Directed by:
Hans G. Hatwig
If you're wanting to see a good exploitation / slasher / gore film, look
elsewhere. If you're wanting to see some overacting guy chasing girls with horrible
hair and clothes around in abandoned houses and through the woods for 80
minutes, this is your movie.
Blödaren
aka "The Bleeder" (Åke Eriksson) is
the nickname given to this film's psycho. He has a beard, long hair and
wears a tan jumpsuit, pushes around a baby carriage, is emotionally
stunted, likes to wag his tongue around a lot and suffers from some kind
of rare, incurable genetic disorder that makes his eyeballs bleed. Twenty
five years earlier when he was just a child, his mother attempted to
simultaneously drown him and commit suicide in a lake but only managed to
kill herself in the process. After spending years in a mental institution, The Bleeder
has escaped and is back at his old, long-since-abandoned lakeside home
killing whoever he can get his hands on. A young couple whose car breaks
down nearby become his first victims. Three months pass, and a new group
of people have the misfortune of getting stranded there so it's time for
more of the same.
A (terrible!) all-female glam rock band called the "Rock Cats" finish a
concert for about a dozen people, hop in their tour bus and are on their
way toward another gig. They - Axet (Sussi Ax), Mia (Mia Hansson),
Nulle (Agnetha Öhlund), Eva (Eva Danielsson) and Maria (Maria
Landberg) - are all bleached and teased blondes decked out in stiletto
heels, studded leather jackets with shoulder pads, giant hoop earrings and
leopard-print spandex pants. One of the girls even wears leg warmers with
bells on them, which are annoyingly heard jingling during nearly every
scene. They have a problem with the "generator" on their bus and are forced
to walk to Bifors; the nearest village. When they get there, they discover
that the entire area has been abandoned and all that remains are a bunch of
run-down, unoccupied homes. As they go from house to house, they find blood on the
floors and in bathtubs, an altar with cups full of blood and a human skull
in a baby carriage. None of that stops these shred-head bimbos from continually wandering off
by themselves so they can get picked off one-by-one. Their only hope for
being saved is a forest ranger (Danne Stråhed) with a braided rat
tail who happens to be in the area checking his mink traps.
You'd figure that a film
with the title The Bleeder would have a little, you know, blood in it,
right? Think
again. Pitchforks, knives and other weapons are brandished at various
times, but the killer ends up actually strangling everyone. Though
some of the girls are pretty good screamers, the acting is awful and none
of the characters are given any personality whatsoever. They all keep
their clothes on, too. So there's no gore and no skin... What exactly does
this slasher flick have to offer? Well, some of the chase / pursuit
sequences are pretty long if you're into that kind of thing. There are a
few minor jump scares that actually work. The director has also lucked out
in having some pretty great shooting locations in numerous huge,
abandoned, lake-front homes. But at the end of the day, I was amused
enough just seeing early 80s fashion victims wandering around spouting
insipid dialogue and then getting killed.
You also get such well-written dialogue exchanges such as; Girl 1: "I
wonder where we are?" / Girl 2: "In a fucking forest somewhere." and one
of the most blatant rip-offs of John Carpenter's Halloween score you'll
ever hear. Some moments are accidentally amusing; like when they're eating
dinner and a can of hair spray is sitting right on the dining room
table, and others are just hilariously stupid, like at the finale when the
last remaining girl is told to roll up the windows and lock the doors on the car
and she leaves the sun roof wide open so when the killer shows up he can
easily yank her out. Despite lacking exploitation elements, there's
probably going to be enough general stupidity here to please fans of
low-budget trash. The director was known primarily for being the editor of
a music magazine and several of the actors were involved in the rock music
scene (the guy who plays the killer, for instance, was the drummer for a
band called Attack).
The only other 80s slasher flick from Sweden I'm aware of is Blood Tracks
(1985), which strangely also involves a hair rock band stranded in the
middle of nowhere. Aside from torrents (some of which have English fan-subs), this is only available in its home country. The director used his magazine to promote it.
SBIG
