Tags:
Film: Blood Salvage
Year: 1990
Director: Tucker Johnston
Writer: Tucker Johnston and Ken Sanders
Starring: Danny Nelson, Lori Birdsong and Christian Helser
Review:
This film starts with a newlywed couple driving down a country road through the woods. Someone in a sports car comes up behind them and we see that he has rigged a set of spikes on the front of it. He drives them off the road and they crash. Immediately after a tow truck appears and takes the car back to his salvage shop which is in the barn next to the house he lives at. There is a family that runs this with the father being played by Danny Nelson. He has a crazy son who was driving the sports car, played by Christian Helser. He also has a mentally handicapped, overweight son played by Ralph Pruitt Vaughn. We then see that Nelson is interested in a young woman who is in a beauty pageant, but she is in a wheelchair.
We then see this young woman as she competes in it; she is played by Lori Birdsong. Nelson, Hesler and Vaughn all come to the event as well. Nelson creeps her out though by standing in front of the stage and staring at her. Helser tries to do something to an RV when a local cop stops him. He sulks off in anger and ends up getting in the ring with Evander Holyfield, who is there as a promotion for someone to last one round with him. Nelson ends up scolding Helser to finish his work.
Birdsong’s family is using the RV they are tampering with. The father is played by John Saxon, her mother by Laura Whyte and her little brother by Andy Greenway. While they are driving back to Atlanta, one of the wheels falls off the RV. Helser first drives by and Nelson comes up. He offers to tow them back to his place to fix the vehicle, which Saxon agrees.
Greenway is quite inquisitive and ends up being knocked out. Saxon then goes to look for him and tries to make a phone call. He stops when he sees articles on the wall about his daughter. He is then knocked out. Whyte then goes in to look for him and she is then taken. Nelson comes out to see Birdsong and when she asks about her family, he tells her that they sent him out here to get her. She then arms herself with a shotgun to fend them off. The problem is they drill a hole in the RV and pump gas into it, which knocks her out.
She wakes up the next day in a bed, realizing that she is inside the house. She finds a picture of a woman with two boys that looks eerily similar to her. Nelson comes up to see her and tells her to make herself comfortable. Her family is up at the hospital because of what she did and her mom had an episode. They are supposed to come back in a couple days to get her. In the mean time, he tells her that he will fix her legs, which she doesn’t believe or what his help, she wants to go home.
We then meet Ray Walston and see the inside of Nelson’s garage. He has a bunch of people who are being kept alive on junkyard life support. Walston is there to broker deals on the new people he has captive to sell their organs. It seems that Nelson is irate, because the woman in the picture that Birdsong saw was his wife and the mother of his children. She died from a heart condition when they could not find her a replacement. He now sells other people’s organs on the black market.
He believes that Birdsong can walk again by putting the spinal fluid of others into her spine. Will it work? Will she be a captive in the house forever? Can she get free and save her family before it is too late? Will her family be able to be saved?
I do have to give this film that it has an interesting concept. I like the idea of kidnapping people and then selling their organs, since there could really be a big market for this. I do think some of the machines that are hooked up to people in his garage are interesting as well. I also am not against the idea of what he does for Birdsong. I don’t think it would really work, but it is creative.
There were quite a bit of issues in this film. The first of all would have to be realism. There is no way that this backwoods mechanic would be able to keep these people alive with the machines that he is using and sell their organs. Next, I really hated Helser’s character. He was quite annoying to me and Nelson was as well. I thought the acting for the most part was subpar as well as the story itself. The film was just a little too boring as there really isn’t a whole lot that is going on unfortunately. I’m also not really sure why Holyfield was in this film or what it really had to do with anything either.
Now with that said, I would avoid this film. The acting is subpar as well as the story. This film does have a good concept, but there are films with similar ideas out there that are much better. I liked the concept of keeping people alive with different odd machines, but in order to believe it, the realism of this movie is out the window. This film was a little too boring for me and didn’t do enough to redeem itself. I would not recommend viewing this movie.
My Rating: 4 out of 10