Blood Car

Here’s yet another straight to DVD horror comedy, but sadly, unlike Murder Party this one doesn’t quite bring the goods. It’s certainly not terrible, mind you, but while Murder Party was able to stay humorous the entire way through, this one struggles a bit, giving us a good amount of filler as it tries (and fails) to get to a 90 minute running time.

It starts off rather promising too. A newsman-type directly faces the camera like he’s in an Ed Wood production and warns us of the terrible calamity waiting in store for us in the future, two weeks from now, as gas prices have risen so high that none but the rich can afford them. Enter our hero, an aspiring vegan (yay to Microsoft Word, by the way, for not acknowledging vegan as a word) and Kindergarten teacher who’s trying to make a car engine that runs on soy grass. Of course, if it worked properly we wouldn’t have a movie, and so he discovers that his engine will run, but only when supplied by blood. The rest of the movie is basically him going around looking for victims while not-very-menacing government types stalk him.

Remember what I said about it giving us too much filler? Well, the film is only about 75 minutes long, and has enough good material to last roughly 50 minutes or so. This means we a lot of boring scenes, particularly near the end when the film starts to grind to a halt. Still, there’s a good deal of good moments to it, particularly in the form of My Girl’s Anna Chlumsky, who plays a hopelessly nerdy vegan street vendor who spends her spare time drawing erotic fantasies about her and the lead. The film comes with a “Making of” documentary that I didn’t watch most of because it was almost as long as the film, but I can confirm they at least started it off right by focusing on her shower scene. God bless ‘em.

Rating: **