Blood and Donuts

A review by Nick Peron

So recently I took a bit of a sabbatical to the west coast in order to get away from it all. While I was out here, the topic of b-movies came up between me and an old high school friend. In the conversation he started telling me about this movie called Blood & Donuts. "You have to see it!" he tells me, "It's really messed up! And it's Canadian!" Now, I decided to take him at his word, because, I figured if it's a friend of mine telling me a movie is messed up, I figured he would be right. Boy was I wrong.

Let me start off by saying that there are three kinds of Canadian horror films: 1.) The entertaining 2.) The messed up and 3.) The boring. Blood & Donuts falls under the third category, and I will tell you why. When it comes to film making in Canada, some avaunt guard artists seem to have this notion that to make their horror film interesting they have to infuse into it some sort of touching non-horror type theme into it. Sometimes it works, but very rarely.

To use an analogy, let's say you had a zombie movie but you wanted to also make it a commentary about family values and the nuclear family. And in doing so, you peel back the horror and the gore and you focus mostly on the family unit. Well what happens is your zombie movie goes from being an awesome, gore-filled Zombie commentary on humanity to.... well Fido .

I'd have to say that Blood & Donuts is to vampire movies, as Fido was to zombie movies. The film itself was filmed in Toronto, which should be the first sign that your vampire movie is going to blow more chunks than an anorexic with an abnormally large pointer finger. Why? Because it is also the place where they filmed the god-awful Vampire TV show Forever Knight . Which should be the basis point that anything vampire related that comes out of Toronto is going to amount to a bunch of celluloid jerking off that features a Vampire that is far too in touch with his feelings. And Blood & Donuts is no exception.

The movie follows the adventures of Boya, a vampire who doesn't like taking peoples lives and just after man lands on the moon he decides to take a nap, only to be woken up in 1995 by some asshole playing golf on the roof of their apartment building. Upon waking up in the modern world (circa 1995) he becomes involved with a cab driver who's in deep with the mob, and an introspective donut shop waitress.

The movie is possibly the dullest dreck I've seen in my life, with Gordon Currie (the actor who portrays Boya) awkwardly delivering his lines at one point, then later becoming this deep philosophical vampire who has telepathic sex with girls when he's in his bath tub and eating rats to crave his blood lust. His cab driver side kick Earl the cab driver, played by Justin Luis, is -- I believe -- trying to sound like a French Canadian cab driver, and does an awful job doing it. There is no way that he's trying to go for a foreign accent, he's using francophone slang/english speak, only without the accent.

To give the movie star appeal, David Cronenberg makes an appearance as the mob-boss known as Stephen who spins home spun wisdom about how shoes leave marks on the floors of bowling alleys while drinking beer and wearing fake glasses. His appearance was just as exciting as when he played the guy calling customers of a gas company thanking them for their patronage in Last Night . If only Blood & Donuts was as interesting a film.

If the mix up of "crazy" and "zany" characters isn't enough for you, Boya's girlfriend who is also a vampire comes back into his life, as she is one of the few that were bitten by him and turned over the years. Which adds one of those zany plot twists I'm sure made the last few minutes of the movie interesting. But to be honest with you, dear, sweet, and kind of smelly reader, is that I turned this movie off about halfway through.

I couldn't sit through it, I'm sorry but it just dragged on and on! And you're talking a guy who's sat through and watched Horsey like four times in his life (which is no easy feat I can tell you that much!) This was just another dull movie trying to humanize a vampire and make their abilities seem like a curse of eternal torment because they can never be with anyone forever unless they stop being such a pussy and bite somebody and turn them into a vampire as well.

I wish I could sit through this entire movie, but I'm sorry but even a seasoned bad-movie-watcher such as myself knows a dull ride when he sees it and I gave it more of a chance than it deserved. The title in itself promises something a lot more campy than it delivers and the tag line "Eternal Damnation Really Sucks" suggests that perhaps there would be a fair deal of humor, but the entire thing is comparable to a slow paced handjob from somebody no grip and a bad case of arthritis.

So, if you like boring Canadian films (and who doesn't?) I suggest that you check out Blood & Donuts. Otherwise, if you want to see a kick ass Canadian movie, go out and rent something that David Cronenberg directed as opposed to starred in (Except for A History of Violence , that one sucked.)