FrightFest review – Bloom
Lily (Meghan Carrasquillo) is getting by in the big city as a cleaner for short-term lets … then learns that she’s inherited the Jack Rabbit Plant Nursery from her aunt Rose, who was estranged from her late mother (whose name was probably something like Tulip). Driving out to the desert, she finds an apparent corpse on the property – who wakes up and admits that he’s Ray (Robert Craighead), a grandfatherly type who is long on nostalgic memories of the childhood Lily has forgotten and slightly patronising townies-don’t-know-nuthin’ lectures about flower husbandry … but short on explanations of why the business has been left to her and what’s in the locked shed.
Director Stefan Colson, who also wrote with Jack Campbell, doesn’t entirely go the expected route with this fable of addiction – though there are a few cuttings from both versions of Little Shop of Horrors transplanted into this seemingly barren soil. Cutting her finger and dripping blood into some pots weirdly generates flowers Lily labels ‘scarlet widows’, which have an entrancing scent and sell for higher and higher prices at the local farmers’ market where Lily meets cute with chocolatier Evan (Jadon Cal Fitzpatrick). When he find out what’s going on, Ray cautions Lily that this has happened before – and those flowers bring out the worst in people. Lily, of course, ploughs on … though, like Seymour in Little Shop, her own blood soon isn’t enough to meet demand for scarlet widows and she considers alternatives like roadkill, beloved pets and (inevitably) people.
Bloom is good on believably off-kilter details. Most spooky old houses in films are full of clutter and cobwebs, but the Jack Rabbit is strangely stripped of furniture – Lily has to camp out on the floor, and never really turns the place into a home even when she gets a boyfriend and a regular income. The scarlet widows are passive monsters, possibly even hallucinogenic since Lily takes to sniffing them dreamily – which puts a lot of pressure on Carrasquillo (also the lead in Colson’s Lookout), who runs a gamut through putupon working girl, wary stranger in town, amiable rom-com potential and distracted junkie to full-on gurning, bloodied maniac. Also on the money is old timer cowboy type Craighead, who is perfect as a character designed to be unreadable – is Ray genuinely concerned only for the happiness of Lily (to whom he seems to be no kin) or a sinister presence engineering her downfall? He has that hard-to-argue-with yet impossible-to-put-up-with tone of friendly but patronising – and evasive when important matters come up – down perfectly: Ray is the kind of guy who’ll spend hours reminiscing about twenty years ago but won’t tell you the one thing you want to know right now.
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