Ghetto Saw.

Have you ever asked yourself, what if Saw was really ghetto and also not good? Well I’ll tell you this; the film is called Blood Money.

Today I watched Blood Money, a very uniquely named film from 2024. Not to be confused with 2023’s Blood Money, 2022’s Blood Money, the 2021 Blood Money series, 2020’s Blood Money, the 2019 Blood Money series, 2018’s Blood Money, 2017’s Blood Money, the other 2017 Blood Money, 2016’s Blood Money, I think you get the point. I’m pretty sure if you dig deep enough you’ll find about 5o or 60 movies called Blood Money releasing in the last thirty years.

Directed by David Garcia, the man behind the docudrama Diary of a Cheating Woman and its sequel Madea Goes To Prison, Blood Money is a ghetto-ass Saw movie. A group of friends rob a club and bury the money. In the ensuing commotion, they accidentally kill a dude who was in the abandoned spooky processing plant for some reason. To be honest if you’re walking into a ghetto-ass warehouse in the middle of the night you probably deserve what you get. Just saying.

The gang gets kidnapped and wakes up in a low-budget Saw ripoff, only there’s no traps and they just have to kill each other while also revealing their past secrets.

The real star of this movie is Carlos Menzies as Manny, or specifically Carlos Menzies’ pepperoni nipples. I don’t know who insisted he be shirtless for a good portion of the film, but good for them. Actually Carlos is probably the most talented actor in this film, and his performances were some of the best parts. Otherwise this film was pretty bad. Somehow nobody realized in editing that the killer talking through a gas mask needed to have some ADR so the audience can understand what he’s saying.

I’m tempted to throw this in with the hood Tubi movies because the volume mixing is iconically terrible and I couldn’t tell what people were saying for a good portion of the movie, and the subtitles didn’t work on Tubi. Overall it leads to a film that is really hard to follow, all over the place, and gets really, really boring. There aren’t many character moments, there’s no saw-action or budget to speak of, and you already kinda know how the film is going to end from the beginning.

At one hour and six minutes, this film feels like a feature length movie. Skip it.

Rating: D-