Blood Drive

Review #11: Blood Drive

I sat in on a panel at a recent sci-fi convention (Heliosphere, in Rye, NY) on the topics of movies that they love to hate. Not movies so bad that they're good, but movies so bad that you want to warn all your friends away from them. In the latter part of the discussion, the panel started polling the audience for their suggestions. I couldn't think of one off the top of my head, but I did mention Syfy channel's Blood Drive, which ran last summer, and which I binged in the fall. No one had heard of it.

Ah, to be that lucky.

The less said about Blood Drive, the better, but this is a review page, so I have to say something.

Okay, first, the commercials sold it to me as an apocalyptic future with some kind of Death Race that involves "Vampire cars". Now, stories with vampire cars tend to be more campy than horrific. Blood Drive might be campy, but it doubles down on horrific. Gory, graphic, buckets of blood, with plenty death and dismemberment. Plus torture for the sake of torture. (One character spends a couple of episodes strapped to a table while a second practically dehumanizes him, which is actually somewhat ironic.) It's a Grindhouse production, so I wasn't expecting a lighthearted romantic romp, but this was nuts. And not in a good way.

We're giving a little bit of background, but not much. They don't get into what caused the world to be this way, or leave open the possibility for saving the world.

But the biggest problem is that the entire show was pointless: nothing that any of the characters do ever matters, not to the world, not to their goals, not to anybody's story line. You'll find yourself saying, "I went through 13 weeks for that?"

One other note: there's a big reveal for who the Big Bad secretly running the show is, and it made no sense at all. In fact, it even had me questioning the whole timeline of the series because of all the flashbacks and backstories of the characters. Wasn't believable.

I can suspend disbelief more than many I know because I'll give you a pass if you're entertaining and internally consistent to your story and your world. Blood Drive does neither, and I cared so little that had they tried to correct the gaps in a hypothetical second season, I wouldn't tune in for the rest of the story.

Hypothetical because it was thankfully cancelled after one season.

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