BLOOD CAR - So bad it's good,then bad!

[indianasmith]

I read the back of this DVD at Hasting's Friday and fell in love with this film before I ever saw it.  Here is the synopsis:

"It is the future.  Gas is $35 a gallon.  No one can afford to drive.  But Archie Andrews discovers a formula that can change the world - a car that runs on human blood."

HOW could you not love that?
I'll tell you.

(The following contains numerous spoilers.  If you are planning on watching this film, you might skip the rest of the post and come back after you've seen it!)

The DVD contained a shock for me when the menu popped up.  The choices were "Watch this F****R"  or "More S***T about this F****R".  I don't like profanity for its own sake, and that struck me as pretty gratuitous.  But, I was willing to give the film a chance, so I clicked "Watch".

The first part of the movie was pretty entertaining.  Archie is a vegan kindergarten teacher who is trying to make a car that runs on "Wheatgrass" - a greenish juice sold by a vegan girl named Lorraine who has a crush on him and spends her time doing explicit  drawings of her and Archie.  He, on the other hand, does not know she exists. He has eyes for the girl who runs the "Meat" stand across the way.  Her name is Denise, and she will do ANYTHING for a guy who can take her riding in his car.  The first hour or so of the movie is pretty entertaining.  Archie makes his discovery, then is busy finding various victims to stuff into his trunk, where he has rigged up a device with spinning saw blades that mulches them and drains them into his gas . . . I mean, blood tank.  He is doing the nasty with Denise and ignoring poor Lorraine while being shadowed by government agents, who curse each other and admire his romantic exploits.  While neither Lorraine nor Denise are shown nude, there are enough random boobie moments scattered throughout to keep guys like Cheeze happy!

Where the wheels came off for me was at the end.  Archie has successfully mulched about four government agents sent to kill him and steal his car and is having vegan guilt fits about all the bloodshed when he finally hooks up with Lorraine.  But while they are in his apartment, the government guys steal his bloodmobile and wreck it.  Then they kidnap him from in front of his kindergarten class (where he is teaching them about Tibet with his face and clothes soaked in blood) and send him to a government agent who tries to talk him into building another blood engine.  He explains with one of the best lines of the movie why the government wants him to do this.
  "Killing citizens to provide fuel isn't racist, it's patriotic!" 
   They assure him the blood will come from derelicts, criminals, convicts, and other lowlifes, and offer him a complete new identity.  They also promise him that all those who ever knew him will forget him.

That is when the funny goes away.  The scene cuts to uniformed FBI (or whatever agency these clowns work for) going into his kindergarten class and gunning down little kids.  They SHOW it, and it is played straight, not silly.  Lorraine is burned alive in her Organic Vegetable stand, and Denise is shot in the back of the head as she answers her door and then turns to run.  Cut back to Archie, who is assured that in his new identity he can have any job he wants.  When he asks if he can be President, they say, "What country?"

In the last scene he is in a new suit, with a haircut, kissing a baby for a photographer.  Then he throws the baby into the trunk of the bloodmobile and drives off.

Like I said, I liked the movie up to the end.  But the sheer mean-spiritedness, as well as the thoroughly anti-American flavor of the whole thing, lost it for me.  If they'd played it just a little more silly, I might have really liked this movie.  As it was, it just didn't do it for me the way I thought it would.

[Shadow]

Yikes!

I really dislike children, but gunning down a kindergarten class may be too much for me. I may have to pass on this one.

[lester1/2jr]

lol archie andrews. is the blood car a red jalopy

[indianasmith]

No, its black.  BTW, if you do watch this, the disappearing reappearing bullet hole in the trunk is a MAJOR continuity gap.

[Sister Grace]

i tried to watch this the other night, i wasn't impressed and kept drifting off to sleep during various parts of the movie. In fact, i slept through the last half of it. I thought about keeping it for another night and just pay the late fee so i could finish it in case i got really hard up for something to watch, but my boyfriend (who sat through all of it) said it really wasn't worth it. One thing i did find amusing though, was the fact that the students in the guy's class seemed to be out of place. whoever casted these kids either didn't notice or didn't care that they looked like they were anywhere from kindergartners on up to fourth graders all in the same room. The blackboard was kinda funny with it's reference to the Manhatten Project.

[CheezeFlixz]

Well I placed this is my Netflix queue and I got today and watched it this evening. It was ok, fairly low budget and the acting was rather flat, thanks goodness most of the girls weren't. 
Between the Mozart, Vivaldi, Chopin and Rossini soundtrack and the few AMPLE boob shots it was watchable, some of the F/X were pretty good, fairly realistic others were what you'd expect from a low budget film and when I say low budget it was $125,000.00 pretty small by todays standards. The move did tend to drift near the end. Kind of like there ran the story now they were just stretching it for time. After all it was only 74 minute run time. It was full of plot holes and goofs but so what, would you expect less?

It's like when he runs out of gas blood he just tosses a body on the trunk and the car starts right up. Well the chopper in the trunk runs off the motor so how does the motor start without blood, how does the chopper, chop with the motor?
Exactly how many shots from a pump up BB gun does it take to kill a puppy?
And how in the hell did blood become combustible?

Over all there could have been a better background story, better set up and better development. I'm cutting them a break since it was so low budget, but even with little funding it could have had a better story. I like the premise, the story was lacking.

I'm giving it 2.5 out of 5.