All You Need is Blood

Tonally gonzo and presented with a semi-analog feel, All You Need is Blood is writer-director Bucky Le Boeuf’s self-referential debut feature. The lines between reality and fiction quickly blur in this autofictional romp. In 1998, the real-life Le Boeuf co-wrote a short film called Drops of Dew with Vishnu Gudi, which I have not seen and could not find online, though stills suggest it’s an arty black-and-white project. The filmmaker’s only other credit is this blithe horror-comedy. Similarly, All You Need is Blood is about a stringy 16-year-old filmmaker named Bucky Le Boeuf (Logan Riley Bruner), who yearns to make an auteur masterpiece with his friend Vish (Neel Sethi). Instead, they slap together a bloody B-movie shot on videotapes over a frantically short timeline. Despite these self-facing nods, the movie’s thin metafictional conceit is less memorable than the fast-paced energy and goofball humor throughout, which is delightfully unpredictable.

After a prologue set 30,000 years ago, where a caveman touches a meteorite and becomes a zombie, the movie picks up in the late twentieth century. On the margins of suburbia, Bucky lives with his blackout-drunk father, Walter (Tom O’Keefe), who offers little support. So Bucky talks to his late mother; she speaks to him through her urn on a high shelf. To be sure, Bucky is eccentric and a little off, from feeding his pet turtle Spartacus bites of banana from his mouth to calling Vish a “scallywag” in earnest. He also vomits at the sight of blood, and that’s bound to be a problem when he resolves to blend his plans to make cinematic art out of a zombie movie. What changed Bucky’s mind, beyond the commercial viability of horror over arthouse fare? He and Vish learn that Walter touched a meteorite and became an instant flesh-eating zombie. With production value like that chained up in the basement, Bucky can’t resist. 

Bucky rushes headlong into making a “zom-dram,” blending zombie schlock with an artiness inspired by his idol, Hans von Franz—whose name, yes, sounds awfully like Dana Carvey and Kevin Nealon’s “Pumping Up” parody of Arnold Schwarzenegger on Saturday Night Live from this era. With the drab surroundings and zeal for homespun moviemaking, All You Need is Blood recalls American Movie (1999) at times. The unfailingly enthusiastic young director tries to assemble friends to appear in his movie, including the cocaine-sniffing actress Vivien (Mena Suvari, doing her best Linda Belcher voice) and his school crush June (Emma Chasse). But most who enter Bucky’s production end up bitten, contributing to the mounting number of zombies—a secret he must keep from a snooping cop (Eddie Griffin). Ultimately, Bucky’s movie restores his broken relationship with his father, whose zombiism is an unmistakable metaphor, and brings him closer to June.

However scrappy the film-within-the-film appears on Bucky’s clunky video camera, the real Le Boeuf delivers a vibrant horror aesthetic with, aside from some mild digital VFX, a mostly tangible quality. The film proper deploys Sam Raimi-style zooms and object POV shots to create a kinetic energy worthy of Evil Dead 2 (1987), while its characters make self-referential jokes about these techniques to humorous effect. Le Boeuf’s inventive visuals include inspired views of internal organs reminiscent of Three Kings (1999) and X-ray flashes of necks snapping. And while Bucky’s production recalls the unpolished but entertaining quality of the home movies made in Super 8 (2011), the practical effects look superb, boasting a refreshing use of fake blood and an impressive mutant costume in the finale. 

After debuting at the Sitges Film Festival and hitting various other small festivals in the last year, All You Need is Blood debuted on the KINO Studio app and has since become available on VOD. It’s a quirky, low-budget production that’s sort of childish and silly—there are poop jokes galore, including zombies who get high on sewage—but it’s also plenty of fun. While suited for fans of Troma Entertainment or the recent string of self-aware Canadian horror comedies by Steven Kostanski (PG: Psycho Goreman, 2021; Frankie Freako, 2024), there’s also genuine heart here. Though the resources at his disposal make him puke, Bucky’s enthusiasm and determination to complete his movie reinforce how filmmaking is a bonding experience—even though most of his family and friends turn into zombies so Bucky can achieve his vision. One has to wonder when and if Bucky will ever process these losses. Regardless, it’s filled with gnarly kills and goofy humor, and it’s grotesquely infectious.