Film noir and voodoo collide in D.O.A. Blood River

Last Updated on July 31, 2021

In 1950, Edmond O'Brien starred in director Rudolph Maté's film D.O.A. as a small-town accountant who gets dosed with a slow-acting poison while visiting San Francisco and spends the week he has left to live trying to solve his own murder. D.O.A. has been remade a couple times over the years (in 1969 as COLOR ME DEAD, in 1988 with Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan in the lead roles), but it sounds like writer/director Stephen C. Sepher might be bringing a bit of horror edge to his own reboot, D.O.A. BLOOD RIVER. 

Sepher's take on the noir thriller concept has the following synopsis: 

Sam Collins, a pharmaceutical sales rep, visits a small town in Louisiana to close the business deal of a lifetime with Dr. Alexander, a doctor specializing in Vaccine Research. He finds himself in a dark world of sex, corruption and murder as he is poisoned with no antidote to save his life. Desperate for answers, Sam turns to a local girl Jesse. Their path leads to a voodoo priestess that only confirms Sam’s doomed fate. On the run, with nowhere to go and no one to trust, Sam and Jesse find themselves running from police detectives, the Mob and a dirty sheriff who wants him dead. 

It's the mention of a "voodoo priestess" that sets off my "maybe horror" alert, but I'm interested in seeing how this new version of D.O.A. will turn out regardless of how far into horror territory things might go.

Billy Flynn (pictured above) stars as the poisoned man this time around and is joined in the cast by Christa B. Allen, D.B. Sweeney, Scottie Thompson, Chris Mulkey, Christopher Rob Bowen, Tyson Sullivan, Lillo Brancato, and Stephen C. Sepher himself.

D.O.A. BLOOD RIVER is being produced by Rory Fradella, Kim Barnard, Nazo Bravo, and Sepher for Silver Plane Films and Kingfisher Media.

Allen on location