I saw Madellaine Paxson and Eddie Guzelian’s Blood Punch at last year’s Mile High Horror Film Festival and have been itching to watch it again ever since. In my review, I called it a “supernatural film noir on meth, with heaps of dark humor and a madcap edge that cuts deep.” After watching it again on Midnight Releasing’s DVD, I stand by my initial 4-skull review. This movie is a stupid amount of fun and has a body count in the dozens – even if it is the same body getting killed again and again and again.

The film is about Milo, a brilliant chemist with a knack for cooking meth. At a drug rehabilitation center, he falls for a chain-smoking harlot named Skyler, who quickly whisks Milo away to a remote hunting lodge in the woods. There, Milo is employed by Skyler’s psycho-boyfriend Russell to cook one mammoth batch of meth for a sizable paycheck. The lodge itself was built on the site of a bloody Native American war, which left a bit of a supernatural mark on the joint. When people die on its grounds, well, sometimes they come back. It’s a vicious cycle that Milo and Skyler must try to break to survive (and sell their meth).

One of the things that makes Blood Punch work so well is the cast: Milo Cawthorne (Deathgasm), Oliva Tennet, and Ari Boyland all worked together before this film on the Power Rangers R.P.M. series in New Zealand. This history shows on screen as their chemistry practically drips between the frames. I had the opportunity to toss a few questions at Cawthorne and Tennet (who are married in real life) about the film, what the behind the scenes mayhem was like, and other bloody stuff about this very bloody film.

Like I mentioned they all worked together on a Power Rangers series in New Zealand before Blood Punch. Making that shift from kid’s show to bloody horror-comedy was a bit cathartic for them. “Power Rangers is quite a long shoot as far as TV series go,” Tennet explains. “So although we had an awesome time shooting it, by the time we were in our last month of shooting we were all a bit over it and ready to do something else. Blood Punch is definitely the furthest you can get from a kids’ series where we were fighting rubber monsters and running around in Lycra! But it was also really great to go into a project with a cast, a director and a writer that I knew so well and had such a solid working relationship with already.”

“It was massive fun,” says Cawthorne. “RPM became very tough after the 5th month of filming, it was a real struggle to get through some of those scenes and that dialogue. Also for Eddie and Maddy I think this was a nice breathe of fresh air, they’d been in children’s TV land for years and years, so this was them really letting their hair down.”

What starts off as a bizarre love triangle meth cookout in the woods quickly turns into an even more bizarre supernatural time loop of death. Cawthorne’s initial reaction to the script was “‘Oh shit, this guy (Eddy) is a nutcase who is trying to lure us to the US’ hahaha, I don’t think I’ve ever told him that! But then I read it again, saw how cool the Skyler character is, then as I got more of the script I started to ‘get’ the tone of the film, and after reading the whole first script I was hooked. I was keen to make it.”

Tennet explains that “To get a role written specifically with you in mind, pretty much never happens as an actor so it was really flattering, not to mention really exciting. Shortly after reading it my thought was ‘Oh god, I really have to learn how to smoke.’” Skyler does indeed smoke a lot in the film. Each time, she cooly lights a match with her thumb. It’s a tough trick to pull off in real life. “I’m not sure I should give this away, but the lighting the match trick was actually done by super-gluing a small piece of the lighting strip from a matchbox onto my thumb and then striking the match on that. There are lots of outtakes of me stuffing up the trick because if the matches got just slightly damp they would snap.”

For the role, Tennet did her film noir femme fatale research. “Blood Simple, Double Indemnity, Something Wild, Body Heat are a few of the ones we watched. Lauren Bacall, Kathleen Turner, Anne Bancroft and are all actresses who nailed the femme fatale role so I definitely drew inspiration from them. Also Noomi Rapace from Girl with a Dragon Tattoo, because we thought that Skyler had probably had quite a tortured past. In saying that, I then let all of that go when we start shooting and just go with my instincts, otherwise I can start to doubt my choices.”

There’s a lot of weapons utilized in Blood Punch. Everything from crossbows to hatchets and even a grenade for good measure. That being said, there’s a lot of great kills in the film – ranging from gruesome to humorous. I’m partial to one where Skyler uses a cleaver. Cawthorne agrees, “that might be my favourite as well. I also like the double ‘scythe’ after Skyler and I have an argument about whose turn it is. I love all the kills once it becomes a bit boring for me and Skyler, that’s when I enjoy the film the most.”

Some of the kill effects didn’t go as planned, as Cawthorne describes, “There was one point where Eddie was firing paintballs at Ari to mimic the pistol shots I lay into him. Ari had padding on most of his upper body. I say’ most’ because there was a small portion of skin that hadn’t been covered right under Ari’s armpit. And it was about the fourth or fifth hit, you can see Ari go from ‘acting’ pain, to really ‘feeling’ pain. It never fails to crack me up. The look on his face as that paintball hits. So no, I guess there’s not a lot of sympathy there.”

Aside from the kills, one scene in particular was difficult for the actors. It involves making out with a whole lotta blood pouring down on them. “I would have to say that was my hardest scene in the whole film,” says Tennet. “You can actually see Milo holding onto me really tight because I was desperately trying to get out of the way of the blood! Actually…now that I think of it…Milo was probably just using me as a shield. What a dick.”

Cawthorne says, “One of the worst thins about that was the blood acted like glue and just picked up anything that was on that ground, so you go to get cleaned up and you’ve got cigarette butts sticking to your arse, and little bits of wood entangled in the hair on your thighs.”

As it turns out, shooting up in CA’s San Jacinto mountains drew some unwanted attention… “We had a guy who had nothing to do with the crew, kind of start following us around, he carried a gun in his belt and would often pull it out and show it to you. Towards the end of the filming he demanded to be paid for his ‘services’, our producer declined and so the guy pulls out the gun, and suddenly our producer was convinced that maybe we actually should pay this guy. He got his money and we haven’t heard from him since.”

The crew also made a bit of a mess in the cabin where they shot. The owner was furious, so when they realized reshoots needed to be done, “We can’t say that we’re the same film crew that ruined the house earlier, so Ari pretends to be someone else, puts on an American accent and rents the cabin. After doing some shots outside we get a call from the owner, saying that one of the neighbors saw people near the cabin with a camera, he’s worried because he had a bad experience with a film crew earlier in the year. So Ari has to assure him that we’re not the same crew, we’re just a bunch of friends who are taking snapshots of the forest. The owner buys it, and we manage to get all the shots we need. But that was a nervous period of time for us, we didn’t know whether the owner was going to pay us a ‘surprise’ visit or not. One day the cleaner knocked on the door and we all jumped with fright.”

Thanks a million to Milo Cawthorn and Olivia Tennet for answering my questions. Blood Punch is available now on DVD, iTunes, and VOD from Midnight Releasing. The DVD includes deleted scenes, behind the scenes footage, and other fun tidbits. I sincerely recommend this film to our readers. It’s an absolute blast.