I just watched Rebel Ridge recently, and it’s curious in the era of “A.C.A.B.” and “Support The Police” to see more and more movies willing to portray the police as the bad guy. You have to assume that’s immediately going to turn off a fair chunk of your potential audience when the character of police officers is already such a polarizing opinion across the country.

And yet, here we are again with the new streaming thriller Blood Star, the tale of a young woman traveling across the country who finds herself at odds with a particularly abusive sheriff. There’s no two ways about it in this one: this one cop at least is definitely a bastard. And he’s here to make our heroine’s life a true living hell before the runtime is up.

Bobbie is escaping one abusive situation–her father, who apparently had broken her arm in the somewhat recent past for getting into legal trouble–by attempting to return to another one–her boyfriend, who we are told decked her at some point. She’s a girl stuck between a rock and a hard place, and who is just exchanging one set of problems for another.

Bobbie meets a sheriff at a very small gas station and is immediately put-off by him. He attempts to buy her a soda, but she rebuffs his offer. After she leaves the fill-up station, she is pulled over by the same sheriff for speeding… and he claims she broke the lights on his car, as well.

Thus begins a stretch of harassment from the sheriff towards Bobbie that grows angrier and more frightening as the movie wears on. Will Bobbie be able to escape his wrath?

TWO UPS AND TWO DOWNS

+ Britni Camacho does a fine job as the lead and carries the flick, appearing in just about every single scene. There are aspects of the movie around her that let her down–more on those in the Downs–but she powers through and shines when she needs to.

When the movie gets into the heavier action and requires more emoting and terror from Ms. Camacho, she really excels. It would be easy to see her as an up-and-coming scream queen based on what the film puts her through in the third act.

+ For its first two acts, Blood Star is a solid cat-and mouse game with some excellent tension. It really creates a visceral reaction in the viewer of wanting Bobbie to escape the situation in which she finds herself. The Sheriff is a despicable character, and the combination of his sinister deeds and Bobbie’s charm makes it easy to root for her.

As the first two acts go on, the sheriff gets more and more aggressive towards Bobbie, and she seemingly has no real escape. Eventually, Bobbie is able to get on her way and picks up a friend named Amy–a girl fired from the diner Bobbie visits–but even that doesn’t keep her safe for long. And then the terror begins again.

It’s an effectively disarming few moments of the flick that allow Bobbie and Amy to build up their characters so we care more about them when the sheriff re-emerges.

– The dialogue is really terrible in Blood Star, and the editing often does it no favors. Especially early on, the way scenes are spliced together makes it feel like the actors are miles apart from each other. I don’t even think that’s true; I am pretty sure the actors are, indeed, face to face, but the editing makes that hard to tell.

Even without the editing, though, the dialogue of the first act of the movie is still very much a weak point. Britni Camacho is a strong actress, as noted, but she struggles to make line reads work whether she is on the phone or talking to the sheriff. It feels like the screenwriter needed someone else to come in and punch the speaking parts up a bit.

– This is a very subjective Down here, and some people will likely have no real issue with it, but what can I say? I did. In the third act, Blood Star turns somewhat malicious and mean-spirited. After working her best to evade the sheriff, Bobbie gets a few innocent people killed along her way to attempted freedom. That’s fine! You expect that in a thriller like this. There’s got to be a body count of innocents.

But then Bobbie is finally caught by her pursuer, and what follows for a few minutes feels like something out of another movie entirely. We see Bobbie experience a minor sexual assault, which wasn’t something I could have foreseen from the previous hour of movie. And then she suffers a gross-out bit of torture that could have come right out of Hostel.

Again, neither of those attacks on Bobbie felt in-character with the rest of the movie, and neither does the sheriff’s exposition drop on why he is doing what he does. For over an hour, Blood Star has some problems as it cruises along, but it is mostly a decent thriller about a victim trying to get away from a much more powerful attacker. But then everything turns, and I didn’t particularly care for the direction it took.

OVERALL

It’s a shame that Blood Star insisted on getting so aggressively violent and hateful in the third act, because I was enjoying the ride well enough up to the point. But there was just no point to the torture scenes other than to discomfort the viewer. And they succeeded, even if in my case they succeeded too hard. Britni Camacho looks to have some star potential, though, so I’ll be interested to see where she goes from here. But as for this picture, it’s all a little below average.