Blood In The Snow 2024: ‘Pins and Needles’ Review
Stars: Chelsea Clark, Daniel Gravelle, Damian Romeo, Kate Corbett, Ryan McDonald | Written and Directed by James Villeneuve
Making its debut at this year’s edition of the Blood In The Snow Film Festival, Pins and Needles is the first feature directed by James Villeneuve. While he had only directed one short, The Ticket, before this, Villeneuve has plenty of experience with genre film. He has a long list of credits as an editor on films such as 5ive Girls and Silent But Deadly, and more recently wrote the horror comedy Vicious Fun.
For Pins & Needles, he’s dispensed with most of the comedy in favour of a straight thriller about Max (Chelsea Clark; Scared Shitless, Degrassi: Next Class) a diabetic biology grad student who’s getting a ride home from a class project with Harold (Daniel Gravelle; Fahrenheit 451, We Forgot to Break Up). Things start to go wrong after he stops to pick up his sketchy-looking friend (Damian Romeo; Cult of Nightmares, The Haunt) and they end up having to take a detour.
Maybe they should have taken their chances with the closed bridge because the car ends up blowing out not one but two tyres in front of a strange building in the middle of nowhere. Max goes to see if there’s anyone there who can help, and it’s a good thing she did. The house’s owners, Emily (Kate Corbett; The Righteous, All My Husband’s Wives) and Frank (Ryan McDonald; Fringe, Becky) drive up. While they appear friendly, they quickly prove otherwise when they slash Harold’s throat.
Villeneuve takes care of this in the film’s first fifteen minutes, from there it becomes a medical thriller as it’s revealed Frank and Emily are harvesting the adrenal and thyroid glands of their victims to create a formula that can keep the ultra-wealthy young forever. Max has to avoid becoming their next victim while dealing with a dwindling insulin supply and blood sugar issues.
Apart from the diabetes angle, this isn’t a particularly original idea, organ harvesting has been at the centre of many films. That includes the recent Play Dead, which covered a lot of the same ground, only in a morgue. What helps set Pins and Needles apart are the demented villains who prank each other while cutting up corpses, complain that one of their contacts has a fleet of helicopters on his yacht while they only have one, and have exchanges like “I’d kill for an intern” “We actually did kill an intern last year, remember?”
Apart from being amusing in their own right, these gleefully psychotic villains help make up for the fact that Max, while strong and resourceful, needs to stay quiet to avoid being caught. She spends most of the film quietly sneaking about avoiding the deadly duo, dropping rat poison in their serum and rigging a mean booby trap or two. Much of her dialogue actually comes in a dream conversation with Harold’s ghost. That’s also where most of the film’s effects are as well, his slit throat being fully visible with most of the film’s other nastiness kept off-screen.
Overall, Pins and Needles is an enjoyable if not particularly original thriller that mixes some genuinely tense moments with some amusing satire at the expense of the uber-rich. It even goes as far as having Frank talk about injecting children’s blood, a riff on Peter Thiel’s interest in transfusions of blood from young men to fight aging. It’s not quite what I expected from the writer of Vicious Fun, but it is a decent directorial debut.
*** 3/5
Pins and Needles had its World Premiere on November 22nd as part of the annual Blood In The Snow Film Festival and will be available on Super Channel on November 29th.
______
