“All You Need is Blood” - Film Review
We are at a time in film history when mainstream movies are afraid to embrace sentimentality. It’s an unfortunate reflection of what’s going on in our society, where people are more comfortable with cruelty than with kindness. Sentimentality is essential. Passion, love, and genuine enthusiasm shape all of us, and it’s a disservice to this artistic medium to turn our backs on honest-to-goodness zealousness. Popular movies have focused instead on taking a meta approach, where the joke is that they’re too cool to embrace authenticity. It’s no surprise that indie films have been able to skewer the meta method to create something that speaks to the passion that’s at the heart of filmmaking. All You Need Is Blood is the first of its kind, a zombie drama (or zom drom) about doing the thing you love with the people who mean the world to you.
courtesy of filmmaker
Bucky (Logan Riley Bruner) and his best friend Vish (Neel Sethi) spend all their free time making movies. So far, they haven’t achieved the success they think their movies deserve, but they’re not deterred in the slightest. Bucky wants to make something that outlives him and creates a legacy that will make his memory eternal. While Bucky finds genre work to be low-brow, Bucky and Vish decide to shoot a horror movie for a local film festival with a $3,000 prize. As luck would have it, a meteor crashes in Bucky’s backyard and turns his father (Tom O'Keefe) into a zombie. Now, with a real-life zombie on their hands, a wannabe actor (Mena Suvari), and a camera-shy assistant with dreams of being an actor (Emma Chasse), Vish and Bucky might have a hit on their hands.
Anyone who loves movies has spent many an afternoon in the backyard with a borrowed camcorder (or cell phone nowadays) making what they believe will be the next great Oscar winner. At one point, some of us knew every dance routine from High School Musical and thought their performance as Troy Bolton was really something. And it was really something because it stoked the flame of what would become a lifelong love affair with film. Beyond the plot of the film itself, All You Need Is Blood is a love letter to anyone whose passions have outweighed their means. It’s a delightfully low-fi ode to an ’80s Spielberg flick by way of five dollars and a dream. There’s nothing more pure-hearted than two teens with a borrowed camcorder making feature-length movies in their backyard, simply for the love of it all.
courtesy of filmmaker
At first Bucky claims that “pain is temporary, but film…film is forever,” but as things start to spiral out of control, he realizes that he’s been making this movie for the wrong reasons. He shouldn’t be chasing awards or critical praise, but instead focus on the joy he gets from the creation of his art. An audience can tell when a piece of art in any medium is made simply to chase awards and acclaim, because there’s a sheen of insincerity that can’t be washed away. There is no such sheen on All You Need Is Blood. All the creator really needs for a movie is true excitement about the craft, but a bucket of blood (or twenty) doesn’t hurt. Who wouldn’t love an out-of-left-field, blood-soaked ending that’s sealed with a kiss? All You Need Is Blood is infectious, a zom drom that may not have a pulse on a zombie technicality, but is brimming with life.
Follow me on Twitter, Instagram, Letterboxd, and YouTube.