Reviewed by

Christopher Armstead

It is New Year’s Eve in the year of 1968 I believe, in this movie ‘Life Blood’, and young lovers Brooke (Sophie Monk) and Rhea (Anya Lahiri) are racing down the freeway all stressed out. Brooke has just done something really, really bad and her kind and goodhearted girlfriend… who we should mention is the absolute honest to goodness TRUTH… just wants her to turn back, hone up to this thing she has done because everything is going to be all right. Brooke’s not going to do this. Brooke pulls over and rationalizes that this bad thing she has done is actually for the betterment of mankind. This thing Brooke has done, and Brooke’s overall sour disposition gets her smited by the hand of God (Angela Lindvall). God, who’s about 5’10" I guess, weighs about 115lbs and sports a see through toga, has plans for Rhea however. God needs angels to destroy evil and knows that Rhea is up for the task. These angels must feed on the blood of the evil and they can only work at night. Rhea believes in God but she also believes in her girlfriend Brooke and begs God to allow her to fight evil by her side. God warns Rhea of this decision but grants this wish and now a couple of sizzling hot vampire lesbian fighters of evil are born. Kind of. More or less. It’s complicated.

Forty years later our girls emerge from the dirt. I have no idea why God put them in the dirt to incubate for forty years other than the fact that shooing a 1969 period piece is way more expensive than shooting a 2009 modern picture. Rhea is ready to fight evil but Brooke, who is kind of pissed off at her situation, is ready just to be evil. After Brooke does a couple of things that mightily stress the kind and gentle Rhea completely out, the pair end up at a little out of the way In and Out store in this tiny city of Pearblossom called Murderworld to shield themselves from the rising sun. Here they meet the clerk at this store, Dan (Patrick Renna), who on one hand is concerned about the two scantily clad young ladies in desperate need of a shower in his store, but they are hot. Especially Rhea. Maybe it’s the skin tone or they eyes or the way she wears an oversized man’s shirt or perhaps it’s that terribly cute accent… Anyway it soon becomes painfully clear to Dan and to Rhea that perhaps Brooke was better left smited

to death back in 1969 because she’s completely out of her mind. Rhea for her part probably realized this a little bit too late because now Brooke is doing much damage, including major damage to Rhea herself, and Brooke is about to rain hell on the planet earth… unless she can be stopped. Does Rhea, who has made her feelings for Brooke public knowledge, have the stones to make this happen?

What are we to make of this little vampire flick ‘Pearblossom’ (the movie’s mythical location) / ‘Murderworld’ (the mythical name of the convenience store) / ‘Life Blood’ (the completely unimaginative name that Lionsgate executives are distributing this movie under)? I guess ‘Life Blood’ sounds similar to ‘True Blood’ so I suppose that’s the angle they’re going after there. I’m going to be gentle with this movie because even though I am of the opinion that the movie is not very good, it is very imaginative in many regards. One of my problems with this movie comes at the very outset in that we see the character of Rhea in a diner having a snack with another character, with this scene obviously taking place after the events of the movie. This essentially means that the movie begins with a spoiler because as things occur during the movie, because of this one editing decision, a lot of these events lose whatever impact they might have had because we know already a couple of major events that have to happen.

I did enjoy the concept that writer / director Ron Carlson dreamed up I just don’t think it was developed all that well. This movie spent a lot of time on peripheral things such as trying to be humorous, which did work to varying degrees, but it did take the movie away from the best part which was the initial concept and the relationship between Brooke, Rhea and this God character, and it also didn’t help that Rhea disappeared for a good little while halfway into the movie. Admittedly this was probably more of a personal issue since Anya Lahiri sure was easy to look at and listen to and watching her go away made me sad. I’m just saying is all.

There were some other nice things in this movie as I thought both female leads trudged heroically through some suspect dialog to create a pair memorable characters, I really enjoyed this particular slant on the admittedly well worn premise of the vampire and there were other clever little things going on the background and off to the side of the actual movie that added to this films overall charm.

Again, ‘Life Blood’ wasn’t really all that good of a movie because of the reasons we mentioned above, in addition to some inconsistent pacing which didn’t allow this movie to really get a good rhythm going, but I did like the basic concept and with a little fine tuning, though I do understand that this is probably unlikely, I think it could turn into a nice little series of cinematic stories.