This is an average horror flick that really should be better than it is. The initial screenplay adapts Lovecraft's "The Lurking Fear" and was by Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett. The film sports a beautiful location (Grand Manan Island, Canada) that maintains that same creepy boating town vibe as their earlier DEAD & BURIED, but gets bogged thanks to flat direction from Peter Svatek. Dupuis, who also has the O'Bannon penned SCREAMERS on his resume (his mom must be proud), looks a tad out of place, more like a TWILIGHT reject with his pale skin, flowing hair and bad fashion sense. Hauer is decent in the film and actually survives. Oddly enough, half of the cast also popped up in THE SWEET HEREAFTER the same year. The film does earn points for having harm come to several children through out. Svatek must have some kind of fetish because he moved on to TV movies like BABY FOR SALE (2004) and STOLEN BABIES, STOLEN LIVES (2008).

There's the core of a decent horror story here, but it's buried beneath such an immovable mound of poor pacing, muddled direction and bad lighting that watching through to the end starts to become something of an ordeal. The story has a dwarfish tribe of mutants – the result of centuries of inbreeding – running around a network of tunnels beneath a sleepy New England town feeding off the embalming fluid of the corpses in the local graveyard. Ignoring the fact that, the little bleeders should have run out of available corpses somewhere around 1452, writers Adair and O'Bannion take an age to get things moving, as our hapless 'heroes,' a descendant of the mutant family with an incurable blood disease (who looks like a half-hearted goth with a hangover) and his wife crawl towards the answers they seek.The poorly descendant also has a craving, but doesn't know what it is that he craves. In fact, I'm not sure he ever really finds out what it is – although he does determine that it isn't a salad sandwich or the molestation of his missus. Maybe they explained while my brain lapsed into one of a number of stupors as it attempted to remain awake – or maybe, having grown as bored as the rest of us, the writers just didn't bother to resolve the situation.Rutger Hauer's in here somewhere, and to be honest he's the only reason I decided to watch. He's wasted here though, as a doctor who is entirely superfluous to the plot, and is clearly painting-by-numbers in order to grab his pay cheque and run – with his reputation diminished that little bit more, but his bank balance just a little bit healthier. I wonder whether he imagined it would end like this when he sat on that roof and murmured of C-beams and the Tanhausser Gate? Don't think so, somehow… The mutants, when they finally show, are by far the best thing about the film, and should have been given a lot more screen time. They're better than Rutger, that's for sure.

Don't know if anyone remembers the box for this or not, but it had a packet of fake blood taped to the front and you could squish it with your fingers. You gotta miss that kind of showmanship now that VHS has become obsolete! Well anyway, back to the film...A pale, terminally sick man (Roy Dupuis) arrives on a secluded Canadian island with his blonde nurse wife (Kristin Lehman) to trace his family lineage in hopes of finding a cure for his "degenerative congenital blood disease." Turns out he's actually a descendant of the incestuous Van Daam clan, whose keeping-it-in-the-family lifestyle has resulted in little, legless, rubbery, bright-light-hating monsters who lurk beneath dark catacombs and emerge with claw hammers to nosh the blood of townspeople. First off, you might expect better coming a from a film scripted by Dan O'Bannon (ALIEN) and Ronald Shusett (FREEJACK), but there are several glaring plot holes and the premise, despite perverse sexual elements, is overly familiar. Rutger Hauer is also wasted yet again as a boozy doctor. However, it's not a complete washout and that's largely due to very good performances from Dupuis and Lehman, who make you believe in their characters and their plight, even though this thing is downright stupid much of the time. Watch for them in other things, but this horror exploiter will be best remembered by me for that nifty box.

Bleeders is set on a small isolated island called Van Daam's Landing where the parent-less John Strauss (Roy Dupuis) & his wife Kathleen (Kristin Lehman) have travelled to in a desperate search for answers to John's hereditary blood condition after discovering that he was born on the island. They ask the islanders whether a 'Strauss' family ever lived there but they claim no one by that name ever has. Meanwhile the island is in a bit of a crisis as all the dead need to be dug up in the local cemetery as the wood used in the coffins is substandard, it is discovered that some of the bodies have disappeared. Around the same time there is a sighting of a deformed creature which ends up dead that the local doctor Marlowe (Rutger Hauer) examines & finds out that it's blood has the same genetic flaws seen in John's. Are they connected? What are these creatures, what do they want with dead bodies & what will happen now all the bodies have been dug up...Also known as Hemoglobin here in the UK which means I saw the uncut version this Canadian American co-production was directed by Peter Svatek & is average at best. The script by Charles Adair, Ronald Shusett & Dan O'Bannon was apparently based on the short story The Lurking Fear by H.P. Lovecraft & has glimpses of creativity, excitement & a pretty good story but the finished result is really dull to watch, it takes itself far too seriously & is just far to slow to maintain one's attention for over 90 minutes, the film doesn't get going until the last 10 or so minutes by which time, if your still awake, is far too late. We learn during Bleeders that these creatures have been on the island for literally generations yet no one has ever seen them because they feast on dead bodies stuffed embalming fluid, OK that's fine if it was a large city but this is a very small community. I mean how many people died there a week, it must have been quite a few to sustain a load of creatures. Even if only one person a week died & that was enough to feed all those creatures that's still a pretty high death rate in a community that probably numbers no more than a few hundred, right? The narrative is very loose, nothing is tied together that well & the explanation why these creature exist in the first place is flimsy to say the least & I wasn't keen on the open twist ending either. Having said that it's watchable & there are a few decent sequences in there.Director Svatek must take the blame for taking a potentially great premise, some terrific special make-up creature effects & turning in such a drab & lethargic film. Bleeders is well made but it has no real energy to it, the horror scenes have little tension & no scares until the end when everyone has to barricade themselves in a lighthouse as the creatures try to get them as a thunderstorm rages outside. There isn't much gore, there's a mangled creature, a few dead bodies, some brief stabbings & the films gore highlight is a cool slit throat that gushes blood.Techncially Bleeders is good, it's well made & competent throughout but I'd have liked a bit more visual style. The special make-up creature effects are excellent it's just a shame that they get all of five minutes worth of screen time, a real shame because they look really impressive. The acting was OK but nothing special & is it just me or does Dupuis look like a female Bruce Campbell?! Hauer probably needed rent money & doesn't put much effort into his role.Bleeders had the potential to be a great film with some cool creatures but in the hands of this set of filmmakers what we ended up with was a slow, dull & disappointing exercise in patience, maybe I'm being too harsh here as it's not without it's merits but there are so many much better horror films out there that I simply cannot recommend Bleeders at all.