Owned version: The same Navarre DVD from 2002 that I pulled the previous film from.
Acquired: June 11, 2014. Amazon.
Seen before?: No.
Notice that the title card forgoes the 2 in the title of this followup to Lindenmuth's 1995 video. This is less a sequel and more a quasi-prequel/parallel narrative, chiefly concentrating on filling in the backstory of Sasha Graham's vampire Angie and, in doing so, providing context for her curious fixation on sullen serial killer Joel. At least, that's my assumption on the intent. Tainted Blood plays mostly like a supplementary work, a series of scholarly notes and asides meant to illuminate a main text rather than its own thing.
A lot of this can be laid at the feet of the sprawling, halting script. While I get what the base story is - a simple tale of sibling rivalry set among a unique subculture - there's a lot of chaff and noise to cut through to get to that. Either Lindenmuth never quite got a handle on the story he wanted to tell or he was so enamored with the world he'd built, a subcult world burbling under the surface of regular civilization, that he tried to illuminate as many aspects of it as he could given his time and budget. Either way, what's meant to be a generation-spanning epic comes off as diffuse and confused; the time-hopping structure primarily toggles between three plotlines with flashback detours into unexpected areas, including 1950s Ohio and 13th-century France, and as the various threads drift across each other it feels less expansive and more lacking in focus. Tainted Blood desperately needs an anchor, a center from which all the other stuff can bloom, and though Angie is clearly intended as this we don't spend enough time with her for that to take hold. She, like everything else, is given equal weight in the tapestry, popping in and out whenever Lindenmuth needs her to. Ideas are continually introduced then dropped - the jump to France leads nowhere, for instance, and tetchy vampire Jonathan's insistence that newly-vamped Tricia not enter his bedroom is given enough weight that I was surprised when it ended up being just a character curlicue. I feel like there was a significantly longer version of this material that, whether during the script stage or in the editing process, got shaved down past the point of coherence.
I'm not angry, just frustrated. There's enough that Tainted Blood does right that I wish the story wasn't such a mess. Elevating Angie to the ostensible fore was a smart move, if for no other reason than it means more screen time for the spectacular magnetism of Sasha Graham in one of the few lead roles she was allotted in her too-brief career; changing the focus also solves the main issue of the first film in that it sidelines the charisma-free Joel to the point where it's easy to forget he's in this at all. At its best, this is essentially a dry comedy about the mechanics of maintaining a vampire life in a world that would want you destroyed if they knew about you - discussions about what to do with a corpse, a freshly-bitten Tricia shrugging and slapping a Band-Aid on her neck wound, a friend of Tricia listening to her going on about having found her true self and assuming she's in a sex cult, things like that. It's the sort of film where one scene will have two vampires hissing at each other over "unworthy" mortals being turned, and the next scene will be about Tricia trying to explain away biting a blind date she's brought home, and then Scooter McCrae will show up for a scene holding a baby in a Hefty bag asking if anyone wants a snack. Lindenmuth's bemused wit is as in evidence as ever, and he's got a crew of solid performers (especially Graham and the appealing Sarah K. Lippman as Tricia) to sell it. There's a lot of pleasures stacked up in the sidecar, but I just wish someone had taken proper control of the handlebars.
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