Blood Stains, a new short film from writer/director Blake Vaz, is sadly nothing all that new original. Even the credits are unoriginal as the feature the familiar font, down to the color, of Quentin Tarantino’s Oscar winning classic Pulp Fiction. The film is certainly one you’ve seen before where you are constantly ahead waiting for the film to catch up.

The film finds Laz (Hansel Ramírez) fronting a band in the border town of Juarez, Mexico. While he dreams of glory for him and his bandmates, he finds they have lost faith. Looking for support from his girlfriend, he finds she too sees him going nowhere. Frustrated with them all, he decides to head off on his own for LA to prove them wrong. Along the way, at a roadside gas station, Laz crosses paths with a strange well-dressed man whose car has broken down. The mysterious stranger makes a deal with Laz for a ride to LA. Laz passenger seems to know a lot about who he is, where he’s from, and what he wants.

Who could the man be? You know who it is and you know the deal he is offering.

While the film does look good, it just doesn’t have anything original in that makes me want to watch it again. One of the great things about a short film is that it’s easy to share.  We have all seen short films that we could wait to show to others and, in the process, watch again ourselves several times. I wish I could say this was one of those. All that being said, I do think that Vaz shows promise as filmmaker. He, himself, is the front man of a band, Mulberry Purple, and so obviously Laz is a stand-in for himself and his own quest for music success. I hope that in the future he creates more original musician related stories and steers clear of telling more of the same old thing.