All You Need is Blood is an awkward one for me to rate. But I’ve decided to give it decent score because it’s a good, solid effort. It’s not always successful and its sense of humor doesn’t match my own, but I dig its determination to be a low budget zombie movie about making a no budget zombie movie.

It’s about an aspiring auteur filmmaker with no money who wants to enter his masterpiece into a film convention. But they only want horror movies… so he lowers his artistic sensibilities to make a dramatic zombie film. First step: include his recently zombified dad who really shouldn’t have picked up that plague-filled meteorite the other day.

This is a horror comedy with a sense of humor that just didn’t grab me. The whole film feels too intentionally corny and cheesy and I’m sure some people will vibe with it. I did not. Which makes the first two acts a little bit of an extended ask for me. I wasn’t amused.

But the final act is so full of rambunctious go-for-broke gory charm, that I can’t hate the movie. It starts by showing off the in-universe zombie film which is honestly better than the rest of the actual movie. Then it throws down with a sequence of such low budget practical effects gloopy, spraying gore, that I had to sit back and appreciate the effort. There’s some truly unique zombie splatter… things I’ve never seen before. Really inventive stuff.

And the low budget filmmaking schtick finally kicked in too. The whole movie is about the urge to just make a movie and I didn’t really feel it. Not until the final act where you see the prosthetic skin start to flay. I finally – finally – got into the groove. I suspect people with actual aspirations to make movies will get into it earlier than me.

So, yeah, my rating was all over the place… but I come down a warm-hearted rating because they put in a solid effort, regardless of whether it clicked with me the whole time. Solid recommendation if you like your zombie movies creative, low budget, and full of gumption.

Score: 75