Death Factory: Bloodletting

Death Factory: Bloodletting
directed by Sean Tretta
by LM Campbell

How much would you pay to watch a complete stranger be murdered? Is the thought of it too horrible to imagine?

If so, you belong with the majority – you deserve society and it’s reciprocation. But for the rest of you I want you to think about that question.

Do it by yourself; forget about chest-beating machismo; forget about what your friends would think about your reply; ignore hubris. Could you possibly be involved in such an ordeal? Could your conscience handle such knowledge in perpetuity?
Many people have watched videos on sites like Nothing Toxic, Necrocide, or others of their ilk all striving to out-gross one another in a bid to cater not to sadists, but to tourists vacationing vicariously through videos intended to repulse – to make you squirm, not excite and titillate.

Death Factory: Bloodletting (DFBL) drops us into the cesspool of such likeminded individuals; a group of jaded perverts have met clandestinely to watch a snuff film get made, a bloodletting. Everyone is there to witness a killing; pooled together like the cooling blood of a rape victim. However, one person who inhabits the lowly realm of Gorehouse, the stomping grounds of all involved, is not there to sacrifice an innocent, but to punish the guilty. It seems that the smecking pedophile who abducted and killed her daughter will also be at the bloodletting. Spirited there by a spurious messiah using god as both a crutch and defence of his actions, the group is unaware that they have been infiltrated by a woman who has lived the last year of her life among them. In the ether of the world wide web she has pretended to be one of them in hopes of satisfying her overwhelming lust for vengeance.

Almost pretending it’s precursor, Death Factory, never existed, DFBL is a deftly filmed horror movie inspired by peoples gravitation to all things taboo and the prurient interests therein.

But what this rogues gallery is blind to is that there is a horrific creation inhabiting the bowels of the dilapidated building from whence the bloodletting is to take place; a being superseded in evil only by the monsters who linger and troll the Hostel-esque website, a site dedicated to providing entertainment vis a vis the suffering of men, women and children in filmed torture, rapes, and murder. These people live their lives with their own lubricious sword of Damocles hanging over them, but as the doors of the death factory slam shut, will it sever all of the strands that separate life from death, or can they escape the inevitable?

I’ve seen enough snuff films in my time that I don’t need to be bludgeoned to death with images of pummelled flesh and phallocidal rage, i.e. the ‘artifices of death’ and while the blood in DFBL is portioned out in hearty dollops, it is more a character driven horror piece – this is no August Underground or Psycho The Snuff Reels. It’s a coherent story where actions are not questioned, nor is the audience expected to suspend disbelief to a point where retardation sets in. Of course it is a horror film, and the occasional turn of logic can be questioned, but merely on a visceral level, it’s pretty fucking fun movie to watch.

I could delve into the film’s latent themes of the perils of lust, of  the id, of drive, and of our basic primordial urges, but instead I’ll simply say that:

Sean Tretta is an adroit, skilled independent filmmaker who allows you to melt into his shots and angles, while the impressive work of experienced actors like Shane Dean (as the sociopathic White Manson) and David C Hayes (as Rubber Love), as well as many of the peripheral actors add dimension to a fairly simple story of perversity, revenge, and hot chicks with daggers on their hands…