Blood Beat (1983)

A young woman accompanies her boyfriend to his family's rural Wisconsin home for Christmas, where the spirit of a Japanese samurai begins wreaking havoc on them.

If the special effects hadn't aged so badly maybe this one would've been better. It's not bad, still. It's intense, yet it's hard to not shake your head at certain scenes. It just... didn't stand the test of time too well.

If you want to see what early special effects looked like though the ending here's a prime display of it.

And maybe they were a bit ahead of their time, too. Don't remember anything like this from the early eighties, even if the samurai/ninja thing's a trendy element of the times.

What happened to the girl, though? Was she the warrior? Reincarnated? Did she even exist? A little loose end there.

I love the cover (reminds me of old comics and Basic Instinct - stylistic violence mixed with an iconic scene), and the premise, the characters aren't bad either, the execution's just a little underwhelming after all.

 rated 3/5: not bad