Film

This audacious, utterly bonkers and downright sick claret-drenched black comedy from 2007 deserves some praise, if only for its nerve. ‘Blood Car’ comes rammed to the hilt with all the micro-budget Cormanesque conventions required to justify cult status: dark, deadpan comedy mixed with copious quantities of blood and gristle, kinky characters, scenes of sordid sex, even an underlying social subtext, all fittingly set to a soundtrack of classical favourites.

We’re in smalltown America sometime in the near future, when petrol prices are sky high and no one can afford to drive. Enter mild-mannered, environmentally minded kindergarten teacher Archie (Mike Brune), who may have solved the fuel crisis by secretly inventing an engine that runs on… blood. Writer-director Alex Orr has assembled a cool cast, with Brune as the increasingly deranged Faustian antihero and Anna Chlumsky as the wheatgrass seller who hankers after him. But ‘Blood Car’ is essentially a one-joke scenario that never quite adds up to the sum of its mangled body parts.