Given my love of all things horror, then of course I opted to sit down and watch "Bloat", as I had the opportunity to do so here in 2025. Sure, I had never even heard about the movie, and all I knew about it was the fact that it was a horror movie. Which, essentially, was all that I needed to know to make me watch the movie. So I didn't have any expectations to writer and director Pablo Absento, really, so he had every opportunity to entertain and impress me.
But talk about a swing and a miss of a movie. You have to watch this garbage heap yourself in order to fathom how lousy film making it actually is. A large portion of the movie is spent with the audience watching Jack (played by Ben McKenzie) sitting at his computer and doing online searches and watching questionable videos. It was insanely boring and laughable to attempt to pass that off as being entertainment. I have to say that this movie, with writer and director Pablo Absento at the helm, was a massive swing and a miss.
And it didn't help that a lot of the footage in the movie was filmed with hand-held, shaky camera and layered with a lot of interference filters. It was downright annoying to bear witness to. Plus, a large portion of the movie seemed to be filmed on the performer's mobile phones.
Of the entire cast ensemble, I was only familiar with leading actor Ben McKenzie and actress Bojana Novakovic. The acting performances in the movie were actually fair, despite the fact that the movie itself was a dumpster fire.
If you enjoy horror movies and prefer to watch a properly filmed and an actually entertaining horror movie, then give "Bloat" a wide, wide berth. It simply isn't worth the film it was recorded on. And wasting 86 minutes on this garbage heap just isn't worth the effort. Some of us literally suffered through this amateurish and home-made attempt of a horror movie, so you don't have to; you're very welcome. This is not a movie that will find its way back to my screen a second time.
My rating of writer and director Pablo Absento's 2025 movie "Bloat" lands on a very generous two out of ten stars.
