What's awesome about it: Do you like sex and violence? Do you like alternate history dystopias? Do you like the idea of fast cars which eat people instead of guzzling gasoline? Do you like satires of corporate greed and the entertainment industry? Do you like explosions, including but not limited to exploding cars, exploding heads, exploding buildings, and random fireball belching machines used as set decoration? Do you like canon gay and bisexual characters? Do you like characters routinely getting covered in blood and all sorts of other fluids, some of which glow in the dark? Do you like cannibals, mutants, and robots? Do you like male nudity happening more often than female nudity? Do you like and male characters getting manhandled and/or tied up, handcuffed, or otherwise restrained in pretty much every single episode? Do you like low budget grindhouse aesthetics, riffing on different sets of tropes every episode? Do you like themes of family, loyalty, betrayal? Do you like weird technology, unethical medical experimentation, non-consensual body modification, body horror, and the easily crossed line between human and inhuman? Blood Drive has all of those things and more.
Grace D'Argento signs up to participate in the Blood Drive, a death race across the country in cars that run on human blood, but at the last minute she gets saddled with an unwilling partner, Arthur Bailey, one of the last good cops in Los Angeles, who just happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time while investigating weird stuff that has been being done to homeless people, and now they can't get too far away from each other or they'll both be killed by the tiny bombs implanted at the base of their skulls as part of the race rules. Grace needs the prize money to take care of her little sister, but Arthur wants to end this spectacle of death and everyone responsible for it. Before either of them have a hope of achieving their goals, they're going to need to stay alive against the rest of the race's collection of homicidal weirdos and assorted dangers of the post-apocalyptic landscape.
While those two are working out their differences, Arthur's cop partner, Christopher Carpenter, gets a new partner, Aki, who promptly leads him into a trap and reveals herself to be a mole for Heart Enterprises, a mega-corporation with their fingers in everything that is making the world a more terrible place. She also reveals herself to be a robot, one of many in fact. Aki alternately tortures and tries to recruit Christopher until he agrees to work for Heart. He intends to take down the company from the inside, but he has no idea what he's really signing up for until it's too late.
Meanwhile, Julian Slink, creator of the Blood Drive and self-proclaimed Master of Mayhem and God of the Stage, is having problems of his own, because he wants to turn the Blood Drive into an artistic masterpiece of reality television, but his ruthless corporate overlords at (you guessed it) Heart Enterprises have ideas of their own for what they want out of the race, television show, and technology that can create man-eating cars, and the struggle for creative control behind the camera has the potential to be just as bloody as the race itself. It's going to be a long and ridiculously tropey road to the finish line, with a lot of strange stops along the way.
Blood Drive is a thirteen episode series which recently finished airing on the Syfy Channel. Sadly, it appears to have been cancelled after only one season, but that season stands on its own very well.
Where to find: It's available for digital purchase on Amazon. It can also be streamed on Syfy.com if you have a cable provider's details you can use to sign in with. If you have a cable package with on-demand service, you might be able to find it there too.
no subject
What's awesome about it: Do you like sex and violence? Do you like alternate history dystopias? Do you like the idea of fast cars which eat people instead of guzzling gasoline? Do you like satires of corporate greed and the entertainment industry? Do you like explosions, including but not limited to exploding cars, exploding heads, exploding buildings, and random fireball belching machines used as set decoration? Do you like canon gay and bisexual characters? Do you like characters routinely getting covered in blood and all sorts of other fluids, some of which glow in the dark? Do you like cannibals, mutants, and robots? Do you like male nudity happening more often than female nudity? Do you like and male characters getting manhandled and/or tied up, handcuffed, or otherwise restrained in pretty much every single episode? Do you like low budget grindhouse aesthetics, riffing on different sets of tropes every episode? Do you like themes of family, loyalty, betrayal? Do you like weird technology, unethical medical experimentation, non-consensual body modification, body horror, and the easily crossed line between human and inhuman? Blood Drive has all of those things and more.
Grace D'Argento signs up to participate in the Blood Drive, a death race across the country in cars that run on human blood, but at the last minute she gets saddled with an unwilling partner, Arthur Bailey, one of the last good cops in Los Angeles, who just happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time while investigating weird stuff that has been being done to homeless people, and now they can't get too far away from each other or they'll both be killed by the tiny bombs implanted at the base of their skulls as part of the race rules. Grace needs the prize money to take care of her little sister, but Arthur wants to end this spectacle of death and everyone responsible for it. Before either of them have a hope of achieving their goals, they're going to need to stay alive against the rest of the race's collection of homicidal weirdos and assorted dangers of the post-apocalyptic landscape.
While those two are working out their differences, Arthur's cop partner, Christopher Carpenter, gets a new partner, Aki, who promptly leads him into a trap and reveals herself to be a mole for Heart Enterprises, a mega-corporation with their fingers in everything that is making the world a more terrible place. She also reveals herself to be a robot, one of many in fact. Aki alternately tortures and tries to recruit Christopher until he agrees to work for Heart. He intends to take down the company from the inside, but he has no idea what he's really signing up for until it's too late.
Meanwhile, Julian Slink, creator of the Blood Drive and self-proclaimed Master of Mayhem and God of the Stage, is having problems of his own, because he wants to turn the Blood Drive into an artistic masterpiece of reality television, but his ruthless corporate overlords at (you guessed it) Heart Enterprises have ideas of their own for what they want out of the race, television show, and technology that can create man-eating cars, and the struggle for creative control behind the camera has the potential to be just as bloody as the race itself. It's going to be a long and ridiculously tropey road to the finish line, with a lot of strange stops along the way.
Blood Drive is a thirteen episode series which recently finished airing on the Syfy Channel. Sadly, it appears to have been cancelled after only one season, but that season stands on its own very well.
Where to find: It's available for digital purchase on Amazon. It can also be streamed on Syfy.com if you have a cable provider's details you can use to sign in with. If you have a cable package with on-demand service, you might be able to find it there too.