Blood Creek (2009)
Its original UK release had the film known as Town Creek but the name was changed to Blood Creek when it was released in the United States. The film was directed by Joel Schumacher who has quite a few amazing films under his belt (including a personal favorite of mine 8MM) though also quite a few that fell short. While not all of his work falls into horror he does have a few key films set in both horror and suspense and knows how to put a film together. The writing credit falls to David Kajganich who is a little newer having only one screenplay written before it. The quality of his work shows through quite well through this one and he has 3 more movies being written. My only worry is that two of them are remakes of classics and I hope he writes the screenplays for It and Pet Cemetery in a way to do them justice as pissing off the Stephen King fans, with remakes of 2 classic films, will surely hurt his chances for much after that.
Now going into this film I had heard mixed reviews. After seeing the film I ultimately believe it was a bias against Schumacher for a few of his films that were utterly painful to watch. If you can put those thoughts aside while watching the film as I did I believe you'll have a great time. We open with a German family on a farm in the middle of nowhere in the World War 2 era who receive a letter that a scholar is coming to stay on their farm. While the mother is against the idea initially the check they are offered to keep the scholar up swayed any decision against finding out more away and they agreed to do it. His first night there he points out that Germany will soon rule the world and we find out he is on a mission for the Nazi regime to recover ancient artifacts that can provide immortality. Apparently there were multiple artifacts left in the United States when ancient Vikings first found the continent and the Nazi's want them. The scholar that comes to town, Professor Wirth (Michael Fassbender), finds the first relic and ends the introduction apparently cutting the daughter and fading out of scene.
We cut to modern day as the modern day as a man, Evan Marshall (Henry Cavill), is being lectured by his father that his older brother, Victor (Dominic Purcell), has been missing for over two years and blames him for it happening. That night out of the blue the older brother reappears and insists there is no time and they need to go out immediately to have revenge on the family that has kept him captive and tortured him for the past 2 years. While his brother is at first hesitant just happy his brother is back when he sees the scars on his back he agrees to go with him. We see them sneak up on the house where the family is at (which is the same house shown in the introduction) and once we have the family rounded up appear to be seeing the same family from nearly 60 years before -un ravaged by the passage of time. Soon after the Nazi shown in the introduction reappears, infused with power making him stronger than a normal man and quite angry for the situation he is described to be in.
This movie was a true shock on how well it was portrayed. When you combine a lower budget film (even with amazing production value) with a Nazi mastermind who is nearly immortal and went straight to DVD you expect nothing great. When you keep in mind that a large slew of his films haven’t been great you will further be worried. Don’t be. If it at all sounds like something you may enjoy watching I recommend picking it up immediately as I was truly surprised at how enjoyable and worth watching this film was.
