A Taste of Blood (AKA Sangre Vurdalak) (2020) Review

A Taste of Blood (AKA Sangre Vurdalak) (2020) Review

The film, hot from an international film festival run, takes place in the uncertain hours after a vampire hunt when it’s unclear if the hunter himself has been turned into a creature of the night. Will his family find out in time, or will their sentiment make them easy prey for the novice nightwalker?

Santiago Fernández Calvete’s horror film A TASTE OF BLOOD, based on Aleksey Tolstoy’s 1839 short story THE FAMILY OF THE VOURDALAK, starts off weak but stick with it as it finds its groove around the midway point when it plays like a modern-day take on the Boris Karloff segment from Mario Bava’s BLACK SABBATH (1963), which was again about a vurdalak.

Rather bizarrely this Argentinian film chooses to dub the younger characters into English, whilst keeping the older characters subtitled, and speaking in their native tongue. It makes for a jarring mix and initially took me out of enjoying the flick as why they had chosen to do this made no sense to me. Once I had adjusted to the oddness of having one set of characters speak English and the others responding to them in Argentinian, I found myself very much liking A TASTE OF BLOOD. It’s well-made and tense and aside from the issue I have already mentioned a couple of times, it’s a decent evening’s entertainment.

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