Bloodline

Hey folks back again. Looks like I have been requested by producer/director Benny Tjandra of Syndicate Smasher gave me a brother seeking vengeance/justice but it is also old school martial arts so yeah I can't walk away from that.

Also Benny is a very nice man and blowing off decent folk is not my style. Who knew the title was that popular, I mean there are commonly subtitle but hey we will persevere.  This is Bloodline a.k.a. Love Sick 2.

So from there on in, I was known as Mr. Clean.

On a serious note, Bloodline as a title and subtitle as far back as 1979 as a title itself.

We open with a somber musical score as our production titles fly by and...a sex scene. Okay won't be taking any screenshots here. A man and woman realizes the spark is gone out of their love life and she wants to know what is all the brooding about. Ran Keo has a lot of his mind, primarily who had the guts to kill his brother and how he is going to spread those guts all over the walls.

Flashbacks that intertwine with present day manhunt in Cambodia, it is obvious Ran Keo (Director/Actor Sam B. Lorn of Moneybally, Seven Psychopaths, Trade of Innocents, The Hangover Part III, Daddy's Love and No Escape) he did not get all his answers, we cut to Long Beach with a cop duo Kong (Daniel Lue of Loaner, Pure Genius, Lucifer and Bosch) and Tara Cruz (Mojan Nourbakhsh of Running the Code, Daddy's Love, Straw Dolls, Armenia, My Love... and Bloodline).

Also I don't know if the syndicate is supposed to be 14K triad or Taiwan's Bamboo Union Gang. Hell they could be Malaysian pirates for all I know.

Kidney punch!

The leader of the mob, Vinny (vo and actor James Taku Leung of Lovesick, Man of a Thousand Faces, Call of Duty: Black Ops, Resident Evil 6, Palace of the Damned, Wolf Mother and Westworld) is being harassed by the detectives for a girl fished out of the river with her hands and feet slashed and burned. The dead tell no tales and such.

True to his word, Vinny sics his high priced lawyer on the department with the D.A. Akemi (Gina Hiraizumi of Port Charles, Soap Girl, Camp Utopia, Only the Brave, Castle, Never Say Never, Deadly Sins and The Fast and the Fierce) and department Captain (Larry Wang Parrish of Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus, Late Autumn, The Republic, Imperial Conquest, Desire Street, Client 14, Operation Terror and Grand Theft Auto V) give them the ritual buddy cop ass chewing of going over their authority and how dare they break procedure.

Uh oh, we ran out of gas.  We're gonna make out now, right?

Ran meets up with Nimol (Mia Sun of Lure, Going Home, Trade of Innocents, The Incredible Burt Wonderstone, No Escape and Small Talk) who gives him vital information on his chase of these volatile men...mostly to avenge her daughter. There's definitely more going on in that scene but I am not one for spoilers.

Vinny explains to his number one man Sonny (Stuntman/actor Vaughndio Forbes of CSI: NY, Resident Evil: Vengeance, Extraction: Genesis, Vain: This Party Sucks, Black Panther and Bloodline) that this situation has been building up for over ten years and someone has been talking.

Now just a few comments on our director, Sam B. Lorn.  He has spent his indie days after being educated in New York Film Academy and worked every aspect of film and distribution for Assembly Films, Screen Gems and The American Museum of Natural History Shelter Films.

With engrossing the Khmer-American views and stories to the movie industry, he managed get thee 2005 film, Lovesick with minor aid from Angelina Jolie.   Several of the actors from Lovesick is probably why Bloodline's working title is Lovesick 2.

The cops are going to be plenty busy picking up after Ran's spree and you'd think they have to stop and wonder if they just give him enough time, will most of these scumbags be dropped and is that a bad thing.

A few points on the protagonist, Ran can take and give a beating. He is driven by the needs to set these wrong doings right and really doesn't care about what happens to himself. That is a dangerous man to cross.

Really felt like a love letter to Michael Winner's Death Wish with Charles Bronson or perhap John Woo's Hard Boiled with Yun-Fat Chow. Solid handheld camera work, good martial arts choreography, a real throwback to the late 70s to early 80s action dramas of the time.

  Now understand, that the violence is nowhere near either of those films.  Toning it down was actually a good way to go in my humble opinion but still comes off as a hard nosed guy wanting to take the lives of the men that stole from him so much.

Sam B. Lorn gives a substantial performance as an actor and this cast and crew move like water under his direction. I hope to see more of his work in the future. Definitely a name I will be keeping track of.

Okay that is just pretty to stare at.