Following Urban Explorers was my first Discovery screen film, the Swedish (but English language) Blood Runs Cold, a slasher made on a shoestring budget with a lot of charm, a lot of a laughs, a lot of good, a lot of bad and one of best killers I’ve seen in a horror film in a long time.
Directed by Sonny Laguna, Blood Runs Cold sees Winona, a struggling musician move into a new house in her snowy hometown. After she bumps into an old flame and his loved up friends, the four of them return to the house for drinks, partying and sex only to be rudely awoken the next morning by an axe-wielding maniac.
First the bad. The acting is terrible, the gore is poor and it’s as dumb as a movie can be. However, one thing saves this film in a big way – the killer. Wearing a jacket, snow goggles and woolly ski hat, he butchers the cast in a way that would suggest he knows he’s being watched.
Here is a maniac that walks past the window, stops and points at his prey for kicks. A killer that would rather axe an unlocked door to pieces rather than just opening it. You can’t help but imagine him wearing a smirk the size of his axe underneath his bandaged face. He is, simply put, up there with Freddy and Jason - except this classic killer has seemingly wandered into a student film and therein lies the film’s greatest strengths and fatal flaws.
The sound is dire, I’m pretty sure I saw a mic in a mirror and thanks to shoddy colour correction, parts of the film carry a strange orange glow but these all add up to giving the film a strange amateurish charm. Couple this with a truly memorable killer and Blood Runs Cold becomes a strange, somewhat kitsch horror movie.
It may seem that a forgotten horror icon is taking his anger out on the crappiest production he can find, but when embraced, Blood Runs Cold can confidently join the brilliantly terrible movie gang alongside Top Gun (1986), Crank (2006), and my all-time favourite, the beautifully bad Shoot Em’ Up (2007).
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