Movie Review: Blood Junkie (2010, Troma)

In Troma's nearly four decade run as one of the top independent film companies there have been numerous slasher flicks to flood the massive cult film library out of Hell's Kitchen. Graduation Day, Mothers Day are some great examples of quality Troma slasher offerings but on the flipside there have been some turds like Blood Hook and Dead Dudes in the House. Blood Junkie is a recent film from director Drew Rosa that attempts to line itself up with the "quality" slasher classics mentioned above. 

Buy Blood Junkie on DVD




Blood Junkie starts off the way any solid slasher should start off, with a kill. A fairly bloodless kill of a homeless man , but a kill nonetheless. After that we head into almost an 80's Kevin Smith-ish goofiness. Laura and Rachel (Sarah Luther, Emily Treolo) are a couple of girls that "just wanna have fun". "Fun" in a slasher movie usually ends up in death. The gals get charmed by two goobers (one with a god-awful mullet) who take the ladies on a camping trip that begins with the cliché campfire horror story about the local Creature (Andrew Swant). The creature looks and acts like one of the Sand People from Star Wars and just loves draining his victims of their blood.

I enjoyed the humor in Blood Junkie to a degree. There is some surprisingly funny dialogue and the whole 80's atmosphere is as spot-on as I've seen in any film trying to recreate that decade. It is a slasher movie but unfortunately there's little "slash" until the final 20 minutes with no suspense to really make up for the up and down pace. Some t&a is thankfully thrown in to the mix, so not all is lost.

Troma's thrown some extras on the DVD. There's an intro that's been on many of the recent Troma releases with Lloyd Kaufman and Debbie Rochon, an early Rosa short-film, a commentary by Rosa and finally some deleted scenes. The deleted scenes are ok. We get to see some extra footage from this hilarious exercise video that's shown in the beginning as well as some random footage in the woods.

Blood Junkie has some positives going for it - I enjoyed the 80's look, the humor was certainly a surprise and also the camera work and editing were very professional. It really does have the genuine look of something like Slumber Party Massacre or Graduation Day. Other than that it's pretty mediocre where slasher films are concerned.