kim, and his siblings Michael (Sam Hadden) and Amy (Olivia Sanders) while Daniel is out of town on a business trip.
The Bloody Man gets substantially more fun once it reaches the stretch where the titular villain starts tormenting Sam and his siblings in their home one night. It even starts to feel a bit like the 1987 classic The Gate at that point, although – aside from a scene involving a severed arm and another involving a stepmom smackdown – it’s slightly underwhelming. But it takes a long time before the movie reaches that point. There’s a lot of build-up to it along the way, and there are even sequences where it starts to feel like The Bloody Man is becoming an anthology film, as Sam, Michael, and Amy each take some time to tell their own version of The Bloody Man stories. Amy’s story is the best, by far.
This movie has potential that it doesn’t live up to and it should have been much shorter, but it’s a decent watch the way it is. It’s along the lines of things like The Gate, The Monster Squad, and Stranger Things, just not quite on their level. It’s worth checking out when there aren’t any new episodes of Stranger Things to watch.
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