Delayed Reaction: Bliss

Premise: A doped up artist get turned into a vampire and become unable to distinguish her drug impulses from her vampire impulses.

 

This movie is a lot. Certainly more than I expected when I decided to watch a horror movie with that cute girl from Friday Night Lights (Dora Madison) and Norm from Cheers (George Wendt). It turns out, this movie is much more like watching an 80-minute-cut of the “Smack My Bitch Up” video. The film is a classic case of “does the second half make up for the first half?” Once Madison become a vampire and the film is basically told in a haze, it is confident and decently fun. The director really got into all that.

 

Several of the building blocks early on I had trouble with. The dialogue is just awful. It all sounds improvised by actors not trained in improve and the only direction was to use “fuck” as a filler word a lot. Don’t get me wrong. I love swearing. “Fuck” is a great word, but it’s used in this as a way for characters to remind you they are edgy and not as a natural part of their speech. Dora Madison is also not who I would cast for this. Her character, Dezzy, needs to be someone who looks about 10 years older. Madison was 29ish when this was made and she has a young face. Dezzy is supposed to be a hardened LA Artist who is well-known, and Madison just doesn’t look worn enough. And she can’t pull off that awful dialogue convincingly yet. Looking at her recent filmography, I get the sense that she’d like to do more horror. I hope she does, because I could see her aging into it pretty well. A late 30s Dezzy played by Madison I could be into, but in 2019 it really just feels like they cast the youngest actress who was willing to get naked and bloody a bunch.

 

For me, the delirium of the film wasn’t quite engaging enough to overcome the performing, casting, and dialogue problems. Others’ mileage may vary. It looks pretty decent for what was surely a small budget. The striking visuals certainly make me curious to check out the director again.

 

Side Rant: I know it’s hard to have an artist be good at something in a movie, because if the art was that good, why would it just be in this movie. A songwriter won’t give their best stuff for someone in a movie to sing. A stand-up comedian won’t give their best stuff to a character to do in a movie. The worst of these is a painter painting something for a movie… What I’m trying to say is, Dezzy’s painting isn’t very good. When a film puts this much into the artist painting their masterpiece, I’m really OK if they just pull the move where they never show the painting and only show people reacting to the painting.

 

Random Observation: Dora Madison and George Wendt made two horror movies that came out in 2019. Is that a crazy coincidence or is there a story there? Did someone who worked on one movie recruit people on set for the second movie or something?

 

Verdict: Weakly Don’t Recommend