(Director/co-screenwriter: Ed Hunt. Co-screenwriter: Barry Pearson.)
Storyline
Three
children born during a solar eclipse start killing everyone around them just as
they’re about to turn ten years old.
Review
June 9, 1970. Meadowvale General Hospital. During a solar eclipse, three children are simultaneously born to their respective mothers. The doctor who delivered them, billed as Doctor (José Ferrer, THE SENTINEL, 1977), is briefly shown conversing with a nurse about the triple-birth/solar event.
June 1, 1980. A young adult couple in a graveyard get into an empty grave to have sex. They don’t know they’re being watched by someone─it’s killer-POV camera time. While they’re doing hetero sex stuff, dirt is flung on them. When the guy gets up to investigate, he’s beaned with a shovel. His girlfriend is strangled with a jump rope. Something light-colored and light falls onto the dead woman’s corpse. All the while FRIDAY THE 13th-style rip-off music plays.
The next morning, in a bright afternoon elementary school classroom, Sheriff James Brady (Bert Kramer) stands in front of students and asks them if any of them are missing their jump ropes─a plastic jump rope handle was found at the scene of a crime (read: previously mentioned murders), and it’s a clue. None of them are missing their ropes, the kids say. One of the girls, Debby Brody (the sheriff’s daughter) says goodbye to her dad when he leaves─it’s quickly established that she’s one of the three children born during that solar eclipse, and she’s a cruel, sly partner in crime with the other two, Curtis Taylor (Billy Jayne, billed as Billy Jacoby, CUJO, 1983) and Steven Seton (Andrew Freeman, billed as Andy Freeman). When Miss Viola Davis (Susan Strasberg, THE MANITOU, 1978), their teacher, checks one of Debby’s outbursts and irritates the girl, it’s clear that this situation is far from resolved in Debby’s (Elizabeth Hoy) mind.
Later that day, Debby charges her fellow solar-born friends to watch her sister, adolescent Beverly (Julie Brown, EARTH GIRLS ARE EASY, 1988) strip, try on date clothes whilst dancing around her room. Debby charges the hot-for-Beverly boys a quarter each, more if Beverly shows more skin. A few minutes after that, Joyce Russel (Lori Lethin, THE PREY, 1983), Beverly’s less outgoing classmate, visits and she and Joyce leave the Brody residence.
The scenes that follow are lifted straight from HALLOWEEN (1978). Initially it’s a wide-angle, late-afternoon shot of the young women strolling down a suburban, tree-lined street. A few minutes later, Sheriff Brody, accidentally driving by them, pulls over in his squad car to say hi to his eldest daughter and her friend. (Joyce essentially equals HALLOWEEN’s Lori Strode [Jamie Lee Curtis], Beverly equals Annie Brackett [Nancy Kyes], and Sheriff Brody equals Sheriff Brackett [Charles Cyphers].)
A few minutes after that, the little psychos─who seem sweet when they want to be─resume killing. One of their classmates (Timmy Russel, little brother of Joyce) witnesses one of their early murders, and they torture him with cruel children’s games (locking him up in a junkyard refrigerator while playing hide-and-seek, then trying to kill Joyce when she goes looking for him, one of the maniacs wearing a white sack cloth with eye holes over his head─which seems like an homage to FRIDAY THE 13th PART 2, except FRIDAY came out on April 30th, 1981, two days after BLOODY’s stateside release.
Joyce and Timmy warn their friends and neighbors about the three psychos. Nobody believes them. Meanwhile, more corpses pop up around town, some obviously indicating who did them in and dumped them. It all comes to a head when Debby, Steven and Curtis attack the Russels in their home. A vicious battle between the solar-born murderers and the siblings ensues, matching the ferocity of the brief, sometimes playful violence that preceded it (leading to another succession of HALLOWEEN-homage scenes). The character-true ending is sequel-bait but not egregious.
BLOODY is a good, entertaining, and sometimes gory flick. Its story is solid (considering its conceit), and it’s tightly scripted and shot (aside from its gratuitous Beverly-dancing-topless-in-her-room scene). Its actors and its characters’ backstories are sufficiently developed for the genre (although Ferrer, only in a few scenes, is wasted here; anybody could’ve played his part, given its brevity). If you can get past its blatant thieving of certain HALLOWEEN and FRIDAY THE 13th scenes, you might enjoy this slyly cruel flick.
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