You Know. The Usual

Generic title. Generic plot. Generic Instant Watch.

Let’s do this.

Quick Plot: Sarah is a happily married young woman nearing the birth of her first daughter with doctor husband Matt. The couple has just bought a lovely home located in one of those creepy horror movie towns where everybody is shifty and the only thing to do is ghost hunt at the local abandoned prison. 

Despite her imminent labor, Sarah and Matt invite pals (schizophrenic-and-dealing-with-it Brie and her boyfriend) and her lazy hipster twin brother and his girlfriend to spend a few days in their new home. Naturally, a visit to the haunted abandoned prison is in order and much hell breaks loose.

Bleed is not a very good movie, but it's filled with way better than it deserves performances from a likable and natural young cast. Lead actress Chelsey Crisp held my attention well, even when the film spun off into an absolute mess of, well, backwoods satanic supernatural occultists.

Now I know what you're thinking: backwoods satanic supernatural occultists sounds like a good time, or at least a fun category on match.com. But for all its barely 80 minute running time, Bleed just never seems to want to tell its actual story. There's a very loose connection established between Sarah and the town's history, but the central mystery is so clunkily parsed out that it's impossible to care. Weirdly enough, perhaps that helps the mean, unearned ending not actually hit as hard. So that’s something.

High Points

I really did find most of the young cast quite effective in their underwritten parts, so good on all six of those attractive thespians. May you move on to stories that actually let you do something interesting

Low Points

The idea of including a character actively dealing with schizophrenia in a horror movie that's going to involve some wild supernatural imagery is clever and rife with potential. Unfortunately, all that's done with it is forcing poor actress Brittany Ishibashi to chomp on antipsychotic medication as if it was M&Ms

Lessons Learned

Free-spirited millennials who don't bathe regularly have remarkable pedicures

Butterflies make excellent guard dogs when it comes to backwoods cults

If you happen to have a half moon tattoo, avoid mysterious towns with abandoned prisons and creepy law enforcement

Rent/Bury/Buy

Tripp Rhame's Bleed is a more competently shot independent horror movie than a lot of its Netflix Instant's competition, but its story is so poorly put together that it's pretty impossible to actually recommend. If you're killing time, it's more watchable than a lot of other low budget horror fare (mostly due to its strong cast) but man, the scares are messy, the story needed two more revisions, and the ending is the kind of face smack that just leaves you feeling bitter and betrayed. Skip it.