Let’s make this triple feature quick. Here are my thoughts on Blood Myth, High Moon, and Marla.
BLOOD MYTH (2019)
If I wanted to be bored to tears by a film in which a several people go to a small town to interview locals about a creepy legend that we never see, I would have just rewatched The Blair Witch Project.
There really isn’t much to say about Blood Myth. A journalist and his pregnant fiancée travel to a small town and speak with people who claim to have gotten glimpses of a mythical being believed to be responsible for disappearance for ages. But don’t expect The Mothman Prophecies.
The fiancée goes missing, and the journalist spends the rest of the movie questioning unhelpful people to find out what became of her.
Nothing much happens until the last few minutes when he locates the fiancée. The brief, occult segment has some gore and killing but feels mostly like a no budget, straight-to-video flick of the eighties.
HIGH MOON (2019)
I assumed I knew what I was getting from a movie about a cowboy that comes back from the dead to finish off the gang of wolfmen outlaws he fought in the 1800s. The hubba hubba and I were expecting a silly werewolf action flick, but we just didn’t get enough of the silliness, the werewolves, or the action.
The film stars sexy horror daddy Matthew Tompkins (The Harrowing, Phobia) as a sheriff in a small town, where a very rare murder case coincides with the return of the sexy cowboy, who looks damn good for a dead guy.
The wolfmen outlaws become a biker gang (absurdly awesome), and we get some early wolfmen attacks (yummy blood and gore), but then the film comes to a screeching halt.
There is way too much talking and too much character development as the sheriff deals with relationship drama. It’s a fricking movie about a resurrected cowboy fighting a werewolf biker gang! Just get to it already!
The film takes itself way too seriously considering the premise, so sadly it’s not as much fun as it should be. The werewolf action scenes are definitely a blast, they’re just few and far between.
MARLA (2019)
The director of this film is also the lead, and while I appreciate what she was going for here, any veteran horror fan watching this film is going to see it as a grimmer, darker version of the movie Teeth.
A young woman gets an IUD birth control device inserted by a doctor who is also a distant relative (ew!). As soon as she has sex after that, she discovers it causes any guy inside her to literally explode.
Rather than having her taking full advantage of fucking guys to death just for the fun of it, the film focuses more on her grief and determination to get rid of the IUD, giving this a sort of body horror vibe.
She spends most of the movie determining why her doctor relative won’t remove the IUD. Yes, it’s long and plodding, but the…um…climax is quite satisfying. With its zinger ending, I think perhaps it all just would have worked better if this were a short film in an anthology rather than a full-length feature.
