The Bride Wore Blood (2006)

The reimagination of the Western genre seems to be cropping up lately with the web series The West Side and Bluebox Limited's The Bride Wore Blood. Blood, co-written and co-directed by Bluebox's co-founders Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, follows the exploits of a modern day hired-gun- with-a-conscience, played effectively by Travis Shepherd.

Shepherd is hired to protect a man's soon-to-be bride when things go horribly wrong. Drawn to follow the facts of her death to its ultimate conclusion, Shepherd finds a weaving story of deceit and mistrust make up the driving forces behind his failure to protect the bride.

The film clocks in at 60 minutes and is segmented into four "acts" which twist the story from one unexpected path to the next. All of the cinematic elements are top notch, from the music to the cinematography, to the acting to the directing. The writing is crisp and the camera movements create a wonderful, consistent style of the piece.

After the letdown with Her Summer, I am very excited to find Blood to be such an excellent piece of microcinema filmmaking.

On a side note, having immersed myself in the Bluebox world over the last week, I found myself feeling a strong sense of deja vu. Years ago I bought and watched multiple episodes of the Random Foo/Pangaea low-budget public access series called Fade to Black. Each episode in the series consisted of a number of short films from various genres.

The Foo/Pangaea group were one of the first real "players" in the microcinema world. Their output was tremendous, generating almost 100 short films in a 10 year period (96-05). While watching Fade to Black I saw the same small group of actors in the same locations being used for various projects.


Bluebox does so as well. Through these three films (University Heights, Her Summer and The Bride Wore Blood), the cast has remained primarily constant. And the house location used in the opening of Her Summer is wonderfully used again in a suspenseful showdown between two guns-for-hire in Blood. Kudos for finding and keeping the talented cast members involved in their projects. In microcinema, you use what you have access to and there's no shame in availing yourself to the same actors and locations.

Woods and Beck

I also appreciated Bluebox's understanding of film history, paying homage to both Raiders of the Lost Ark (the coursework assigned to the class is lifted line for line from Ark) in University Heights and The Birds (the car screaming across the horizon, dust and smoke billowing behind it, accentuating the urgency of the moment) in The Bride Wore Blood.

I hope Beck and Woods continue to make movies. They're very talented guys. The Foo/Pangaea group has all but dissolved over the past three years. Jason Santo, of Pangaea, went on to create Mindscape Pictures, but has since stopped making movies. He got married and opened up a comic book store. C.C. Chapman and Dan Gorgone, of Random Foo, haven't made a new film in three years... they have children now and their priorities have shifted.

My hope for Beck and Woods is that they are able to make a living in cinema before the responsibility of marriage and fatherhood enter their lives. These guys have real talent and I'd hate to see their work diminish like so many other previous microcinema filmmakers.