The Blood Shed
Written and Directed by Alan Rowe Kelley
Featuring: Allan Rowe Kelley, Susan Adriensen, Brian Juergens, Terry M. West,
2007, Heretic Films
www.hereticfilms.com
Alan Rowe Kelley is the mastermind behind the awesomely fun 70s slasher film throwback
I’ll Bury You Tomorrow, and
The Blood Shed, his newest brainchild, is just as fun, unpredictable, and dementedly hilarious.
Alan Rowe Kelley has no shame, which is important for comedians. And that’s exactly what he is in this film, as well as an actor and director. He’s managed to create characters that are both inventive and cliché, and his dialogue, sets, and costume decisions all collaborate on his unique and artistic vision of dementia. Alan Rowe Kelley stars as Beeftina, the darling of the Bullion family. Wearing her short frilly dresses, white lace socks with frills, and shiny black Mary Jane shoes, she skips merrily down the road with her favorite dead pet squirrel flapjack in tow. What makes this funny is that Alan is a 45 year old man. Beeftina’s hyperactive sister Sno Cakes (Susan Adrienson) is the Kelly Bundy of the family; blond and dumb as a brick. The Bullion girls live with their father/uncle (Terry M. West) and two brothers (Butternut and Hubcap) in a ramshackle old house decorated elaborately in crazy Christmas lights, animal parts, and random fun artifacts that usually grace the walls of restaurants with names like Flingers, Chachki’s, and P.J. Macillicuddy’s.
Susan Adrienson and Alan Rowe Kelley as 'Sno Cakes" and "Beeftina"
Instead of a traditional (there is nothing traditional about Alan Rowe Kelly) plot with beginning middle and end, The Blood Shed is more of a slice of life of the Bullion Family. They have a callous disregard for the lives of their evil neighbor children, the local police, and basically anyone who pisses them off, but a very strong family tie that binds them. With implied incest, cannibalism, and country-folk mentality, it is easy to place this film within the subgenre of movies about geographically isolated, secretive and psychotic families like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes, and Spider Baby. However, it’s probably more accurate to call this film a parody of those types of movies, succeeding in humor and style and in many ways surpassing in humor Rob Zombie’s House of 1000 Corpses. Kelley’s appreciation of this long-standing horror tradition is obvious in how much fun The Blood Shed is, but he isn’t afraid to make fun of the genre and of the people it usually mocks; uneducated rural miscreants who are so out of the loop of modern civilization that they don’t know that what they’re doing is not only illegal but ridiculous.
Some of the guests at Beeftina's birthday party!Beeftina, for instance, is so deluded about her life and so removed from reality that she has decided she wants to be a supermodel despite her unfortunate looks, of which she is surely unaware. Answering an ad for modeling photographs, Beeftina is cheated out of her cash by an unscrupulous model scout (Zoe Daelman Chandler) and her less cruel assistant (Katherine O'Sullivan). Laughing while Beeftina poses for “modeling photographs”, the scout and the photographer (the extremely hunkeriffic Kane Manera) laugh at her attempts to appear sexy, gorgeous, and “supermodelly”. But just because Beeftina is a country bumpkin does not mean she should be an object of degradation. Her brothers soon arrive to stop the photo shoot, ultimately kidnapping the photographer, scout, and assistant and forcing them to attend Beeftina’s bizarre 12th birthday party. There are also some memorable incidents involving an impromptu wedding with the unwilling sheriff, Sno Cake’s help with a lemonade stand, and dealing with the local bully who kills Beeftina’s pet Flapjack.
Katherine O'Sullivan runs for her life from Butternut and HubcapInspired jokes come in subtle forms in The Blood Shed, like costume design and consistent character development. Bullion family meals show Beeftina sipping Beef Broth from a carton through a straw, and at Beeftina’s birthday party, Susan Adriensen gives an amazing comedic performance as Sno Cakes throwing a temper tantrum over her pork fat dinner. Naïve sensitivity is something all of the Bullions share, making them sympathetic characters as well as devious killers. It’s a brilliant circus of a script that actually ends with several key plot lines stolen directly from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and House of 1000 Corpses. After watching a film like The Blood Shed, it’s easy to second guess whether what you just watched was simply a fun exercise in laughter and gore, or actually a very ingenious parody of an overused horror film formula. I guess that’s because the art design and style is so gorgeous, the acting so good, and the humor SO funny that it is hard to imagine something done so many times before could turn out good this time around. But it does. It turns out really good. Expect a certain level of the abnormal going in, and you’ll only be pleasantly surprised.
