Bloodsucking Bastards Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		2.5
Video		3.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.0
Overall		2.5

Bloodsucking Bastards Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman November 4, 2015

If you’ve ever gotten one of those annoying calls from a telemarketer, you may have thought to yourself that the poor sucker on the other end of the line must be something close to a zombie, chained to an autodialer and forced to spew out the same stupid garbage to everyone who has the temerity to actually answer the phone without checking Caller ID first. Bloodsucking Bastards is an occasionally funny if unambitious horror comedy that takes place in the confines of one of those call centers. It turns out that one of the employees of this telemarketing firm is a different kind of sucker, namely the blood sucking variety, and that employee's exploits soon "turn" events into a cascading scene of increasing mayhem.

While a couple of early developments show (discursively) that something evil is lurking around the dark spaces of this particular office facility, Bloodsucking Bastards tries to eke out laughs from more typical frat boy humor like office guys firing spitballs into a harridan female coworker’s hair. The ostensible hero of the film is hapless Evan (Fran Kranz), a guy who invites the umbrage of his male coworkers when they find out he responded to his girlfriend’s profession of love with a lame “No”. Unfortunately for Evan, that girlfriend is Amanda (Emma Fitzpatrick), yet another coworker. Bloodsucking Bastards probably spends too much time detailing the interrelationships of the office crew instead of playing up the incipient terror that employees are dropping like flies (only to rise again as newly undead). The film picks up a bit of steam as it goes along, and there’s a kind of clever twist when it's revealed that the architect behind the vampirism, a snarky brownnoser named Max (Pedro Pascal), may have had an ulterior motive. Unfortunately, though, Bloodsucking Bastards is neither consistently funny nor scary, two obvious deficits for a supposed horror comedy.

Bloodsucking Bastards Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Bloodsucking Bastards is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Scream Factory, an imprint of Shout! Factory, with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.24:1. This is perhaps appropriately if unattractively a kind of bloodless transfer, one that suffers from anemic contrast and some ugly color grading, often toward a sickly green tint, all of which tends to deplete detail levels. In relatively normal lighting conditions and without any overt color grading, the palette pops rather well (including some really vivid reds, making blood splatter pretty memorable), and detail is quite commendable. There are no issues with image instability and no undue compression anomalies.

Bloodsucking Bastards Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Bloodsucking Bastards features a lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 which offers excellent clarity, but which may start to annoy some folks due to the really noisy score that attends several scenes. Sequences with the overpowering cues tend to suffer at least a bit from prioritization issues, where some lines of dialogue can become slightly buried. Otherwise, though, the track offers excellent fidelity and no issues of any kind.

Bloodsucking Bastards Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Commentary with Dr. God


• Outtakes (1080p; 3:21)


• BSB: On Set (1080p; 3:45)


• Trailer (1080p; 2:31)


• Easter Eggs (1080p; 4:15), (1080p; 00:19), (1080p; 00:28), (1080p; 00:25). Are they proper easter eggs when they're identified by an easter egg icon?

Bloodsucking Bastards Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Bloodsucking Bastards has an appealing enough premise, and there are a couple of enjoyable zingers that flit by, but this is a pretty juvenile enterprise that tries to wrest humor out of elements like potty jokes rather than what's going on with the characters. Technical merits are generally very good to excellent for those considering a purchase.