A BLIND BARGAIN (2025)

New in select theaters and soon to be released On Demand!
Directed by Paul Bunnell.
Written by Paul Bunnell, John Falotico, Bing Bailey.
Check out the trailer here!

It’s 1970 and Dominic (Jake Horowitz) is a Viet Nam war vet struggling with a drug addiction. His mother Joy (Amy Wright) is concerned for him and sends him to a methadone clinic for treatment. It is there he meets the lovely nurse Ellie (Lucy Loken) and the ominous Dr. Gruder (Crispin Glover). Dr. Gruder discovers Dominic has a unique blood type he needs for his experiments on reversing the effects of old age, but the blood can only come from Dominic’s mother Joy. Dr. Gruder will pay good money for Joy’s blood and since Dominic is a drug addict and deeply in debt to his dealer Vincent (Rob Mayes), he decides to betray his mother and check her into the clinic. Gruder’s treatment works amazingly well on Joy, reversing her age significantly and turning her into the stunning actress she once was (Annalisa Cochrane). But a bargain this good comes with a price.

A BLIND BARGAIN is a remake of a lost Lon Chaney silent film from 1922. The premise is quite odd and I don’t know how much it deviates from the original, but it seems the old version was about a mad doctor who devolves his patients into monkeys. So I think it deviates from the original quite a bit.

But this is an odd one. Crispin Glover offers up a good, eccentric performance. Of course, he does. He always does. He’s one of those actors who never repeats himself and even though he could be a big-name star, he chooses to work on projects on the periphery. Here he is diabolical and more restrained than in previous performances. Glover gets maniacal by the end and this is no subtle movie, by a long shot. But out of all of the strange details in A BLIND BARGAIN, Glover’s performance isn’t among them.

There’s an outsider spirit to A BLIND BARGAIN that you just don’t get in mainstream movies. There’s a sense of morality that this film lacks. It’s reminiscent of the early John Waters films where there really is no taboo subject matter. The lead, Dominic, sells his own mom out for drug money. There’s a weird mother/son fetish thing going on when Joy turns into a younger version of herself. And even though one might call Joy a victim of the doctor’s experiments, when she does turn into her younger self, it turns out she is quite selfish and unmoral herself. So, there’s no real conventional lead to root for here. Everyone is either a part of a corrupt system or, in Joy’s case, expelled from that system because she became old.

There is also an abundance of characters I will call Lynchian characters. These are characters that have nothing to do with the plot but seem to simply exist to make things weird. They seem to have some kind of backstory, but it just isn’t revealed. It’s like they fell into the movie from a completely other movie. PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS Sean Whalen, Claudia MacLeod, and John Karyus are three such characters that show up in A BLIND BARGAIN inexplicably delivering a suitcase full of bugs.

This is a strange one, indeed. And I guarantee it’s not for everyone. Still, this could be a worthwhile watch for those who like their movies on the weirder side. It has some subtly trippy sequences where Dominic goes into a drug infused haze and the walls animate and a trippy musical scene where young Joy sings at a party and walks across water. So, if any of that intrigues you, you might be interested in A BLIND BARGAIN. I can’t say it was for me, but I can say I saw some things I didn’t think I’d see and was never bored with it.