Hulu’s new movie “Flesh & Blood” is so mind-bogglingly bad I had to take a break halfway through just so I could force myself to finish watching it.
There is nothing entertaining about this film. It’s a low budget movie filled with bad acting and a predictable story. The entire movie takes place inside one house due to the main character’s agoraphobia, or fear of going outside, that developed after her mother’s murder. Normally, I would consider this to be an interesting premise, but this movie wastes every ounce of its potential.
I got the impression that 90 percent of the budget was blown on buying a house for the characters to run around in and tear apart with sledgehammers, and the other 10 percent was spent on the cheapest actors they could find. The inside of the house was barren, like they didn’t have the time, money or interest to decorate the interior. The most furniture shown is a few chairs, a couch and a bed. This is explained away by having the house be under renovation for the entire duration of the film, but it really just comes across as an unbelievably lazy set design.
As a result of the extremely limited space, only five characters are ever introduced. The characters that we spend the most time with, the main character and her father, are both weakly written and terribly performed. Dermot Mulroney brings nothing to his performance as the father, which basically amounts to a series of bad monologues and a bunch of shots of him trying to look sinister. Diana Silvers is only marginally better as the main character, spending most of her time on-screen trying her best to look horrified.
The plot is awfully, horribly uninteresting and stupid. The big reveal comes only 20 minutes into the hour and 33-minute-long trainwreck, following one of the briefest and most uninvolved setups I’ve ever seen. The movie stumbles over itself trying to get as quickly as it can from one supposedly shocking or clever event to the next, realizing intermittently that it still has time to kill. It’s almost like director Patrick Lussier was so excited with the mildly interesting premise that he forgot to actually make the movie any good.
The horror aspects of this so-called horror movie were neither frightening nor even remotely surprising. The entire film should’ve wrapped up in 30 minutes. From the low production value to the scenes filmed almost entirely in daylight, to the empty setting and monologuing murderer, nothing about the film was scary in the slightest. I spent the film feeling bored and frustrated, but not scared.
Do not watch Hulu’s “Flesh & Blood.” It is a waste of time. The film has no appeal whatsoever, utterly wasting the potential of its premise and painfully drawing a poorly written story out into a full-length movie of garbage. The plot is bad, the acting is bad, the writing is bad, the production value is bad, and the horror is non-existent. It’s a bad movie. Please, spare yourself.