Blood Quantum

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🎙️ EPISODE 640: 01.31.23 This is a Canadian zombie movie with a fascinating twist (minor spoilers): the First Nations people are immune to the zombie-causing virus. I thought it was a very clever idea but it's never quite stretched passed the simple impetus for having it. Either that, or the message is muddled and, eventually, drowned out by some familial melodrama which felt neither here nor there in terms of some larger, metaphorical concept. But if the underlying story and the performance are probably a C+, the action and the filmmaking is an A. Writer-director Jeff Barnaby clearly has a love and a knack for making gruesome horror that's never TOO over the top and unrelenting, but still wickedly sick in spots. For example...

As a simple philosophical revenge plot, it works fine. And it probably could've leaned into that harder, honestly. "The earth turned the white man into something she could use again: fertilizer," the samurai grandpa character remarks at one point. I get that that sentiment, on its own, is limiting in its own ways, though. But there is a samurai grandpa character in this, so that pretty much tells you all you need to know. Don't overthink it.

CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ EPISODE 639 - (YOU ARE HERE) - EPISODE 641 ⫸

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Blood Quantum is a 2019 Canadian horror film written, directed, and edited by Jeff Barnaby and starring Michael Greyeyes, Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers, Forrest Goodluck, Kiowa Gordon, Brandon Oakes, Olivia Scriven, Kawennáhere Devery Jacobs, and Gary Farmer. The film depicts the effects of a zombie uprising on a First Nations reserve whose residents are immune to contracting the plague because of their indigenous heritage, but must still cope with the consequences of its effects on the world around them, including white refugees seeking shelter on the reserve. It was released on September 5, 2019.