Bled starts as young female artist Sai (Sarah Ferooqui) meets a mysterious yet charming man named Renfield (Jonathan Oldham) & they end up back at her studio apartment where he gives her the bark of some sort of tree which is used as a hallucinogenic drug when melted down. Sai quickly becomes hooked as she is whisked into an alternate fantasy reality which involve Vampiric creatures. Sai's photographer friend Royce (Chris Ivan Cevic) becomes concerned about her as she drifts further from reality as she becomes addicted to the drug, can Royce her kick the drug or will it end up ruining her life & why did the mysterious Renfield get her addicted to the stuff in the first place & do the elaborate fantasy dream like trips have any significance?

Co-produced & directed by Christopher Hutson this anaemic arty Vampire flick is pretty much 95 minutes of tedium & is throughly deserving of all the bad comments. The script was written by the interestingly named Sxv'leithan Essex (how the hell do you even pronounce that anyway?) who is also credited as production designer & his unusual name is actually more interesting than anything that ever happens in Bled, I would guess that the makers set out to make a very serious fantasy based horror film with a strong moral message about the dangers of drugs, drug addiction & date rape drug at it's core. The majority of the film is spent on the drug issue with Sai's initial introduction to the drug, how great the first time was & how she becomes hopelessly addicted which eventually destroys her, her life & her friends lives. It's never explained where she keeps getting this drug from as Renfield only gives her a little bit during their initial meeting but hey, who cares? The first twenty odd minutes of Bled are really boring & dull, the following hour or so aren't much better before a mess of a final ten minutes which involve a Vampiric monster & Renfield making a reappearance. The moral elements are patronising, the fantasy elements seem like an afterthought & the horror is none existent. There's also the dialogue which is awful, every sentence tries to be profound, have loads of hidden depth & just tries to have so much meaning that it becomes tiresome to listen to.

The concept of the film is terrible & so is the execution as there's absolutely no gore or violence to speak of & the entire thing is set inside an apartment that doesn't appear to have any lights. The fantasy setting looks a little better but it's sparsely seen & underused. There are no scares here, no atmosphere & to make matters even worse the makers have decided to used muted very faded colours which I just hate & find annoying, what's wrong with a nice colourful image? It seems to me to be a fad with current filmmakers who seem to think that it automatically makes a film cool or adds atmosphere which it most certainly doesn't, more often than not it just makes your film look dull & drab as evidenced here with Bled.

This probably had a low budget & was shot in Los Angeles & it has reasonable production values but it's all so dull. The acting didn't impress me, I didn't care for or about anyone which is never a good sign.

Bled is a terrible Vampire film that goes for psychological horror as well as physical with all sorts of parallels to real life dug addiction & what it can do to little or no effect because the whole thing is so dull. There might be an audience for a film such as this but considering the other comments not that big a one.

Sentiment: negative