Julie Strain

(In French, On Cable TV, February 2022) As someone who watches a lot of movies, high and low, it’s confounding to hear arguments about “worst movies of the year” when talking about big-budget, technically competent movies with a well-known cast. Sure, it’s fun to pile on when big projects go awry, and there’s not denying that some of them aren’t very good. But “worst movie of the year”? For that you just have to go digging into low-budget tripe made for non-theatrical distribution channels. Something much like Blood Gnome, for instance, which looks as if it was filmed in a series of garages with people with more mercenary intentions than talent. Writer-director John Lechago combines an invisible murderous gnome creature with the Los Angeles BDSM scene as his angle for Blood Gnome, but the result is terrible no matter how you look at it. Muddily shot will full-framing of actors to ensure that we don’t focus too much on the threadbare sets, Blood Gnome is trash and at least has an awareness of it. The script’s awfulness is not helped by some terrible production values. While the BDSM angle desperately wants to be good for cheap titillation, the best it can do is briefly feature pin-up model Julie Strain as a dominatrix—the rest of it plays with the subculture at a very superficial level. The rest of the film isn’t much better, and anyone looking to get some cheap thrills out of the result is going to be best-served by looking anywhere else. The monsters are mean-spirited enough to go beyond simply killing BDSM enthusiasts to cyberbullying the protagonist in mildly amusing early-2000s chat applications. I’ll give one meagre compliment to Blood Gnome: as ugly and awful as it is, there’s enough dumb stuff in there to keep anyone’s attention. That may be the faintest compliment possible, but you’d be surprised at how many other movies (many of them low-budget horror) can’t even achieve that level of engagement. Oh yes—there’s much worse than Blood Gnome out there if you want to talk about the worst movies of the year…