BLOOD TRACKS (1985)

Trailer:

*Spoilers Throughout*

What’s It About: The Swedish hair metal band Solid Gold (played by real-life Swedish hair metal band Easy Action) has gone up to the snowy mountains to record a music video with some scantily clad sleazy groupies, but they find the action to be not so easy and the gold not so solid but the tracks definitely bloody when they run afoul of a weird murderous hermit family.

Here are some of my observations as I watched the film:

• A train? Ohhh, Blood “Tracks.” Like train tracks. I get it. 
• So I guess this is like Terror Train but with a band. But Terror Train also had a band. And David Copperfield. Your turn, Blood Tracks. 
• This chick stabs her husband to death and grabs her 9 children and makes tracks. Blood tracks. 
• Fucking amazing theme song. I’m sure it’s all downhill from here. 
• So that family’s been hiding in the fucking sewer for 40 years? People probably would have just forgotten about the murder in like 5 years. Or the mother could have just explained it was self defense. Or moved to another country and took on a new identity. Literally anything besides live in a sewage plant. 
  

  “The view is shit and the neighborhood is going down the toilet, but the rent is reasonable and I’m flush with funds.”

• So the band Solid Gold is filming a video in the snowy mountains. Despite the fact that there are broads in bikinis, this would be the most boring video of all time. 
• Ohhh, Blood “Tracks,” like music tracks. I get it. 
• Ohhh, Blood “Tracks,” like tracks in the snow. I get it. 
• Ohhh, Blood “Tracks,” like heroin tracks in your arm. I get it. 
• Avalaaaanche! Please perform a song about it as it’s happening. 
• When two people are trapped in a car under an avalanche, there’s only one thing to do. Fuck your way out!
• The plot is getting off track. Blood track.
• There are too many characters, it’s hard to keep track. Blood track. 
• It doesn’t make a ton of sense why the family is killing this video crew. Hopefully they’ll settle their differences with a battle of the bands at the end. 
• We are rockin’ tonight! We are rockin’ tonight!
• This isn’t the worst shitty horror film I’ve ever seen but I’ve almost completely lost interest. Blood interest. 
• So basically the rest of this flick is the crew wandering around the sewage plant and getting picked off by the family, for some reason. I guess they just don’t cotton to trespassers. But they’re also trespassers. 
• You know there was some major incest going on the past 40 years. 
• The streaming quality is so bad in this movie I can barely tell what the fuck is going on. 
• There’s one semi-sane brother who wants to put an end to the killing but nobody knows what the fuck is going on so it does no good. 
• I have no idea what just happened for the past 45 minutes. 

Eh, fuck it.

Scare Volume: The crazed, murderous, probably incestuous family can be unnerving, but they’re not on like Texas Chainsaw Massacre level or anything. And you can see the avalanches coming a mile away.

Gore Volume: A pretty decent amount, as there are impalements, sharp objects to the noggin, and a few tracks in the snow that may or may not be composed of blood.

Nudity Volume: Some groupie boobs, but not as many as you’d predict in this scenario where a metal band is trapped with several slutty groupies.

Best Kill: As in the trailer above, nothing beats a good hatchet throw to the skull. That psychotic hermit must have been perfecting his hatchet throwing in the sewage plant the past 40 years.

Best Scene Trivia: The band members of Easy Action, who play the band in the film, had never acted before and to overcome their stage fright, director Mats Helge Olsson fed them copious amounts of beer. The band and several of the crew members made the film while drunk.

Worst Scene: I still can’t get over the fact that the mother thought that taking all of her kids to live in a sewage plant was her best option. Unless that’s what she wanted all along.

How ’bout the Tunes: There are only three metal songs by my count, the title track played twice, then “We Go Rockin'” and a power ballad over the credits, “In The Middle Of Nowhere”:

Band Rating: Pretty solid (gold), but nothing to write home from Sweden about. Not a shock that their sound didn’t make blood tracks to the states. Although I hear the guy who gets beheaded above was also eventually in Europe, the band, not the place Swedish sewage plants are located.

Overall: Blood Tracks is what happens when a movie producer snorfs a mountain of cocaine and thinks about how words have several meanings and voila, Blood Tracks. This movie could have just as easily been Blood Racks, about a killer loose in a department store terrorizing women with huge boobs. Anyway, you kind of get what you expect with Blood Tracks, but I was at least hoping it would be more fun than it was. It’s not like it would have been that hard to do, but they decided to make a more serious thriller about The Hills Have Eyes with an androgynous metal band instead, and the results weren’t nearly as awesome as that sounds.

Score: 4.5 blood-tracked avalanches (out of 10)