Blood Vessel

 A bunch of people stuck in a life raft are picked up by a nazi ghost ship... and then they're killed one by one. Not by a deranged/possessed George Kennedy; It's been way too long since I saw 1980's Death Ship, so I can't really say if there are any homages here, but barring that the only thing these two movies share is the premise.

 The castaways here are the survivors from the torpedoing of a hospital ship by a U-boat. It's a diverse bunch, but time and genre limits constrain them to caricatures - you can pretty much describe all of them with a couple of adjectives: You've got New Yorker Asshole (Mark Diaco), Tough Black Guy (Christopher Kirby), Australian Cowboy (Nathan Phillips), Compassionate Nurse (Alyssa Sutherland), Snooty Brit (John Lloyd Fillingham), and Stoic Russian (Alex Cooke).

 After a short credit sequence (which includes a very nice take of the life raft shot from underneath during a thunderstorm), the survivors run into and manage to board a nazi corvette. It's an out of the pan into the fire kind of choice, since their rations had run out, but lucky for them there doesn't seem to be a living soul on the ship.

 Or maybe not so lucky. As they search the ship they find some grisly, butchered bodies, a creepy young girl with an antique doll who constantly asks about her family in Rumanian, and... vampire hunter paraphernalia. Oh, and a pretty cool-looking carved sarcophagus, which I'm sure has nothing to do with the plot. 

Aww, they're funpires!

 It takes a while for the Vampires to run amok. That's not a huge problem, as I thought the first part was pretty effective - there's not a lot of mystery as to what's actually going on, but the way the discoveries are dispensed, and the way the cast bounces off each other is pretty entertaining; while the characters never get any development and some of the acting is a bit iffy, they do butt heads and share some fun badass moments. And failing that, they get killed at an acceptable rate even before someone opens the chained coffin.

 Once that happens and the vampires (sorry - Strigoi) come out the pace picks up with regards to character deaths, but it remains weirdly inert. Mostly because apparently Strigoi don't like moving much; a lot of the movie is them looking creepily at the camera, making hand gestures to control the people they've bitten and reacting to stuff from a distance, which... to be honest, looks pretty goofy. They do attack a couple of times, but the (excellent) practical makeup effects must prevent them from moving much because it's all quick edits that show very little actual action.

 Despite that there's enough mayhem to keep things fun. Nothing special, but still a good time. It's creepy, especially at the beginning, but it's never scary - the vibe is closer to a grim action/survival movie than actual horror. It also has precious few jokes and never descends into winking despite the brilliant pun title; That's something I can respect.

 The effects are solid, low-budget work, with some excellent designs; the cramped ship interiors make for great sets, and I loved the various creepy carvings the Nazis had looted from Rumania. The vampires are a bit more animalistic than usual, and the main Striga looks a bit like the monster in The Night Flyer. As mentioned they look kind of goofy, but in a fun way, especially when their eyes light up.
 I also really liked the cool mold-like effect on the walls near the various corpses, to show the corruption in their blood. And there's also an absolutely brilliant maquette explosion. This movie packs quite a bit of nice eye-candy; Director Justin Dix is an F/X guy, and it really shows.

 So we end up with a solid B-movie, which is nothing to sneeze at. I'd prefer the monsters to be a bit more dynamic and the action a bit better, but what we get here is still worthwhile.

Evil Dead Rise

  How cool is it that you can say that while Evil Dead Rise is by far the weakest out of the Evil Dead  movies, it's still a pretty great, mean little horror B-movie in its own right?

 The house that Sam Raimi built - five movies over forty-two years, and a TV show I should really get back to someday - has lately gone back to the basics. Fede Alvarez's underrated 2013 remake was all intensity, harkening back to the first Evil Dead with a heavy dollop of queasy, painful-looking violence; Evil Dead Rise, written and directed by Lee Kronin, hews close to that, but balances it out by making the gore a little more cartoony. Aside from short visual gag (hehe, visual!) that's a direct lift from Evil Dead 2, there are no real jokes here, but by dint of the violence being less realistic, we get something a little closer to Raimi's concept of a 'spookablast' - a fancy name for a horror movie that aims to be fun while keeping the scares.

 After a short cabin-in-the-woods set prologue (which expertly takes the piss out of the Evil Dead trademark zooming evil shots, and ends in a minor massacre with some pretty lackluster gore) the action moves to the big city. More specifically, a derelict building where single mother Ellie (Alyssa Sutherland) lives with her children: two teens (Morgan Davies and Gabrielle Echols) and a kid (Nell Fisher). We're introduced to her by way of her estranged sister Beth (Lily Sullivan), who's come to crash with them for a while.
 Things are not going great for Ellie - she's been left by her husband, and the building she's living in is condemned, meaning that she has less than a month to find a new place and move. Also, an earthquake's just revealed an abandoned bank vault, from which one of her kids retrieves the Necronomicon Ex Mortis (they call it by another name, but I didn't catch it.)

 The script is fairly well put together - despite its short running time, it takes the time to try and make you empathise with these people. Maybe it's not wholly successful, but it's clear that they're good folks who love each other and really don't deserve the truckload of nasty shit heading their way.

 Great care is also taken to seed things that will come into play later - The mulcher in the garage, the fact that one of the neighbors has a shotgun and power tools, the garage blinders getting stuck, some scissors falling under a sofa... nothing incredibly clever, but cool nonetheless.

Insert post-Campbell catchphrase here

 Soon Ellie is possessed by the Evil, this time summoned by an incantation handily recorded in some LPs that came along with the book (next movie, maybe people can discover the audiobook version - it'll save time). The movie's best horror conceit is that the it then sets the possessed mum loose to try and cut her family - including a tiny, say Newt-sized child - into ribbons... which is laudably fucked up. We had a little of that on part deux, but it was all secondary characters, and it wasn't really played for horror.
 Things get bloody and pretty cruel. It does hold back a bit- it's got one of those scenes where a sharp implement gets inches away from an eye and then is pulled back, an act of blue-balling for the gore connoisseurs in the audience. Overall, though the mayhem is respectable, if a bit over the top and... yes, cartoony. Performatively disgusting, not actually disgusting, if that makes any sense. So the suffering isn't by any means realistic, and while that detracts a little from its impact, it does make it easier to enjoy the film as a ride. A spookablast with very little overt humor.

 It's not perfect (besides the aforementioned issues with the intro, I didn't really buy the final confrontation, and some of the character work is pretty shaky) but its problems are all pretty minor. All in all, it really works - it's energetic, isn't afraid to go for broke, and it does as best it can by the films that preceded it.

I'm not a fan of the intro, but damn if this isn't a great image (and it makes for a killer title screen)

 There are a ton of callbacks to Evil Deads past, from a certain audio-only cameo to people conspicuously saying "I'll swallow your soul" or "Dead by dawn!" to both a shotgun and a chainsaw seeing some heavy usage.
 There's also a lullaby. No Oldsmobile in sight, though.
 You can tell the crew has some real love for the series (quite a few of them worked on the TV series, presumably brought on by the producers.). Things play just a little too safe, but that's ok; it feels more like someone taking care not to fuck up something they love than overt calculation.
 Hopefully next time around we'll get the batshit insanity these films are best known for.