BLOOD BEAT (1983)

BLOOD BEAT (1983)

Tagline: Who can survive its reign of terror?

(Horror, Hunting, Samurai) [R]

Gary, bring me some candy bars.

In this one, Ted and his family are going to have a joy-filled Christmas and apparently do a ton of hunting. It doesn’t take long before the hunting part starts freaking out Ted’s girlfriend Sarah. As she becomes more and more distraught in the rural Wisconsin home, the spirit of a Japanese samurai begins killing everyone in sight. Because why wouldn’t that happen?

Oh, man. One thing the 80s had to offer was just a TON of crazy horror flicks and this one spits in the face of common sense, plot, character building, dialog, good directing, decent acting, all of that stuff. There is a scene in this where Ted goes to hug his mom and just hits Sarah in the head. Guessing due to budget or something, they just didn’t even bother to redo the scene. In another scene, Ted sits down on a log with the barrel of his rifle pointed right at his neck. What the cow?

Really the main story is about Sarah even though we are at Ted’s parents’ house. Apparently, Ted never told Sarah that his family hunts like non-stop. She hates hunting and to be clear, if you don’t like hunting parts of this movie might be a hard watch for you. No wait a minute. For most people, nearly all of this movie is going to be hard to watch. This flick could have been as fun as MAXIMUM OVERDRIVE if they had played AC/DC’s “Rock Your Foundation” during the house-shaking scene, but nope. They didn’t bother doing that. This movie might have also been better if Sarah and Ted’s mother Cathy just straight up got in a fistfight because they could not stand each other. 

The score for this thing features the most annoying violin chords of all time. The soundtrack is rough. There just isn’t much going on here with that. 

Acting wise Claudia Peyton who plays Sarah is basically expected to carry this movie on her back. She got out of acting immediately after this movie and it ended up being the only film she ever showed up in. His acting in this is rough, but she wasn’t alone. Dana Day who plays Dolly doesn’t get a lot of screen time in this, but does okay in the scenes she gets. Day was only in 1 short before this film and never acted again. The same can be said for Helen Benton who plays Cathy. Her acting in this is beyond bad and apparently, she didn’t want to do it again. James Fitzgibbons plays Ted and did end up doing one more movie, but not until a quarter of a century later. He isn’t quite as bad as Benton, but you do wonder for the entire movie why the character doesn’t handle things differently. The only actor’s career this Samurai didn’t kill was Terry Brown (THE PRINCESS DIARIES) who continued acting till 2021 and may pop up in another movie someday. 

The ending definitely gives you that what the crap did I just watch feeling. Then again, how many glow-in-the-dark killer samurais are really in Wisconsin?

I have to give BLOOD BEAT a 4 out of 7. It’s bad, but it’s so nuts that it’s nearly worth at least a singular watch just for the wildly bizarre experience. It is probably not a great pick for a Halloween-Horror-O-Thon, but for 80’s horror completists, it seems like this is pretty much something you can’t skip.

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