Bloodstalkers

Bloodstalkers
United States - 1978
Director – Robert W. Morgan
Vidmark Entertainment, 1985, VHS

This looks like one of those local visionary films. Some fellow saw some original low budget horror films and figured, with funding he could assemble those ideas into his own locally made low budgeter. And it does have potential, with each of those good ideas couched in irritating droning stupidity, and swimming in a thin broth of failure. The entire plot is revealed in boring detail on the back cover of this video and worded in such a dry way as to force you to recoil in instant yawns.

Two couples are headed down to a cabin in the everglades for a week of relaxation when they stop at a gas station for directions and are menaced by a sinister but goofy looking old man and his warnings of “Bloodstalkers”. Nevertheless, they continue on, filling each available breath with veritable verbal diarrhea until they arrive at the cabin. After a bunch more grating oral defecation, Mike and his wife Kim opt for a little skinny dippin’ in the pond, and it looks like this might get tolerable for a minute when Jeri, the other woman gets excited about taking her clothes off. But no, her sweaty revolting lounge-act boyfriend Daniel would rather discuss domestic affairs while Mike and Kim go swimming in the blue filtered hard shadows of really bad day-for-night shots.

Frightened by noises and something in the water, Mike and Kim return to the cabin where Dan and Jeri are talking, with less clothes on, a mixed blessing, but at least a change. At last, something starts to happen. Sudden beating on the walls of the cabin freaks everyone out, but Mike fires his tiny .22 pistol which temporarily stops the terror but also signals the end of any further possibility of skin.
Valiantly leaving the cabin to seek help, Mike enters a world of darkness and much of his actions are a mystery because I can’t see a goddamned thing. After Running into a Baptist church where the congregation is in full swing, the film shows promising signs of revival, but Mike passes quickly through a few moments of inspired editing before whacking his head on a rock, rendering him, and the remainder of this film once again unconscious. Waking, he gets a ride back to the cabin with a deputy sheriff, where, confirming our worst fears, the rednecks have already committed all the carnage and his friends, like the film are proven to be long dead.

All those usurped ideas from other films have merely been shamefully woven into a tapestry of shit through which a few all too brief moments of original light shine.