We've all been there, the trepidation of introducing a new partner to your family. And why do we always seem to do it at the holidays? Maybe we're hoping that all the tinsel and the trash will distract the family just enough to make them welcoming. The family in Blood Beat (1983) has your normal family problems when new girlfriend Sarah arrives, and things get worse immediately as mom's psychic abilities put Sarah on edge and celebrations take a backseat to a ghost samurai murdering the neighbors.

This winter we're gathering together on the longest night of the year, well in the northern hemisphere at least, and watching a holiday horror film. Well, holiday enough. Like each of our holiday specials, the end of year holidays are rather incidental to the plot of Blood Beat. Our dear friend Stephen G. joins us for a film he was, inexplicably enough, already planning to watch this year for the first time.

As any review of Blood Beat will tell you, it's a deeply weird film, but it's maybe not even the weirdest movie we've seen this year? I mean, we watched House and Head and Crumb this year. Truly, from Antichrist to Zazie dans le Metro, the tenth year of Lost in Criterion brought us some brilliant films that are more than a bit out of the ordinary. Blood Beat isn't actually too far off from some movies we've seen this year, and even closer to some of the lower budget independently produced horror films we've seen as part of the collection in the past. Maybe we'll get a Criterion release of it before we're done.