"The catch of the day… is you" when Vinegar Syndrome reels out BLOOD HOOK on Blu-ray/DVD combo.

Seventeen years after his grandfather mysteriously vanished, music student Peter Van Clease (Mark Jacobs) inherits his lakeside cabin and decides to confront his past with the urging of his psych major girlfriend Ann (Mark Jacobs, PLAYBACK) and the support of his friends: fishing enthusiast Finner (Christopher Whiting), New Age rocker Rodney (Patrick Danz), and high-maintenance Kiersten (Sara Hauser). They just happen to have arrived in the middle of the annual Muskie Madness fishing competition. Despite his grandfather's reputation as one of the founders of the town, Peter finds himself unwelcome by caretaker Wayne (Paul Drake) and his shell-shocked war vet son Evelyn (Bill Lowrie), and even less so when upstart Finner tries to beat out sore loser Denny Dobyns (Dale Dunham) and town bait seller Leroy Leudke (Don Winters) for biggest Muskie, someone with a giant fish hook is dragging the competition into the bay. Peter thinks something is very wrong but Ann thinks he is projecting and the sheriff (Paul Heckman) would rather deal with disappearances than suspected murders, even after the city slicker parents of kids Irv (Greg Nienas) and Ruthie (Julie Vortanz) vanish on successive nights. Unable to convince the sheriff about his suspicions, Peter must rely on the unpredictable Evelyn whose ex-wife has also recently vanished.

Lensed in picturesque Hayward, Wisconsin, BLOOD HOOK is a real headscratcher of a regional slasher flick. Nowhere near as intentionally funny as distributor Troma's trailer tries to spin it, the film gains most of its laughs from acting that varies from competent to utterly horrible – with our verbose protagonist unfortunately among the latter and the more over-the-top villain and red herrings actually somewhere towards the former – along with the staging of its kill sequences in which the filmmakers are unable to disguise the fact that the actors have to throw themselves into the water to convey the effect of being reeled in. The pacing is lopsided with a "leisurely" buildup before the first real gore scene at forty-odd minutes of a near two hour total and the plotting betrays a half-baked script in which Peter using his perfect pitch to diagnose the killer's trigger is novel in concept but manages to seem as randomly thrown in as the attempts to create another red herring late in the film by referencing the mental state of a character that the audience has already been shown slipping away during some of the kills. The gore effects are accomplished within the limits of the budget, although one image of the killer's victims floating beneath the dock on a fish stringer manages more a chill than the prosthetic of one of fresher kills having a rope pushed through the bottom of his chin and out through his mouth. There's a Troma movie in there somewhere but BLOOD HOOK's treatment of the concept isn't it.

Released theatrically by Troma and on VHS by RCA/Columbia during their deal in the 1980s, BLOOD HOOK then appeared on DVD from Troma as part of one of their TROMA TRIPLE HEADER sets with BLADES and ZOMBIE ISLAND MASSACRE utilizing the same tape master. Newly scanned in 2K from the original 16mm camera negatives, Vinegar Syndrome's 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.66:1 widescreen Blu-ray presentation not only reveals the intended framing of this Super 16 film but also the full 111 minute length of the original cut (versus the 92 minute version that has been circulating), restoring a few seconds of gore here and there along with almost twenty minutes of filler starting with an extended introduction to Peter and his friends driving into town, along with Peter's failed attempt at casting his rod, the kids' visit to the top of the giant Muskie, the tail end of the restaurant scene after Peter sees a character disappear from the docks, a scene of Peter and Ann on the water, a transition shot to the restaurant after another character gets hooked on the lake, Peter's run-in with Denny on the street (a sequence which actually does include a clue to the killer's identity), Finner running into Peter and Ann in town, an additional scene of the urologist trying to start his boat motor before he is hooked, Peter radioing the sheriff about his suspicions about one of his friends before said friend gets killed, Peter showing Evelyn the severed ear of a suspect he now believes has been killed by the real killer and another flashback to his grandfather's disappearance, a scene of Ann waking up from her stupor before the one where she goes out to the docks to meditate, and an aborted encounter between Peter and Kiersten in the aftermath of Ann's disappearance. The credits and intertitles appear to have been recreated. The DTS-HD Master Audio 1.0 mono track is clean but the mix is basic. Optional English SDH subtitles are included.

Extras start off with "Hook, Line and Sinker" (30:01), an interview with director Jim Mallon (who went on to produce and direct MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000) who reveals that the film's inspiration goes back to him spending vacations as a child with producer David Herbert and a short film they made about vacationers attacked by resentful backwoods locals. While Herbert went off to become a west coast salesman for IBM, Mallon started working at a PBS television station as it was transitioning to video but still had 16mm equipment and accessories. When Herbert tired of working for IBM and returned to the area, they came up with the concept for the film (originally titled MUSKIE MADNESS) and set about raising funds, a process that took a number of years. He admits that funding took up much of their time so they. He hired creative writing teachers to script it and they came back with a three-hundred page draft, but Mallon and Herbert never reworked it to their satisfaction as they cut it down and rewrote scenes for budgetary limitations. He also notes the static film setups as a matter of getting scenes in the can with often a 1:1 shooting ratio. Although he concedes that it is uneven, he may be reaching in suggesting that he was channeling or anticipating the humor of David Lynch and the Cohen Brothers.