James Cullen Bressack’s latest film, Blood Craft, is long on ideas, and short on ability. The story is fairly straightforward, and has a certain twisted charm to it: sisters Grace (Madeleine Wade) and Serena (Augie Duke) were abused horribly by their minister father (Dave Sheridan) all their lives, a situation exacerbated by the death of their mother, Hilde (Dominique Swain) when the girls are young. Their father dies years later, Grace comes home for the funeral, and Serena decides she wants to use the witchcraft learned from their mother to reanimate their father and torture him, so as to achieve some sort of posthumous retribution.
It’s an intriguing idea, but so poorly executed as to be cringe-worthy. The topic of childhood abuse is played like it came straight from the mind of an armchair psychologist, with Grace working as a private dancer for a series of men who verbally abuse her and ask her to perform degrading sexual acts with phrases too filthy to print (one involves placing the heel of a strappy shoe somewhere improper).
The conceit is, supposedly, that the now-grown sisters are the heroines of this story, but even they fight and bicker and argue so much that it’s difficult to find likeable aspects to the pair of them, much less the never-ending stream of incredibly awful men which peoples Blood Craft. The sheriff is abusive towards his son, the sheriff’s son is abusive toward the sisters, the father is both abusive to his family and stealing from the parish’s donation box – as a matter of fact, the only person seemingly beyond reproach is mother Hilde, who coughs into a hankie in one of her first flashback scenes.
The hankie, of course, comes away with a spattering of blood on it. Evidently, consumption is still a thing in the mid-’80s. Sadly, that’s about the only blood the audience gets until well near the end of Bressack’s film. While the mutilation of the father after he’s been reanimated is pretty gruesomely impressive, it’s a long slog of poorly-acted flashbacks, expository dialogue, and incest before there’s anything approaching solid entertainment.
