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Review
BLOOD & DONUTS
Rating: 
Canada. 1995.
Director – Holly Dale, Screenplay – Andrew Rai Berzins, Producer – Steven Hoban, Photography – Paul Sarossy, Music – Nash the Slash, Digital Effects – Spin Productions Inc, Special Effects Consultant – Michael Lennick, Makeup Effects – Randy Daudlin, Production Design – David Moe. Production Company – Daban Films/The Feature Film Project.
Cast:
Gordon Currie (Boya), Justin Louis (Earl), Helen Clarkson (Molly), Fiona Reid (Rita Poe), Frank Moore (Pierce), Hadley Kay (Axel), David Cronenberg (Crime Boss), J. Winston Carroll (Bernie)
Plot: A stray golf ball smashes through a window and wakes up the vampire Boya who has been hibernating inside a bag since 1969. Checking into a Toronto fleabag motel, Boya becomes embroiled in the life of Earl, a loser taxi driver who is being harassed by organized crime arm men. Boya also falls for Molly, the waitress at a donut shop, which arouses the envy of Rita, a woman who has been waiting 25 years for Boya to return to her.
Blood & Donuts is a Canadian vampire entry. It was made as an indie film. It’s an oddly unsatisfying film, one where the elements of the vampire film and the non-commercial approach of an indie film never quite congeal together. The film doesn’t really have much of a plot – it just consists of the loose interactions of various characters – waitress, trouble-prone taxi driver, Mafioso hoods, vampire and his aged girlfriend – all loosely centered around a Toronto donut shop and adjacent fleabag hotel. While this may well work for a Jim Jarmusch film it makes for a minimalist vampire movie where not a lot ever really happens. Even the film’s attempts at humour never produce more than a quizzical smile.
Rather than any figure of dark charisma, the vampire, as played by Gordon Currie, seems like an aging rocker who has been reduced to living out on the street, with Currie walking hunched-over, eyes flickering about as though too frightened to meet anyone else’s. Justin Louis’s performance as the cabbie Earl is delivered in a mock Italian accent and an entirely unvarying monotone, which is something that has one wanting to scream by the film’s halfway point. Blood & Donuts was shot in Toronto and, as is becoming fairly much de rigeur for offbeat films shot there, it employs local work of art, David Cronenberg, the director of films like Videodrome (1983), The Fly (1986) and Dead Ringers (1988). Cronenberg is amusingly cast as a Mafia head, expounding wisdom to his lackeys. In one of the more amusing asides he deflates one hood’s cod-wiseguy pretensions to tough-guy talk – “You grew up in Toronto, Axel. Who here talks like that?” The film also features the intriguing end credit: “Filmed on location in Toronto, Ontario and the Sea of Tranquility, The Moon.”
Subsequently director Holly Dale has worked in Canadian television. So too has screenwriter Andrew Rai Berzins, although he did also write the screenplay for the excellent Beowulf & Grendel (2005). Last updated: Thursday, 18 September 2008
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