| Blood Ransom | |
| Director: | Francis dela Torre |
| Music: | Albert Chang |
| Editing: | Thomas Apolonio |
| Studio: | Tectonic Films |
| Runtime: | 101 minutes |
| Language: | English |
| Gross: | $220,388 |
Blood Ransom is a 2014 independent Philippine-American thriller vampire romance film written and directed by Francis Dela Torre, and starring Anne Curtis and Alexander Dreymon. Blood Ransom was filmed in California between MayJune 2012.[1]
Crystal, a young woman, falls in love with Roman, a criminal. Roman lures her into a life of "sin". One day, she wakes up and realizes that Roman has turned her into a monster. She decides to escape from Roman with Jeremiah, who works as Roman's driver through a kidnapping plot that goes wrong. Jeremiah and Crystal subsequently begin a love affair and devise a plan that can make her human again. But Roman sends his henchman, Bill, to hunt them down. Crystal is now faced with a choice. She can kill Jeremiah to live, or follow an impossible plan that can turn her soul human again, so that she can be with the man with whom she has fallen in love with.
Despite generally negative reviews—with the Sacramento News & Review panning the film as "amateurish and clumsy"[2] and the Los Angeles Times calling its story "underdeveloped"[3] —critics commented the cinematography[4] [5] and applauded "the best efforts of [the film's] hard-working cast".
The Village Voice gave the film a mixed review, finding the plot "less than coherent", but stating that the film "often feels older than it is" and that it "hearkens back to when the properties of vampirism had room to shimmer under the eye—when the creatures were less predictable, instead of codified for video-game precision".[6]
The New York Times described Curtis as miscast, but noted that "[i]t would be interesting to see her in a role of more down-to-earth dimensions". On the other hand, the Los Angeles Times wrote that "the film plays like a vanity project" for Curtis.