"Here For Blood" (2022)

by Mike Imboden

Normally here at “The Good, the Bad, and the Verdict”, both Joseph and Mike give their thoughts on a slice of cinema. However, here and there they will be taking the reins in a solo outing. For this installment, it’s Mike with a solo review of the Screambox original, Here For Blood by Daniel Turres and Pageman Production.

Synopsis

Struggling to make ends meet, a rowdy pro wrestler agrees to babysit a precocious 10-year-old girl. What starts off as a laid-back night of junk food and video games quickly spirals into bloody chaos as the secluded home is invaded by a cult of mask-wearing maniacs.

The Good

As a fan of professional wrestling AND horror, Here For Blood is right smack-dab in the middle of a Mike Imboden’s Favorite Things Venn diagram. So did this live up to my hopes? I’d have to say “Yes”. While the majority of the film is comedic in nature, there are plenty of things to cause some unease, especially if home invasion movies get you like they do me. I can handle monsters, slashers, zombies, and supernatural stuff, but man - throw a Ben Cooper mask on someone and have them sneaking into people’s houses and I’m a blubbering fool. Thankfully the tropes of the home invasion sub-genre are offset by the humor and the ridiculous amount of blood spraying from slit necks, chopped limbs, severed heads, and all other manner of violent wounds.

Shawn Roberts, who’s been in a ton of things (most notable to me being Albert Wesker in two of the Resident Evil movies), is great as wrestler-turned babysitter Tom O’Bannon. The dude is jacked up, so he has an impressive presence on screen, and he’s quick with a quip, so he makes for a believable hero (in an unbelievable bloodbath). Maya Misaljevic is equally as good as Grace, Tom’s charge for the night with both of them working well together like the best of any adult/child duo from film and TV history (think Mandalorian and Grogu, or The Terminator and John Connor - you get the drift).

The Bad

There’s a lot of professional wrestlers who can act and have done so. There’s also a lot of them that are genre fans, so finding an actual wrestler to play the role of Tom shouldn’t have been too hard. Is that a bad thing, though? Not really, I guess. Although Shawn Roberts does resemble John Cena to a certain degree so this ends up being like a live action version of the meme where a knockoff product is titled as a “Wish-dot-com version of…”

Honestly, though, there’s not much “bad” about Here for Blood. At two hours it DOES feel a little too long, but there aren't very many slow spots that feel like they could be edited out and, yes, the plot isn’t anything all too original, but then again it doesn’t NEED to be for what we've got. So, you know, let’s just call that a wash and leave things on a positive note.

The Verdict

Pro wrestling mashed up with horror is nothing new (there are many entries ranging from Mexican icon Santo fighting Dracula to wrestlers battling zombies and all sorts of evil) so don’t expect Here For Blood to break any new ground. However, Daniel Turres and company take the familiar and put a nice coat of paint and wax on things in the form of copious amounts of blood, some good comedic interactions, and more than a couple of funny one-liners making this a wholly enjoyable ride. I’m surprised we here at GBV missed this last year (although Joseph may have reviewed it for another site earlier in its festival run before we really took off), so I’m happy this is getting a wide release in a week via Screambox.

If watching jacked dudes beat the snot out of demonic cultists is your thing, you won’t have to look any further than this gem right here.