BLOOD GNOME β The fetish community of downtown LA is being terrorised by an unseen killer. A nerdy phtographer with a tragic past is hot on the case. Invisible gremlin types who get off on blood sports, a tentacular slime beast that pushes out narcotic embryos and girls in bondage gear are all in evidence. 'Blood Gnome' is a microbudget horror film from around ten years ago, which was roughly when I last watched it. I remember thinking at the time, βan S/M flick with killer gnomes and a weird cthulhuvian monster β how can this not be the best film ever made?β Inevitably, my viewing experience went on to show that 'Blood Gnome' was not in fact the best film ever made, although it sounds undeniably impressive on paper. It's quite good fun, is in a way original and imaginative, but is too slight and meagre to do much with its quite 'heady' material, although what it actually does is to some extent cool. Erotica isn't the point here really and 'Blood Gnome' is distinctly in the DTV horror bracket rather than sub-porno... those looking for Andreas Bethmann type excesses had better go away, for 'Blood Gnome' is not particularly explicit in its expose of the BDSM scene, and the whole sex underground angle seems to have been pursued either for lip service novelty, or because the director just knew some dudes who were into that kind of stuff and wanted to let it all hang out on camera (a bit). Interestingly, although it's pretty tame, it does home in on blood letting fetishes (for narrative reasons more than anything else). S and M or no S and M, perhaps what it needed was a touch more of the madness suggested by the words 'invisible killer gnomes'. It's never less than watchable though, and ultimately 'Blood Gnome' is a winningly eccentric one of a kind that manages to stand out from the shitpile of no budget horror despite its shortcomings.
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