And as might be expected from Dan O’Bannon, Hemoglobin/Bleeders is an interestingly complex, intelligent and well thought-out story, not unreminiscent in many ways of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher (1839). Unfortunately, the film falls down due to dreary direction. The photography is drab and director Peter Svatek’s pace drags – almost nothing happens in the first half hour, for instance. One can see that a number of sequences have been designed on paper in a way that could have had some shock impact had they been directed by someone with half an ounce of talent – creatures snatching bodies up from underneath coffins, Roy Dupuis having to devour a dead foetus – but Peter Svatek directs them with a dreary lack of event. Indeed, in the case of the dead foetus devouring, the camera censuredly looks away when it comes to the act of doing so, which is surely a criminal lack of nerve for a horror film. A sex scene between Dupuis and Kristin Lehman has never seemed more pointless and gratuitously inserted. It is only during the climax with the survivors huddled in a lighthouse during a rainstorm shooting off the monsters as they clamber up the cliffs that Svatek manages to rouse anything approaching mild tension.