Movie review - Blood Barn

Blood Barn ** (out of 5) In this latest entry into the Cabin-in-the-Woods aisle of the glutted horror supermarket we begin with seven college-age camp counselors celebrating the end of their season by spending a weekend at the rambling isolated former home of the ingenue’s grandparents. That’s Josie (Lena Redford - no relation to you-know-who), who is as wholesomely naïve as they come. The other two gals are Amanda (Andrea Bambina), sporting the look and edginess of a Krysten Ritter; and Rachel (Chloe Cherry), a leggy blonde whose sense of adventure is halfway between that of her gal pals. The four guys are such generic frat bros, I’m not sure who was which… and it really didn’t matter much.

The requisite menace is some mostly-unseen entity that lurks at this long-neglected (though the electricity is somehow still working when they arrive) house and barn for reasons having to do with some sort of evil stuff that happened in the past. Standard set-up. Clothes that were shed for a dip in the pond are sucked into the ground; things go bump in the night; people start disappearing; some resurface as if possessed; not everyone will survive to leave the property.

The monster doing the damage is mostly on screen as a malevolent vine that grabs folks and kills or changes them in a variety of gruesome ways. Besides fake blood and zombie-esque makeup, the vine that resembles spider legs more than anything botanical, and eerie red lighting fill the bill for most of the mood-setting special effects.

This formulaic exercise is missing a few easy add-ons that could have made it a whole bunch better. Such flicks typically thrive on more titillation than this one serves. A sprinkling of naughty bits and boinking would have been easy to fit in, so to speak. Some of the encounters with the whatever-it-is were soft-pedaled, as if trying to keep it PG-13 for marketing. Even worse, co-writer and director Gabriel Bernini didn’t bother to let us know just what that thing was, or why it was there. Backstories are essential for such productions to seem grounded in the supernatural peril its characters are confronting. We’re not expecting realism, but we do expect an underlying reason for what we’re witnessing.

Having a low budget justifies flicks making the best of inexpensive fx elements. They did have enough money to hire competent actors, and chose them well. But it don’t cost no more dough to flesh out a script with the whys and hows of its alternate realm – especially since one of the writers is on set doing the directing. A near miss from what it could have been.

(Blood Barn streams exclusively on Screambox as of 2/17/26)