Recovering drug addict Massimo (Michael Klug, House of Black Wings) credits his girlfriend (Christine Nguyen) with his sobriety. They’re madly in love and destined for a wonderful life together … until the “millennial soy boy” (to quote his racist stepfather) gets bitten by a vampire, which fucks everything up.
Look, if Monte Light wants to call Blood Covered Chocolate an homage to the 1922 classic Nosferatu, he has every right. This is his movie, after all. But I found it to be original (or as original as one can get within the vampire genre) — very much its own thing, Lynchian light zaps excepted. Garlic, sunshine, crucifixes — all mean diddly squat in this overall impressive indie.
Doing a 180˚ from 2020’s Space, Light shoots Blood Covered Chocolate in crisp black and white, with the occasional nod to color in kaleidoscopic-pattern cutaways, Zoom calls, cartoon clips and tinted scenes. Most visually arresting among the latter floods the screen’s left side blood-red as a shadow of a vampiric hand (the most overt Nosferatu reference) slowly nears Massimo’s oblivious mother (Debra Lamb, Deathrow Gameshow), who’s standing in the frame’s grayscale right. In addition to flashing to public-domain works from Fritz Lang and Max Fleischer, Light cribs the iconic floating-head-and-spine monstrosity from the Indonesian oddity Mystics in Bali.
A staple of Fred Olen Ray and Jim Wynorksi erotic comedies (including the recent Bigfoot or Bust!), Nguyen uses her Blood Covered role to her advantage, proving she can act. She still has to take her clothes off, but for once, that’s secondary. I wish Klug were as skilled, but I found his affectations in timing and delivery awkward. Luckily, this flick flows fast, like a bladder draining a liter of water. Balls are required to begin your closing credits with the words “YOU HAVE JUST EXPERIENCED” filling the screen, but Light earns it. —Rod Lott