Here for Blood

I recently watched the Canadian film 🇨🇦 Here for Blood (2023) on Shudder. The story follows a professional wrestler who reluctantly agrees to cover a babysitting job for his girlfriend. What starts as a quiet night quickly turns into chaos when a group tries to kidnap the girl he's watching. From there, it's a wild ride of blood, guts, and gore.

Directed by Daniel Turres (Terry's Car Gets Stolen), the film stars Shawn Roberts (X-Men), Maya Misaljevic (Locke & Key), Joelle Farrow (Turkey Drop), and Jesse Buck (Nightmare Alley).

This movie was an absolute blast and has serious rewatch value. It's a self-aware horror comedy that embraces its over-the-top nature and delivers with style. The soundtrack is fantastic, and the script is packed with fun scenarios and clever references-including nods to Little Shop of Horrors and Scream. The kill scenes are especially impressive: elite throat slashes, creative gore, fun burn effects, and an awesome "he's not dead" moment that had me grinning.

While the ending didn't hit quite as hard as the rest of the film, it didn't take away from the overall entertainment.

In conclusion, Here for Blood is a fun, blood-soaked ride that's a worthwhile addition to the horror genre. I'd give it a solid 7/10 and highly recommend it to horror-comedy fans.

A pro wrestler who fills in for his girlfriend at a babysitting job defends his charge from an evil cult.

It turns out I've seen Shawn Roberts in some stuff, but the name didn't mean anything to me. He was one of the guys who got killed off a bit early in Land of the Dead, which is a pretty awesome job on a resume but not all that memorable. However, he was great here, and I'll probably remember his name now.

This is a splatter comedy full of cheesy lines and gore sfx. I'm not really sure I liked anyone but Roberts and the kid he was babysitting, played by Maya Misaljevic. The scenes between them were great. When other characters intruded, the movie often got a bit dumb.

The bad guys are played with extra camp. Roberts' reactions to them were funny, but I didn't find the bad guys themselves all that funny. I think part of the problem was the writing and directing. The bigger, musclebound guys had some presence and made for appropriate challenges for Roberts, though.

That led to some pretty decent fight choreography, and the fights could get pretty brutal. If you don't like gore, you might want to skip this movie, though it's played for laughs. There are constant geysers of blood, which got a bit silly, but I guess that's unavoidable in a 90s horror homage.

I didn't really feel that all the characters were able to satisfactorily justify their existence. However, Roberts was able to keep things pretty fun, and having lots of characters around meant that the body count could keep piling up. If that's all you really need to enjoy a movie, I'd say this is a good watch.

If you like movies like Dead Alive, Botched, and Evil Dead, it's worth a look.

In need of some extra money, a down-on-his-luck wrestler agrees to babysit his girlfriends' younger sister for the night while she studies for an upcoming exam, but when a deadly cult descends upon the house looking for blood he must put his fighting skills to the test to save everyone he cares for.

There's quite a lot to like with this feature. Among the brighter spots here is the film's wildly imaginative setup that provides this with a great opportunity for fun throughout. The main concept of him getting dragged into the babysitting gig is quite fun, making quite heavy use of the concept of him being a male trying to go through the act of babysitting a young girl. This gets brought up throughout the course of the film as his muscle-headed style and good-natured sense of duty conflicts with their more natural sense that try to explain what's going on as the situation spirals out of control involving the purpose behind the cult's appearance at the house and what they're actually doing there. It's all given a great comedic bent with the reactions, one-liners, and over-the-top nature of everything which all sets the film in motion rather well. This setup provides the kind of baseline starting point where the fun of the home invasion produces no shortage of high-energy confrontations. With that comedic bent still in full effect, the confrontations here with the initial members of the cult trying to sneak inside and take her without conflict but get interrupted by the wrestler putting his moves to the test in defending her. This continues with the added bodies being added to the fray as his friends arrive looking to end the night there and get drawn into the mix and then the parents that bring about all kinds of fun here with the series of twists they bring about which not only generates a slew of highly effective gore scenes for the numerous kills but also keeps the film going along as such a frenetic clip that it comes together incredibly well for a lot to like. There isn't much to dislike here but it does have some minor drawbacks. The main factor against the film is that it tends to introduce a few too many elements than it needs to for the type of story this is trying to be. The whole idea of the cult trying to gain immortality through the sacrifice is fine enough, but to constantly try to bring about the importance of the situation with a wise-cracking hero featuring supernatural healing powers just as much as the supernatural regeneration powers of the cult that tends to feel somewhat unnecessary. As well, with the film's heavy focus on the comedic touches not just in the reactions and quips being offered, some of them come off as being scripted rather than being genuine in-the-moment comments so the lessened tension isn't there at the wrong moments. These slight issues are all that keep it down.

Rated Unrated/R: Extreme Graphic Violence, Graphic Language, and children-in-jeopardy.

Here for Blood is a ton of fun. Shawn Roberts absolutely kills it with the awesome one liners while defending a house against a home invasion.

Tom (Roberts) is conned into babysitting by his girlfriend and thus starts the home invasion by a group of mask wearing killers.

The fun starts when Tom encounters the first man in a mask and kicks the loving junk out of him.

What makes this stand out from some other home invasion films is its absurdly funny humor, extremely creepy antagonists and awesomely over the top practical effects.

You find out that this home invasion is to possibly capture the little girl and anyone else is just dead meat. About a third of the way through you will probably guess the reasoning as to why they are doing it but it gets does have some twists and turns... especially when you figure out who is behind it.

Here for Blood is a lot of fun and Shawn Roberts really adds a lot with his cockiness and hilarious one liners through out the film. It also doesn't slow down at all. It's definitely worth watching if you like horror comedies.

I personally don't care for Horror movies that mix their tone as much as this one does. Like I mention in my title, 'Re-animator' is way Over The Top too, but maintains more of a campy/satire tone throughout. This one right from the opening scene starts off with prolonged, extreme violence. Just not really my thing, especially if you are going to mix goofy humour with it later. The tones are just to extreme for my personal 'Taste' (such as it is)

However, in all fairness if you like these kinds of films that mix extreme violence with Over The Top gory humour, you may indeed like this one just fine. But, just for me, I don't really care for this more 'Modern' take on this kind of 'Horror', although I did kind of like the Supernatural elements as basic as they were.

For example, it is similar as to why I didn't enjoy the recent film 'Violent Night' Again, they were trying to mix humour with extreme violence, and in this case with a young girl involved. To me, I feel you should either go for a lighter touch and play up the humour, or take the whole thing completely seriously and just make a straight forward Slasher film. Just my take on it.

But, like I say, IF you are the kind who likes this more 'Modern' approach to Horror, and you don't mind the mix of really goofy humour and extreme, brutal violence, then you may very well enjoy this movie more than I did.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ My Particular Way of Rating:

5 - Flawed, but with some entertainment value.

6. A decently passable story maybe worth a watch.

7. A solid film, well made, effective, and entertaining.

And, obviously, you can probably figure out what above and below these would mean... : )