What? A lousy 2.7 rating out of ten around here? That's at least two whole points to few. I'm not claiming it deserves a rating higher than five, but still "Bleeders" isn't nearly as awful as indicated by this low rating and it actually features a handful of good & fairly original ideas! This movie handles about macabre topics like deformed monsters caused by generations of incestuous relationships and even freaking hermaphrodites, so I'm tempted to honor it with more points just for NOT being another uninspired teen slasher flick or uneventful ghost-story. This low-budgeted B-effort opens with a young couple arriving at a remote island where the atmosphere is clearly ominous and unwelcoming. The man, John Strauss, suffers from a rare blood disease and came to the island to find a cure, as all his ancestors were living there. Along with his loving wife Kathleen and the local doctor (Rutger Hauer), John learns he's the last survivor of the notorious Van Daam family; a line of highborn Dutch perverts who fled their own country after it became illegal to fornicate with each other. The hated family supposedly got extinct now, but they're still living underneath the island in a network of caves and they feed on corpses stolen from the local cemetery. So the plot is a little stupid and quite the opposite of scary, "Bleeders" is still an entertaining flick that often feels like an old-fashioned and cheesy 80's effort. The Van Daam monsters look like little trolls and they don't really do much, apart from munching through corpses and pulling people under the ground. It's really not a bad movie story wise, after all it's adapted from a Lovecraft story by no less than Dan O'Bannon, but the execution is undeniably tacky. Most of the locations and scenery look really ugly and there also is a severe pacing problem. The first half of the film is rather slow, whilst the second & more entertaining half often gets interrupted for pointless reasons, like the completely gratuitous sex sequence for example. The dialogs are laughably inept, Hauer is underused in his role as town's doctor and the climax is too easy to predict as well. Come to think of it
maybe it does deserve the 2.7 rating! Nah, it's good fun when you're in an undemanding mood.
