FountainPen Whenever I see a movie on IMDb with a rather low rating, I immediately feel the reviews rating it 10/10 are suspect. This was the case with the review by ldorio-1 who said "A weird film, but worth seeing a second time!!!!!!". This is a review by a person who has reviewed only ONE movie on IMDb, this one! Kinda makes you think he/she must be a cast/crew member or a friend. A shame. The movie overall is OK, could have been far, far better with proper direction and decent cinematography. Looks as though it was shot on a minimal budget. Even sound suffers. I can recommend this, especially to fans of the great Rutger Hauer. 5/10.

Project X-ray Nobody's written a review of this for a while, but never mind, so here I go. Got this for £1 second hand in a charity shop. This still represents mediocre value for money. My version was on DVD and has the title 'Hemoglobin' rather than 'Bleeders' or 'The Descendant' as some reviewers here. I've no idea if the different titles have different cuts. The cut I saw was pretty bad. The producers of this must have thought they'd lucked out for a while- the cast's actually quite good (including Rutger Hauer), the location's great- a spooky Canadian Island standing in for New England, and a script by 'Alien' writers Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusset, borrowing heavily from HP Lovecraft. But the end product is naff.Where id it all go wrong? Well, the first rule of making a monster movie is make the bloody monsters scary. The second rule is make the bloody monsters scary. You get the idea. Well I saw these monsters and all I could think was 'I could kick their asses'. I'm not some macho meathead- I'm a 34 year-old nerd, but I could still kick those monsters' asses. They're weird inbred troglodytes descended from a family of 17th century aristocratic dutch perverts. They have messed-up faces and eat pickled corpses. They aren't vampires and can easily be harmed and killed by normal, conventional means such as knives, guns and boat propellers. They have strong arms, but move about by shuffling along on their butts because they DON'T HAVE ANY LEGS. Yep. The 'terrifying' creatures in this movie are all seriously disabled and stalk their victims by walking on their hands and shuffling along on their asses, at a crawling pace. Plus they're deathly afraid of strong light. Their only weapons are small, stubby daggers made out of scraps of bone. The villagers, meanwhile are tooled up with a wide variety of high-powered firearms (that they somehow can't shoot straight) and have access to an endless variety of blades and blunt implements (that they somehow choose not to use). Seriously. If I was in this movie, I'd have just sat in the lighthouse and shot the freaks one by one as they struggled to climb the stairs. Even if I ran out of ammo, I could just throw heavy objects at them. If I ran out of heavy objects, I could still smack them on the head with a big stick as they butt-shuffled slowly towards me. If they broke the big stick, then I could still kick them in the face before they could reach me. they'd have to bite my foot off before they'd even stand a chance. The average 10-year old could beat up a dozen of these with a bit of effort and imagination.In short, these poor creatures are actually considerably less threatening than the average dairy cow. They aren't scary monsters, they're just very sick, profoundly disabled adults. Watching this turkey, I felt more sympathy than fear for these unfortunate individuals. They do not make the grade as antagonists of a monster movie.Sadly, this film isn't quite bad enough to make it an ironic comedy in the vein of 'Plan 9 From Outer Space'- or 'The Room'. It's just a bit rubbish.

Bloodwank Though it came out in what is generally considered a dead time for B cinema Hemoglobin is a film that I have quite a nostalgic interest in. I nearly saw it some 11 odd years ago, I guess it must have been right about the time it first came out and I recall seeing the first couple of minutes and being put off by talk of inbreeding. That sort of thing gave me the willies back in the day, I was a lot more prudish and so as I recall I skipped to another channel and watched Species. Fast forward to yesterday and I finally got around to watching Hemoglobin after all these years. Worth the wait I'm happy to say, plus I probably wouldn't have got a huge amount out of it had I watched it back then, its darker and more adult oriented than the sort of thing I used to groove to and most likely would have been a snooze. The plot deals with the unfortunate John Strauss, cursed by a degenerative and life threatening blood disease, a cure for which he searches on his ancestral island. Unfortunately this is a place of dark shenanigans, notably the aforementioned inbreeding whose repercussions are still present and making trouble. Its gloomy stuff, moving at a measured pace it melds dark drama with creature feature, stirs in disturbing themes and cooks the lot with solid performances and well woven atmosphere. Roy Dupuis summons appropriate sickly desperation as John, convincingly driven to far places, while Kristin Lehman handles the role of his wife with a nice feel of love and support. Genre fans will be most pleased by the inclusion of Rutger Hauer though, having a blast as an alcoholic ex doctor nonetheless able to rise to the occasion in times of need, a rundown but definitely not out performance that's gladdening to see given his occasionally rather forgettable work in other b pictures of the era. Other performers do well enough, no one really shines but they work well with the wet and dreary location. A solid if unremarkable script from genre legends Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusset (with Charles Adair) keeps the film serious minded and interesting whilst throwing out some fun character quirks, things get a bit sketchy towards the end though with character behaviour stretching beyond the characterisation and wavering tone. Mostly its solid work though and the bleak edge works well, aided by fine monster effects. The beasts are shown to just the right extent and look impressively grim, every bit the foetal distortions brought to monstrous birth that they are supposed to be and their attacks are tightly edited and intense, occasionally even bloody. Sadly the direction here isn't terribly dynamic, Peter Svatek can maintain a dark atmosphere but not much in the way of tension so the film suffers in the final block, he also fatally shies away from what could have been a fantastic bit of grotesquery, this was a film that needed real balls and they are sadly lacking, so what should have been a terrific climax falls a bit flat. Inevitably this brings into sharper relief other problems with the film, lulls in pacing, plot holes and the like, but I prefer not to dwell on them. Basically I had a fine time with this one for the most part, more unsettling than expected and well worth the wait. Inessential if you don't have much time for creature features or this era of horror in general, but otherwise I'd say its pretty well worth checking out...

udar55 This is an average horror flick that really should be better than it is. The initial screenplay adapts Lovecraft's "The Lurking Fear" and was by Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett. The film sports a beautiful location (Grand Manan Island, Canada) that maintains that same creepy boating town vibe as their earlier DEAD & BURIED, but gets bogged thanks to flat direction from Peter Svatek. Dupuis, who also has the O'Bannon penned SCREAMERS on his resume (his mom must be proud), looks a tad out of place, more like a TWILIGHT reject with his pale skin, flowing hair and bad fashion sense. Hauer is decent in the film and actually survives. Oddly enough, half of the cast also popped up in THE SWEET HEREAFTER the same year. The film does earn points for having harm come to several children through out. Svatek must have some kind of fetish because he moved on to TV movies like BABY FOR SALE (2004) and STOLEN BABIES, STOLEN LIVES (2008).