Writer(s): Jose Carlos Gomez
Starring: North Roberts, Matthew E. Prochazka, Colleen Irene Boag, and Bruce Spielbauer
I was perusing through the movie collection on hoopla (basically a Netflix for certain library systems) when the artwork for Bled White caught my eye. There was something about its minimalistic approach that appealed to me, featuring only a person with a bloody face lying in a bed of snow…it was really quite striking. Well, on a late-winter’s eve, I was terminally bored, and randomly picked this out of my “favorites” list to watch.
It doesn’t take long to realize that Bled White wears its inspirations on its sleeve. The most obvious example of this is in the way its story is told—the chronology jumps around, and the story is even broken down into titled vignettes, much in the same vein as Quentin Tarantino's seminal crime-caper Pulp Fiction. The main problem with that is that director Jose Carlos Gomez doesn’t have a hundredth of the talent that Tarantino has, and probably has even less than that fraction of the budget. This means the narratives are only loosely interwoven, and it makes it feel more like a gimmick rather than a necessary story device.
It all takes place in a future world where the dead have overrun the living. I suppose wisely, given the obvious budget restraints, the zombie attacks are few and far between, with Gomez instead filling the film with a countless shots of barren, snowy landscapes that are meant to evoke the mood of a lonely, solitary landscape. I surmise that if these shots were removed, the movie would only end up running somewhere around 60 minutes. Also working to pad the running time out even further are the random zombie attacks, which are usually poorly edited, and feature lots of close-ups of bloodied zombie faces as they move forward for the kill. There's not much in here that works.
Ed and Matt are two guys who survive by robbing, killing, and looting. They trade some of the canned goods that they find (which seem to be the main currency of this future) for rent in a nearby motel, and survive off the rest. They also donate the lifeless bodies of their victims to Sam and Mary, a couple who still occupy the same house that they lived in with their son, Victor. Mary is desperate to get out of there, but Sam refuses, because their son is still in the house with them, chained in the upstairs attic and kept alive by the corpses Ed and Matt give to them.
At some point, they get into it with the owner of their motel, the wife of whom Matt has a thing for. Matt also keeps a zombie in his bathtub, though I’m pretty sure it’s never explained why, though of course it ends up moving the plot forward by attacking someone at one point. Meanwhile, Ed dreams of leaving the town and looking for Melissa, a woman on an old VHS tape that he just randomly found on a street, something he eventually heads out to do. I think this story marker is trying for irreverence, but it just comes off like a bad, half-baked idea that never goes anywhere, both literally, and figuratively.
There are also some other things that happen, but none of them are really worth getting into, and it all leads up to an overwhelmingly stupid ending that seems to suggest that our surviving heroes are only in for more of the same (a fate that we are gratefully spared). The worst part about it is that it just seems to come out of nowhere—I was expecting the final scene to be a lead-up to some kind of revelation, but it just stops and the credits started rolling.
The experience of watching Bled White is quite a drag—it’s pretty boring, amateurishly shot, and not even remotely shocking or surprising—but I do have to at least give it some credit in that it doesn’t try to be like every other zombie movie. Multiple angles of the zombie outbreak are explored, such as the family who keeps their zombified son in the attic because they don’t want to let him go. Granted, stories like that have been done many times before, but I can at least appreciate that they were trying to do something a little bit different with the overdone zombie subgenre. The makeup effects are what I could consider “standard”—just a lot of extras covered in fake skin and blood and growling up close at the camera—but gorehounds will be very disappointed, as there’s really not a lot of the red stuff.
The acting is fairly decent, for the most part, though I have to confess I was really impressed with North Roberts’ performance as Ed. He successfully walks the line between wannabe tough mob type, and sensitive father figure to Matt, his partner in crime, and does well with the range of emotions he has to display. The rest of the actors are pretty much what you would expect to find in a movie with such a small budget, though none of the performances are terrible.
As I said, I popped in Bled White because I was bored, and while it didn’t alleviate my boredom, it at least managed, for the most part, to take my mind off of how bored I was for about an hour and twenty minutes. And that has to count for something, right?
RECAP: It won’t fool anyone into thinking it’s anything other than a low-budget film, but Bled White does benefit from some good performances, and the ambitions of writer/director Jose Carlos Gomez, no matter how incapable he is of matching them. The film is broken down into several vignettes that jump back and forth in time, making it an ultra-low budget zombie version of Pulp Fiction, but with half the imagination and very little of the (writing) talent. It’s all pretty bland, with shots of a barren, snowy landscape taking up what feels like a quarter of the run-time, but it's also mercifully short, another little detail that works greatly in its favor.
RATING: 4/10
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