Cup of My Blood (DVD)

Jack (Daniel Patrick Sullivan) is an artiste, but his drive to create beautiful photographs died with his muse and wife, Tina (Allie Smith), so now he just does porn stills for a website called The 2nd Cumming (“Because once is never enough!”). It’s a joyless existence, but it pays the bills and keeps him busy. Everything is hunky-dory in Jack’s workaday life until a bloody car wreck outside his apartment building delivers unto him a sacred relic: The Holy Grail.

It becomes Jack’s job to protect the artifact at any cost — and it could just cost him his life when supernatural creatures slither out of the woodwork in various guises. Some of the entities are trying to take it from him, while others seek to aid him. But who can the mystified shutterbug trust? This question is put to the test when a beautiful (and often naked) young woman named Iona (Janina Gavankar) comes into his life and rekindles his desire to create great art with his camera.

Cup of My Blood was undoubtedly born of a wet dream from the mind of writer/director/DP Lance Catania. We see a gratuitous amount of female nudity, intercourse, and phallic symbolism… and we see a lot of it for no apparent reason. At least the tried and true concept of mixing sex, death and religion is — while offering nothing new — well done here. Reminiscent of movies like Constantine and Stigmata, Cup of My Blood is nice and nasty little brew of gothic/God horror. The composition of the shots, the sets, and the photos used to depict Jack’s work are all striking and visually rich enough to lend credibility to the onscreen histrionics.

The movie does suffer from its low-budget limitations (too-dark cinematography, hollow-sounding dialogue, and dodgy CGI) but you can tell Catania put a lot of forethought into the movie (in fact, it’s almost over-directed) — there are no slow spots or major plot holes (of course, you have to swallow the whacky, fantastical plot first of all). The actors are well-cast and the characters are, while definitely following certain archetypes, well-rounded and interesting enough — how can you not love a nefarious mute named Nibbles who’s played by an actor named Circus Szalewski?

Cup of My Blood is one of the better low-budget horror straight-to-video indies I’ve seen in a while. If you like religious-wrought horror that’s just a tad over the top, and all the sacrilegious and decadently stylish trappings that go with it, you could do a lot worse at the video store.

The final DVD will apparently have Audio Commentary, Behind the Scenes and Deleted Scenes, but unfortunately reviewers were not sent final product. Not only do I like to include such things as part of my reviews, but I actually would have been interested in learning more about the backstory of the film and the filmmakers.

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Reviewed by Staci Layne Wilson