BLOOD CAR

CAR...SPOILERS...FILL IN YOUR OWN PUN

Far be it from me to bang on yet again about the democratisation of the film-making process, but every time you sit through another cheap, shoddy piece of ill-conceived garbage it should act as a reminder as to why it should be made much harder to make movies. Talent, skill, imagination and craft will overcome any obstacles; making it easier for people to get their film made doesn't just make it easier for talented, skillful and imaginative craftsmen (and women) to get their films produced, it makes it easier for deluded imbeciles to have their irrational scribblings produced, and put on the same rental and retail racks proper films by proper filmmakers who have earned the right to be there through their talent and skill. No amount of easily downloaded editing software or budget HD camcorder equipment can make up for the gaping hole in the writing, acting and directing - the things you can't actually buy. Just because your piece of crap is sitting next to Pan's Labyrinth on the shelf at Blockbusters, it doesn't make you a filmmaker.

It's the near future and petrol is over $30 a gallon (it's about $3.50 at present in the US), so nobody can afford to drive. Well-meaning, supposedly lovable kindergarten teacher Archie is trying to create a car engine that runs on wheat grass extract, but it's only when he accidentally cuts his hand that he realises he's invented a car engine that runs on blood. Animal blood doesn't work: it has to be human blood. But the very fact that he has a car attracts the attention of the town slut Denise, which he doesn't resist, leaving behind his tentative friendship with the plainly besotted wheat grass seller Lorraine (Anna Chlumsky, probably best known as Macauley Culkin's girlfriend in the wet My Girl), despite the fact that he's a charmless idiot with the personality of a spoon. Meanwhile, the government are also interested in Archie's discovery....

Much of Blood Car is flatly done and uninteresting, it's not funny, and the occasional stabs at bad taste feel misjudged and lame. Towards the end, Archie freaks out in a diner in a scene which looks like something from Natural Born Killers, and then the film veers into full-on Troma sicko territory with children being murdered and a baby being slung into the whirring blades of Archie's death engine. Anything for a laugh, eh? Frankly by this point I was too bored to be shocked, but I was left feeling insulted that the genius behind it thinks that this sort of rubbish is acceptable. It isn't and I ended up wishing that camera equipment was far more expensive and still used costly film stock, or that someone somewhere in the production process had said "This isn't good enough". Astonishingly, this turd got a limited UK cinema release earlier this year.

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