As a genre hybrid, The Bleeding House couldn’t be more calculated to bum me out. It is, of all things, an “artistic” slasher movie. It starts out promising…a family of four at dinner time, some ugly secret from their past keeping them isolated and unhappy. But everything goes to pot (for us as well as the family) when a mysterious stranger (Patrick Breen) shows up asking for assistance. Not only is this character named “Nick”, but he is a walking Xerox of every Southern Gothic cliche known to man, right down to his all-white suit and his front porch logorrhea. Anyone who lets him in the front door and doesn’t phone the police (and also the Golden Turkey awards) deserves the night of hell they are about to experience. But we sure don’t.
By the time he reveals himself as a serial killer, we are already wishing there were another serial killer around to finish him off. Luckily, there is. In fact, the movie has no less than three, possibly four soulless murderers walking around. Eventually, the worst of the bunch, the family’s young daughter (Alexandra Chando) shuts our soliloquizing slasher up for good, but not before we are forced to watch — in sick, loving detail — as he drains her parents of blood and puts it in mason jars, slits her brother’s throat, and shoots two dim-witted local policemen. To say I found the experience unpleasant is to bless it with faint criticism. It is a thing no one should witness. It makes me want to run out and see The Sound of Music just to scrub my mind.
The Bleeding House was the second film I saw in the Tribeca Film Festival.
(Travalanche) 