Blood Hook. Jim Mallon, 1986.
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Edition screened: Vinegar Syndrome Blu-ray #220, released 2018. English language. Runtime approximately 111 minutes.
Summary: Minimal fish cleaning.
Details: The head is cut off of a dead fish at a bait shop, 5:21-5:28.
Blood Hook was not as horrible as I expected it to be. Because it is a “comedy horror” movie, because main characters are zany teenagers on some kind of holiday, because the plot context is a fishing contest, I began viewing with the three biggest clothes pins I could find clamped tightly on my nose.
To my surprise, Blood Hook could have been much worse. It’s not that the film grabbed opportunities to excel, but that it didn’t grab opportunities to be as base as possible. The biggest surprise, almost a lift, was provided by characterizations and dialogue of the teenagers. Just this once, lines simply did not just alternate between unfunny comedy and unsexy promiscuity. The teens in Blood Hook were superficial inarticulate morons, a character type far easier to watch than wisecracking frenemies.
Also, our director used the fishing context backdrop to create humorous, idiosyncratic character obsessed with a sport, rather than as an excuse for a lot of cheap gross-outs about fish guts. One 7-second bait shop scene early in the film, and quite a few scenes of people lugging around huge fish. That’s it.