With Ghost Of The Needle, filmmaker Brian Avenet-Bradley proved himself a capable creator of a psychological thriller. Cold Blood (which started its life under the title, Freez'er) was his debut effort and while there's nuggets of the style, and mood, he'd bring to his sophomore effort, this just doesn't work because the story seems to be lacking the "bite" it needed to really be effective and in the end there's no real story momentum to speak of. Things just seem to follow a logical course and never really challenge the viewer to create their own tension or suspense.

Cold Blood does, however, start with one Hell of an opening scene as we see J.M. (Barnes Walker III) smack his wife in the head with a baseball bat in rage after catching her cheating on him one afternoon. Seems he hit a little bit too hard and managed to kill her. He goes through the motions of cleaning up the evidence and keeping her body cold in a bathtub filled with ice before he decides to take off to a remote farm his family owns in order to not only stash the body away, but to take attention away from himself.

Once there he has to deal with his guilt making his mind play tricks on him (this leads to a few scenes of mildly effective "visions") and he decides to hide the body in a deep freeze in the barn. But things aren't as easy as they seem as soon the farm's caretaker (John L. Altom), his sneaky cousin (Kendall Dreyer), and the caretaker's apparently abused wife (Carrie Walrond) start snooping around. This leads to all sorts of madness and murder as J.M. continues to lose grip on his sanity.

What could've been a slo-burn psychological horror-thriller doesn't quite pay off. The opening moments work well using minimal dialogue, slow building mood, and a creepy musical score effectively but once things shift to the farm the movie starts to stumble as Avenet-Bradley's script just doesn't throw out enough "guilt" or "visions" to make the lead character at all interesting. And while we know J.M. is a killer, the character just isn't likeable at all with Walker giving a dull performance where he delivers his lines in an uninteresting monotone and doesn't really show us enough emotion. This is a guy who's just killed his wife, I assume by accident, and even if she was cheating on him he should at least have some sort of emotional reaction to it - Walker is just a blank slate for almost the entire movie.

This is where Cold Blood is frustrating. Never able to cash-in on it's intriguing and somewhat gripping first twenty minutes it takes an alright premise and flounders with it and not counting a pleasingly ironic ending the entire thing is a real slog to get through. Avenet-Bradley is a talented guy, and we can see that with Ghost Of The Needle, but his debut is trying too hard to be a moody thriller and not succeeding nearly enough at it.

Visit Heretic Films for more info. (Chris Hartley, 9/23/05)

Directed By: Brian Avenet-Bradley.
Written By: Brian Avenet-Bradley.

Starring: Barnes Walker III, Carrie Walrond, John L. Altom, Kendall Dreyer.

Picture Ratio: 1.78:1 Widescreen.

Picture Quality: I'm not quite sure what kind of media this was filmed with, so it's hard to judge based on that, but the transfer here contains a few dirt specks here and there and clarity is a bit "iffy" at times, but it's generally a bearable job by Heretic.

Extras: There's quite a selection of special features here as we get a trailer, some brief cast & crew bios, 2 deleted scenes, an interesting gallery of songs composed to fit the theme of the movie (before Avenet-Bradley had even written the script!), an okay "making of" featurette, and a listenable commentary with director Avenet-Bradley, his wife (and director of photography/producer) Laurence, and star Walker.