Movies
Open House (V)
“Where OPEN HOUSE could have gone over the top, it comes back down to earth and kept things on the ground floor. All in all an interesting watch, but beware an ending that may leave everything you cared about unresolved.”
Minor spoilers ahead (first fifteen minutes) – won’t ruin the film
Alice (Rachel Blanchard) is away one afternoon while a realtor shows off her pad. It’s during this open house that somebody slips in unnoticed, and takes cover in the basement. Realtor locks up, Alice comes home, has a dinner party, and fades to black with her friend Jenny on the couch (Anna Paquin) via ample good food and fine wine.
She awakens later that night to find herself alone, with Jenny’s car still in the driveway. Searching the house, Alice ends up in the basement, where she finds her friend sprawled on the floor – dead – her throat slit. Before Alice can escape the house, she is subdued by our mysterious invader, and locked away in a cubbyhole within the cellar.
The invader is David (Brian Geraghty), a beady eyed, quiet minded yet violent murderer – and he has cleared the way for his partner in crime, Lila (Tricia Helfer), to join him in some pleasant, domestic living. After a finely chopped organic vegetable omelet, sautéed delicately with a splash of extra virgin olive oil and a sprig of parsley, Lila ensnares an ex-boyfriend of Alice’s who insists on dropping over the house and letting himself in via some keys. Not before long you get the impression that Lila is actually the blood thirstier of the two – filming her sickness – killing for the thrill of it all, and the sex she’ll have later while watching the videotape.
When Lila goes to work during the day, like the normal people they are trying to portray would, David goes down to the basement and takes his prisoner Alice out of the wall. She is chained and gagged. From listening from beneath the stairs, Alice has been able to determine that Lila does not know about her presence, and that David is keeping her a secret.
David explains in short conversation that Lila will kill her if she finds out she is alive, and that keeps Alice quiet and subdued at night. But as the film progresses, and the intricacies of David and Lila’s relationship are divulged, it seems that perhaps Lila is the corrupt driving force, and he more of an influenced victim. She calls him weak on more than one occasion, and Alice tunes into this, attempting to win David over on the idea that they can run away from all of it together. By no simple means, as she is playing with two murderous killers, Alice must try to survive this invasion by avoiding Lila and playing David to her advantage.
The formula created by first time director Andrew Paquin is a fair one, and provides a firm backbone for a horror/prisoner/home invasion tale, but on the downside, something about it seems scattered and unfixed. At some points OPEN HOUSE seems to want to be a gore/slasher movie, racking up several kills along the course of their stay, but it’s there that the special effects fall flat or seem TV quality, failing to truly disturb anyone. And where OPEN HOUSE becomes a decent tightrope, psychological thriller, it lets up too much, leaving the emotional tones of the film too 2-dimensional to be called anything more than OK. And the victims – who cares? You’ll barely know who they are.
David looks like a psycho with his narrow beady eyes, and his long emotionless stares, and he manages to progress over the course of the film from a purposive killing machine to having perhaps a fragment of human self sense to stop the vicious cycle, but even this progression is too shallow and unrevealing to make you care about the characters at hand – Alice, Loni, or David – filling this house with shallow characters and flattening the story (which hinged upon them and their interactions, as they ARE stuck inside of a home throughout the film).
Final analysis: The gore isn’t over the top, comprising of arterial sprays, blood pools, and slit throats that look like cheap makeup FX – perhaps hitting its meat zenith toward the end when Lila looks through the coolers full of dismembered body parts, but otherwise, the story relies on the domestic tensions of David and Lila, and the need for Alice to survive and her attempts to twist David’s weak mind to her favor. But to no spectacular avail. Characters come in the front door and exit via plastic bags, but you won’t know them any better than passerbyers. Dinner guests, realtors, cleaning people – all emotionless sacs of victimry that get off’d like products being boxed on an assembly line. However OPEN HOUSE is driven by a decent plot, and some solid acting on Brian Geraghty’s part. His Arian-like, seemingly emotionless, pin eyed stares just personalizes the essence of a dim-witted psycho. Where OPEN HOUSE could have gone over the top, it comes back down to earth and kept things on the ground floor. All in all an interesting watch, but beware an ending that may leave everything you cared about unresolved.
The problem with filming sequels back-to-back is that, unless you can afford expensive reshoots, there’s no easy way to adjust course in between movies if fans react badly to where the story is headed. That’s why it’s important to have a complete narrative thought out well in advance lest you accidentally kill a budding franchise.
However, this isn’t always the case. Every once in a while, it seems like the cinema gods smile upon certain chaotic productions and gift moviegoers with complete franchises that feel like more than the sum of their hastily produced parts. Ted Nicolaou’s Bloodlust: Subspecies III is precisely one of these miraculous pictures, with the raw talents of the artists involved (as well as the continued support from Romania) turning the feature into an effective conclusion for a series that kind of made things up as the filmmakers went along.
That’s why I’d like to invite my fellow readers to join me on this third part of our journey through the Subspecies franchise as we look into Bloodlust and talk about how it remains a surprisingly satisfying finale to the original trilogy.
A Trilogy Planned on the Fly
Released only a year after Bloodstone found plenty of success in rental stores and mail-in VHS catalogues worldwide, 1994’s Bloodlust was produced at the same time as its predecessor in (mostly) the same locations and with the same team. This means that the movie benefited from all the same upgrades as Bloodstone, with the crew now being more experienced with the ins and outs of surviving a low-budget Romanian production and the cast really settling into their characters.
At this point, everything from location scouting to the makeup process had been streamlined, with Wayne Toth and Norman Cabrera, the main duo behind special effects, even switching out time-consuming prosthetics for latex gloves in order to speed up Anders Hove’s monstrous transformation. The titular “subspecies” demons were also once again relegated to a mere cameo appearance due to the laborious puppetry required to bring them to life.
The only real hiccup came from the fact that actress Denice Duff had replaced the first film’s Michelle (Laura Mae Tate) and was immediately expected to portray the character as both an innocent victim in part II and as a secondary villain in part III. According to behind-the-scenes interviews, the hectic production schedule that blended two different movies meant that Duff would often find herself having to alternate between two incredibly different versions of Michelle during the same shooting day – though it’s obvious that she’s having more fun with Bloodlust’s more traditionally vampiric version of her character.
In the finished film, we pick things up immediately where the previous entry left off as Rebecca (Melanie Shatner) is forced to leave her vampire sister Michelle (Duff) behind in the dungeons of Castle Vladislav due to the rising sun. This allows Mummy (Pamela Gordon) to use Michelle’s blood to revive the vicious Radu (Hove) so that he may continue his quest for the coveted Bloodstone – a magical artifact that perpetually drips the Blood of Saints.
Meanwhile, the dreamy US embassy agent Mel (Kevin Blair) agrees to help Rebecca plan a rescue mission, though they’re unaware that Radu has become infatuated with Michelle during his attempts to guide her growing bloodlust. This all culminates in a climactic confrontation meant to tie up all of the series’ loose ends in one of Full Moon Pictures’ most ambitious productions.
The Evolution of Radu
Like its predecessor, Bloodlust: Subspecies III was also warmly received by fans who argued that the series was an even bigger success than Full Moon’s other major horror franchise, Puppet Master. This praise wasn’t unanimous, however, as 1994 had seen the rise of a more modern breed of sexy vampire popularized by Anne Rice, with old-school Nosferatu like Radu being viewed as obsolete when compared to the likes of Lestat and Gary Oldman’s take on Dracula.
In a way, one might argue that Nicolaou’s film is something of a swan song for the classic vampire story, as Bloodlust combines all of the traditional elements we tend to associate with these tales into a single tragic yarn that ties a neat little bow on Radu’s story as well as the old-fashioned monster movies that he represents. The finale remains shocking despite the fact that this is the third time we see Radu get brutally killed onscreen, with the brief tease that he may one day return feeling more like a nod towards the nature of evil rather than sequel bait.
The film dabbles a bit in gothic romance and even explores the inherent power fantasy behind transforming into an immortal creature of the night, but the filmmakers never lose sight of Radu as a demonic force even when he’s willing to betray his beloved Mummy for Michelle’s sake. In fact, his twisted “love” for his fledgling makes him even creepier as we get the feeling that his passion comes from a dark and disturbing place.
Anders Hove is at his absolute best in this film, with the effects department boosting his moments of what the younger generation would call “aura farming” whenever Radu emerges from shadows like a 90s version of Count Orlok. There are even a couple of surprisingly effective jump-scares here, which is why I’d argue that Bloodlust cements Radu as one of the most memorable cinematic vampires of all time despite his humble origins.
Subspecies Saves Its Best For Last
Nicolaou and Vlad Panescu also saved the best for “last” (more on that in a bit) regarding the film’s visuals, with the cinematography and overall atmosphere of Bloodlust absolutely surpassing what we saw in the previous films. Everything feels appropriately climactic this time around (including the wonderful soundtrack that was co-composed alongside an authentic Romanian orchestra), and I appreciate how this is the fastest-paced entry in the trilogy since the film doesn’t need to waste time setting anything up.
Bloodlust still suffers from some of the same low-budget blemishes as its predecessors, but there’s so much creative passion here that no amount of wonky effects work or stilted dialogue can get in the way of appreciating the flick’s gothic grandeur. That’s why it’s not surprising that the movie’s definitive(-ish) ending would later be retconned as fans begged for more Radu.
Of course, the next entry in this series would be a different kind of vampiric endeavor altogether, with the filmmakers attempting to engage with the same trends that ultimately killed Radu and his antiquated kin. That, however, is a story for another time. For now, I’ll merely insist that Bloodlust: Subspecies III remains a highlight of Full Moon’s expansive catalogue and is definitely worth seeking out today.
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