The Red Circle

[201]0 // 002 Blood Car [2007] dir. Alex Orr

“Let me set this up for you… You know the phrase ‘If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen?’ Well, people still say that. But they don’t drive cars.”

Those words, spoken by a potato chip chomping narrator, begin our journey into the futuristic world of Blood Car. Somehow these people made a movie about a car that runs on murdered human beings’ blood and didn’t make it into a horror movie. They filled it with ridiculous humor and on-the-nose satire. Given the immeasurably small budget (Reported be be less than $25,000) Alex Orr has made one hell of a flick. It manages to be an amalgamation of several films while being its own thing at the same time.

Archie is a vegan kindergarten teacher who is developing an engine that works on wheat grass. Maybe, in a normal world, this would be some damn hippie bullshit. But in the world presented in the film (a world that is “maybe two weeks from now,” according to the same narrator), gas has risen to $40 a gallon, and there are no more cars on the road. Only the obscenely wealthy drive – the rest of the cars on the planet have been abandoned in automobile graveyards, where horny teenagers still have sex in them. But, back to Archie.

He’s hit a dead end in the engine experiment when in a fit of drunkenness, he cuts his hand on a broken vodka bottle (complete with the hammer and sickle logo – the film, if nothing else, has class) and the engine roars to life with the bloodfuel. Tasked with finding new fuel supplies to maintain the ungodly amount of pussy he gets from being the only guy in town with a car, Archie begins by using his own emaciated frame for the gas. Then he moves on to squirrels, chained up dogs, dead neighbors before getting his hands dirty with actual manslaughter via lawnmower blades he has placed in the trunk.

But, beyond all of this, there is almost no horror involved in this film. Sure, people get hacked apart by axes, little kids get bullets in the brain, and shady government agents get shredded by the ultimate Honda Civic mod. But this is all part of the spot-on absurdist humor of the film. It does right what most fresh-out-of-college filmmakers do wrong. There are homages to other films, the end of the film is essentially the end of The Godfather, and there are kills directly out of Goodfellas and The Shining. But Blood Car is smart enough to use these references inside a framework all its own. They’re nice moments for the people in the audience who will recognize them, not blatant rip-offs for throwback value.

Add in Anna Chlumsky as a all-organic kiosk owner who sells Archie his wheat grass and Katie Howlett as the sexpot who owns the rival stand, simply called MEAT, and you’ve got a decent cast that understands the ridiculousness of the plot without overselling it. The script is tight, and above all, actually funny. This actually may be the funniest movie I have ever seen that includes gags about puppies and five-year-olds getting murdered.

Blood Car will never go down in history as anything other than a deceptively smart piece of absurd, violent filmmaking, but Alex Orr creates a world that is worth revisiting. While the government satire may be a little heavy-handed (and it’s understandable but off-putting that there is no one over thirty in this film), the final speech given by the government agent about the Blood Car in question is an exercise in brilliance. Not only does the logic not work, the phrasing and the delivery of these absurd declarations elevates the material to far above its no-budget DIY roots. I’d also be remiss to neglect the brilliant way the CIA spooks clean up after a clean hit.

I am glad that there are smart, resourceful, and talented people like Alex Orr and his crew that get to make movies that appeal to insane people. There is so much unmitigated garbage floating around in the independent scene, that it is a welcome bit of refreshment to see a film as well put together and executed as Blood Car. Its premise and delivery maximize the retardedness of every moment. And that’s what makes it so smart.

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