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Saturday, June 30, 2012

Death Factory: Bloodletting

Well, I know this will be a HUGE shock, but my latest movie from Blockbuster never came in the mail, so my back-up plan is to watch another free slasher flick on YouTube. Probably not as much silly fun as Hell Night, this one is called Death Factory: Bloodletting. Prepare for disappointme--uhhh, I mean, "SPOILERS"...

Opening scene. Yay, a red bicycle and pictures of a mother and daughter. A young woman(the mother, I presume...) is setting up a video camera. She tells the camera that her name is Anna, and that, if we are watching the tape, then she must be dead. Then the title of the movie slams into the screen. Good thing I wear a seatbelt when I view this crap.

Anyway, we leave Anna's rollicking comedy tape, and head to Phoenix, Arizona, 6 months into the past. Time travel makes me thirsty! Anyone have any iced tea? No? Well, fine. I'm now officially watching this under protest.

Anyway, a radio evangelist is raving as a motorist listens, and talks back to the radio. The driver, a long-haired goon-looking type, is heading to a place called the Carter Brick Factory. Another subtitle tells us that the factory was shut down in 2005...what, is this for a pop quiz later? Just get to the point!

Anyway, Freakazoid drives his van into the closed warehouse, and walks outside to another empty-looking building, where we hear a child wailing. Freaky's flashlight reveals what looks like a community of homeless people, using the empty building as shelter. When one person starts to flee, Freaky shows him and the others that he has food for them.

After passing around the sandwiches, Freaky finds out that there are only 4 people in the group, and he sees evidence of drug use. When he confronts the group about the drugs, he stands up and starts to blow them away, Dirty Harry-style. The only one he spares is the baby.

So, what does your average nutjob do after feeding homeless junkies, killing them, and then abducting a baby? Why, he brings it back to his van of course! Freaky opens up the back doors, gives the baby a bizarre pep-talk about how the adults deserved to be shot, then plops him down on the floor of the van and backs away. Okay, that seems kindaHOLYWTF?!?!?!?!  A demon-shark-woman just swooped up from the interior of the van, and ate the baby! Say WHAAAT?

More subtitles. She's Alexa, the "little sister". Freaky is Denny, the "big brother". And I'm Mark, the "constantly perplexed second cousin, once removed". Then more time travel. 6 months later, to be precise. Screw it, I'm taking notes. And I'm still calling him Freaky.

A woman wearing only black panties is chained to the floor. She's being watched by a person in a control booth,via a security camera. Freaky is there too. A loud, blaring siren goes off, and the woman wakes up. After looking around for a few seconds, her name is given as "Jane Doe: The Object". How nice.

Jane immediately tests the strength of the chain holding her, and it seems pretty strong. She stares down helplessly at her hands, and sees that someone has given her a label: when Jane puts her open hands side by side, the word "whore" is spelled out. Whoever made this film, he seems to have some major issues with women.

Then we see some kind of altar, and a television. A person on the tv is delivering a sermon about doling out justice, Hammurabi-style. He seems to be fixated on murder in that vein. As the girl cries, the crazy she-beast from the van wakes up and hears her. Uh oh...this could get bloody.

As Jane tries to tell her captor that she doesn't deserve to be treated like this, Freaky gets on an intercom, and tells her why he sees her as a whore. While Jane tries to undo the chain that confines her, the she-beast comes after her and gets a taste of her second course. Blood-spray goes everywhere, and Freak just smiles. Lather, rinse, repeat. Is the entire movie going to be like this?

Oops, now back to Anna(the woman recording her last thoughts...), who may or may not be dead as we watch her. See? I paid attention! She raids a medicene cabinet, and mixes up a concoction to get herself higher than Cheech and Chong on the moon. Then, after a shower, she decides to resume recording her message.

Apparently, she plans to attend a ritual sacrifice, called a bloodletting. She doesn't want to do this, but it's part of a secret plan that Anna has been putting together for a long time now. She apparently lost a loved one, and believes that the people attending the bloodletting may have taken part in the murder. By posing as an online fan of these rituals, she has slowly worked her way into their ranks, hoping to expose them.

She also has a name for one of these sickos, Rubber Love. Anna strongly believes that he was the one who murdered her daughter, and wants to kill him herself, should the opportunity present itself. Anna only has 1 fear...that this might be a trap. If it is, then I get to go to bed early tonight!

As Anna arrives at the meeting place, a masked man assaults her. He holds a gun on her, and asks for her name, a password, and a sub-password. Satisfied that Anna isn't a cop, he lets her up, but binds her hands and tapes her mouth shut. A pretty odd assortment of other captives stare back at her.

The guy in charge directs one of the captives to untie the others. One girl immediately looks for a spot on the floor to pee on, and the gunman threatens to kill her for not peeing before the journey. Then there's a pointless altercation between a redneck and a black guy. The gunman leaves the group, and lets them all get to know each other.

While they all just pretty much pace around and give each other dirty scowls, Freak watches from his remote location. A camera goes glitchy, and he yells at one of his workers to fix it. Booooooooooriiiiiiiiiiing.

As I nod off, the folks trapped in the warehouse decide to get acquainted , by at least revealing their internet names. The Nazi-racist guy introduces himself as White Manson, a collector of nazi items and snuff films. Next up is Black Johnson, a guy in the sex-slave trade. Who's next, Green Hornet? Blue Beetle?

Nope, now we get the best name in the movie thus far, the intellectually-stimulating Slutty Baby. She's more or less an online hooker...for a tidy sum, she lets men do whatever they want to do to her. This week, she's being paid to appear in a crap horror flick. Why didn't they just cast Paris Hilton in the part?

And now we get the movie's token shy, nerdy guy. He's The Cock Master, I shit you not. His thing is homemade bombs and killing sprees. His introduction segues into another introduction, of a dominatrix and her slave, named Gretel and Hansel. Yeesh.

Then we meet an obese guy with a chip on his shoulder, who calls himself Rubber Love. Ooooh, remember him? Anna sure does! Rubber Love openly admits that he has a fetish for abusing children. Anna shoots him a look that would kill a lesser mortal.

When it's Anna's turn, she introduces herself as Massive 9, and her online persona is known for being able to supply and distribute any materials(movies, magazines, etc.) that the others ask for. Pretty ballsy of her to create such a huge character. She better hope they believe her.

Then we see Freak in a red room, praying. He asks God to accept the people he brought to the warehouse as human sacrifices. After the prayer, Freak watches his sister chained up, and "wakes up" her inner demon-cannibal. Then he just sits back and grins. I'm glad someone's happy.

Black Johnson pours himself a drink, then whines about having to wait for the main event to happen. Rubber Love claims that one bloodletting lasted 13 hours. Then Gretel orders Hansel to ask Slutty Baby to speak with her. The 2 women chat, and it turns into a lesbian booty call. Probably as bored as I am, Anna wanders away from the group to look around the warehouse.

Anna eventually finds herself in an area that seems to be isolated from the rest of the building. She looks at her surroundings for a few more minutes, decides that she's really alone, and removes a handgun from down in her pants. Fun fact: your ass is designed to store guns in. After checking that it's loaded and that the safety us off, she conceals it again. When Anna rejoins the group, she finds Rubber Love staring at a centerfold like it's the cure for cancer.

In a bathroom that seems far too clean for an abandoned factory, Gretel and Slutty Baby get down to business while Hansel just stares up at them. I swear, he has the best role in the film, if only because he doesn't have any horrible dialogue to say. Lucky guy.

Anna decides to confront Rubber Love, albeit while still in character as Massive 9. She gets him to talk about her daughter's abduction and murder on film, and he reveals that there was another person involved. Well shoot, now she can't kill him until he reveals the identity of this mystery person. This is getting too complicated for a slasher flick. Somebody die, will ya?

Whoops, I should be careful what I wish for...Filled with rage, Anna decides to shoot Rubber Love several times. Freak, um, "freaks" and demands that his accomplice rig up some electric fence to keep everyone confined. At the same time, Gretel sends Hansel out to see what all the noise is about.

Hansel wanders down a deserted corridor, which pretty much seals his fate. Sure enough, the screen goes red, which means that the she-beast can't be far behind. She leaps out at Hansel, and chews his throat apart. Pretty ironic, considering how little he's spoken in the movie. It'd be like being in a boxing match with Helen Keller, and hearing your trainer say, "Go for the eyes! The eyes!"

Oh, and I forgot, but in all the excitement, Anna was knocked out. When she wakes up, the others have her gagged and tied to a chair. They demand to know why she killed the fat guy, which is going to be pretty hard to explain with her mouth covered. Oh, and Black Johnson panics, claiming that the guy in charge of the bloodletting will probably come in and kill the rest of them because they broke his rules. Ummmm, yeah....I don't think that's going to be a problem at this point.

Black Johnson(with that name, he really should consider going into the porn film biz) and Cock Master take it upon themselves to find a way to escape the warehouse, while White Manson hears Anna's real background story. He then reveals that he also had a tale of revenge, and that it screwed him up in major ways.

Then the she-beast kills Gretel and Slutty Baby after the world's shortest lesbian sex scene, with the world's swiftest double murder. Freak starts laughing like the loon that he is, and jibber-jabbers at the monitors. Was this script written by a sane person? I'm having serious doubts about that.

Anna tries to loosen her wrists, but the actress is so bad at conveying this, she just jiggles her torso in the chair, more or less. Or, Hell, maybe that was what the script told her to do. She finally grows a brain and gives up on that concept, because her next idea is actually not bad: Anna leans over, cranes her neck a bit, and chews through her bindings. If I thought it would do any good, I'd yell at her to stop chewing when she hits flesh.

Oh, and before she moves on, Anna stops to kick Rubber Love's corpse. As dumb as I find this movie, I'll admit that this made me laugh.

Freak and his assistant, Sid, discuss how things are going, and Freak channels his inner Bond villain. Seriously, he even rubs his hands together while they talk about their evil plans. Then Freak gives Sid a syringe, and tells him to inject She-Beast with it. Yeah, riiiight...If Sid had half a brain, he'd tell Freakazoid where to shove that needle.

Once Sid has left the room, Freak turns his attention back to the security monitors. He watches Black Johnson and Cock Master(I hate you, movie...I hate you so much. New rule: no movies unless they have characters that have actual names!) as they keep attempting to escape. Black Johnson gets frustrated and starts to throw furniture and props aroiund, causing Freak to shout at the monitor. Heh, we finally have something in common.

Cock Master spots an open door fram that only has a flimsy plastic curtain over it, so he decides to check it out. As soon as he sticks his head through the doorway, She-Beast spots him. She leaps at him, and yanks him through the doorway, giving "fast food" a brand new definition. For a skinny, demonic cannibal woman, she sure does seem to eat a lot. She-beasts must have high metabolisms.

Black Johnson turns around to discover that his companion has vanished. We see that Cock Master isn't quite dead, but is being rolled down a hallway on a bed with wheels. As the young man sees a television on that same weird evangeical show as earlier in the film, She-Beast wraps his limbs in chains. Then she crawls over him, grabs a hollow metal rod, and shoves it through his abdomen. When he dies, she uses the pole like a straw, and drinks his blood. Yum.

White Manson(wait....Charles Manson WAS white! His nickname doesn't even make any freaking SENSE!!!) steps into the restroom, where he finds the bodies of Slutty Baby and her slave. Slutty Baby appears to be (barely) alive, until White Manson snaps her neck. Then Black Johnson joins him, and accuses him of murdering the women. White Manson shows Black Johnson that his hands are blood-free, and they agree to get the Hell out of Dodge, proverbially speaking.

As She-Beast starts to eat Cock Master's face, Freak yells into the microphone that she needs to hurry up and kill the remaining survivors. He plays a sound through the intercom that immobilizes her, then orders her once more to attack and kill anyone who's left.

As White and Black work together(in perfect harmony?) to check out more possible escape routes, Freak decides to finally address them directly. He tells them that, when he was younger, he had a sister who had been mutated by an experimental drug. He chained her up, but then decided to use her as an "instrument of God", having her kill degenerates that he lured to the abandoned factory over the internet, with a particular focus on druggies.

While he's ranting and raving over his grand scheme, we see She-Beast injecting herself with a glowing substance in different parts of her body. As Black and White(an awesome computer game...at least, the first one was...) agree to work together to escape, Anna is just wandering down one random corridor after another. She arms herself with a metal bar, then removes her shirt. Don't get too excited, fellas...she has a white t-shirt on underneath.

After a few more pointless shots of people wandering around and Freak shouting into his microphone at his sister(who I think might be named Alexa...I just noticed that the name is written on a piece of tape on the mike stand), Anna hears a noise and hides behind a wall for whatever's heading her way. Black and White attack her from behind, and accuse her of killing the others.

Anna tells them about Alexa, and they all head into the restroom together to plan their next move. Black and White argue over how to survive, and Black decides to head out alone. His plan is to use some propane he saw earlier to blow a hole out of one of the walls, and leave. Eh, it's better than no plan at all.

Oh, and Anna may or may not be psychic now. When she and the others were just in the bathroom together, she had "flashes" of the scenes earlier in the bathroom. She saw the lesbians get attacked, and also saw the neck-snapping occur. I guess. So now she's weirded out by White, even though he's been relatively "nice" to her.

Anyway, I explained all of that because now White wants to know where the ammunition for the gun is. See, Anna has the clip, but Black has the empty gun. So, even though she's acting frightened around White, she gives him the bullets(which were apparenty shoved into her vagina, in a sandwich baggy. Gotta love movie logic...). Wait until she tells Black where she kept the gun...

After he puts the ammunition back into the clip, White waits for Black to return, and gets the gun back. To the surprise of no one at all, White loads the clip into the gun, shoots Black to death, then threatens Anna. This movie is about as subtle as an ace bandage lined with broken glass shards.

Then we get a slight plot twist. White reveals that he was the person who killed Anna's daughter. After he gleefully studies her reaction, he shoots her in the gut and leaves her to die. Of course, he then encounters Alexa and shoots her as well. Where was this guy an hour ago?

He enters Freak's control room area, and aims the gun at the back of the mastermind's head. Then we get yet another twist: he, Sid and Freak(who I forgot is named "Denny", although I think "Freak" suits him better, so I'm sticking with it) were all in the plot to kill the group together. Although Sid  and White aren't into the religious aspect of it as much as Freak is, they're both still murder-loving nutjobs. Sheesh.

After White leaves the control room, Freak orders Sid to go give Alexa another injection. Sid wanders through the halls with the glowing syringe, but locates Anna instead of Alexa. He offers to save her life if she promises to punish White, Freak and "all bad men" for him. Yeah, sure he does. And I'm the Emperor of Ice Cream.

So he injects Anna--and by "Injects", I mean he squirts the green goop from the Re-Animator film series into a gaping hole in a fake prop stomach. Then we get a wide shot of Anna moaning and writhing around in pain as the chemical transforms her. She starts to cough up blood, and keels over. Wow. Great healing properties in that chemical.

Sid, while attempting to escape, runs into the not-quite-dead Alexa. She glares up at him from the floor, then cowers in pain as she hears that weird sound again. Sadly, Sid gets away before she recovers. On the plus side, she catches Anna's scent, and wanders away to find her. Instead of finishinbg her off, Alexa drags her away.

Back in the control room, it looks like our favorite maniacal douchebag is combing his beard. Yippee. Then we see Alexa rolling her bed down the hall, but with the still-unconscious Anna on the mattress. When Alexa stops wheeling it to sniff and nibble at some body parts on the ground, Anna opens her eyes. They now look white-grey like Alexa's eyes. Finally!

She calmly(?) feels her stomach, and discovers that the bullet wound has completely closed. Then she quietly grabs a sharp blade off of the floor and attacks Alexa with it. After a brief scuffle, Anna wins the fight and goes off in search of more victims.

She looks around, then remembers White. Anna decides to hunt him down next, unaware that Alexa is still alive. Anna goes past rows of stacked crates(isn't this building supposed to be abandoned and empty?), unaware that Alexa is now hot on her trail. Oh, and there's a brief glimpse of Sid wandering around too...why hasn't he left yet?

The 2 She-Beasts have another fight, and Anna stabs the other mutant several more times. she watches her foe have a few spasms, and only moves on after Alexa stops moving. Then, after Anna leaves, Alexa has a few more spasms. Uhhh, which part of "chemical healing properties" didn't Anna understand?

Anna climbs a ladder attached to what I'm guessing is a vat of the aforementioned methane, then she stops to watch Alexa tracking and following her. Instead of having another spat, Anna chooses to keep moving. Alexa climbs the ladder, then--Surprise!--Anna kicks her back down, where she gets impaled on a metal bar. Anna climbs down to admire her handiwork, then saws Alexa's head off to make sure she stays dead.

Driving home,White tells his wife that he'll be there soon. Oh wait, he's not driving....I guess the camera crew just can't manage to hold the equipment steadily, giving it the illusion that his van is moving. He's still parked at the factory/warehouse/whatever. As he wraps up the conversation, White hears movement on the roof of the van.

He hangs up, then decides to have a look. Anna leaps on him when he gets out and looks up. Then we see Freak trying to reach Sid on a walkie-talkie, to no avail. That's when Anna pops up behind him, and begins to squeeze the sides of his head together like a lemon. He attempts to cripple her with the sound frequency that drives his sister insane, but discovers that the device has been disabled. Whoops!

After Anna kills Freak, she chains White to the floor like Alexa was. He just laughs, and asks her why she hasn't killed him yet, and Anna replies that she plans to keep him around until she gets hungry. Then she pounces on him and begins biting chunks out of him until he either dies or passes out. My vote goes for "dies".

The movie ends with an assault on the building by a few guys that are the saddest-looking attack squad in the history of assault teams. They all fire on Anna, and we see one more shot of her videotaped confession, followed by a quick scene implying that the assault team botched her execution. THE END...?

Man, I hope so. This was just depressing to watch. Sure, on a technical level it was impressive...there was ample gore, many victims, a potentially interesting concept...but it had almost no plot, and incredibly shallow characters. And the worst part is, this is apparently a sequel! I'm almost tempted to rent the first one, just as an endurance test for my annoyance level. Almost. 1 out of 5 killer trees, with the single point awarded for the effects.

And what(ughhhh) did I learn from watching Death Factory: Bloodletting?

-Experimental drugs that glow in the dark are never good.

-Never trust a friendly Neo-Nazi.

-Being a mutant is great for your figure.

My next film will be Red Hook. It can't be as bad as this one, can it? Seriously...can it?