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Blood Drive’s dystopian cannibal future is just the present, with more visible gore

Blood Drive’s dystopian cannibal future is just the present, with more visible gore

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It’s campy, over-the-top entertainment about a world where cars run on human blood, but it’s perfect for our current political moment

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Image: Syfy

In the second episode of Syfy's new exploitation grindhouse gorefest Blood Drive, a fat Elvis impersonator (named Fat Elvis) is murdered and turned into meat to feed the customers at the Pixie Swallow diner. Poor meaty Elvis is hung upside down from the kitchen roof like a pig. The camera sits in the next room, where a grunt mops the floor to get rid of earlier bloodstains. Meanwhile, a waitress bustles in and out of the kitchen door, which swings back and forth, giving the audience teasing glimpses of Elvis' corpse being hideously dismembered. By hiding so much of the carnage, producers / creators John Hlavin and David Straiton make their viewers strain to make out as much as possible of the unedifying spectacle. You can almost hear them snickering in the background, and deservedly so. They’ve put a lot of thought and invention into catering to the lowest common denominator.

Blood Drive is set in a near-future dystopia, but Elvis’ corpse hints at how much it’s steeped in decaying nostalgia. The apocalypse Blood Drive sees heading toward us is really being seen in the rear-view mirror — a pastiche of the sex-and-bodily-fluid-soaked post-apocalypses of 1970s and ‘80s cinema. Yet for all its fond stylistic and thematic nods to films like, say, 1987’s Blood Diner, the series still feels remarkably up-to-the-minute. Back in the 1980s, Reagan was cutting the welfare state, rolling back environmental protections, and ramping up mass incarceration: as hardcore band D.R.I. succinctly put it, "Reaganomics killing me / Reaganomics killing me / Reaganomics killing me / Reaganomics killing you." The bleak retro vision of future ruin and appetite is, as it turns out, our bleak Trump-era present. Blood Drive has a bite because America is still devouring the same foul meat with the same vacant grins.

In the spirit of great exploitation cinema past, Blood Drive's plot is more an excuse for gore than an actual narrative. An as-yet-unexplained natural disaster literally cracked America apart, resulting in environmental degradation and general devolution. Amid the semi-ruins, desperate snaggle-toothed contestants compete in a quasi-legal, to-the-death road race for a $10 million prize. Since gasoline has become almost unobtainably scarce, however, racers have had to turn elsewhere for fuel. Instead of petroleum, their cars run on… human blood! (You probably saw that coming.)

The series premiere gleefully introduces the high-concept world; Grace D'Argento (Christina Ochoa) is approached by Mad Max-esque scruffy road baddies, who make the expected offensive overtures. In efficient rape-revenge, bad-ass castrator style, Grace dispatches one ruffian — and then opens the hood of her car to reveal grinding metal gears which gnash and churn like hungry teeth. She feeds the offender into the machinery, which sprays blood and viscera over her body. After topping off with another bad guy's severed arm, she roars down the road in an apotheosis of sex, death, and freedom.

Image: Syfy

It's a preposterous sequence, and clearly a derivative one. The vehicles that run on blood are a nod to the War Boys who use Max for blood transfusions in Mad Max: Fury Road, which, appropriately enough, Syfy re-ran ahead of the Blood Drive premiere. But the blunt juxtaposition of cars, environmental degradation, and murder isn't diminished by the fact that it's familiar. On the contrary, the series's commitment to its past sources, including Death Race 2000 and general grindhouse dreck, make its contemporary commentary on climate change feel like and eerily bumbling afterthought. It's as if we've always been getting our kicks by murdering people for fuel — which, given what we now know about how our love affair with giant cars has affected the planet, is more or less the case. The celebration of the open road — still very much alive in films like Edgar Wright’s upcoming Baby Driver — is a cannibalistic fantasy. When we get behind the wheel, we're like those feral, bosomy monsters in a Hammer horror film, licking our glistening fangs.

Grace's unwilling partner in Blood Drive’s central race is idealistic cop Arthur Bailey (visually appealing but otherwise unremarkable placeholder Alan Ritchson). Bailey, who Grace calls "Barbie," isn't especially engaging, but his police department is another queasily familiar element. He’s an idealist, but his fellow cops function as the toughest gang on the block. When the citizens they’re supposed to serve and protect dare to try to obtain water, the cops hand out a beatdown instead. The department keeps track of arrest stats through dental records; officers are expected to pull a tooth from every suspect they arrest, and deposit it in the sergeant's jar.

‘Blood Drive’ has a bite because America is still devouring the same foul meat with the same vacant grins

Paul Verhoeven’s bleak 1987 tech-fantasy Robocop is another influence on Blood Drive’s vision of a quasi-fascist police force. But again, the series blithely connects the ugly future-past to the equally ugly present. The cops in Blood Drive carry personal cameras to record interactions, but that doesn't put a check on officer excesses. Instead, they’re used to make instant determinations of guilt and punishment, legally authorizing spur-of-the-moment punishments, à la Judge Dredd. Blood Drive's future is post-racial; cops, improbably, don't seem to particularly target minority communities. But the casual violence, cynicism, and cruelty of the police department of tomorrow can't help but call to mind Black Lives Matters protests, and what they've revealed about the violence, cynicism, and cruelty of police departments today. The dystopic imaginary police state of the ‘80s is still our dystopic imaginary police state today, reflecting the state of the ongoing struggle to enforce the law effectively, yet fairly. Blood Drive suggests that nothing's changed about our concerns since 1987, and nothing is going to change. New technology will just be repurposed to make things worse.

As in Robocop, the police department in Blood Drive serves the corporate overlords — specifically, the mysterious, omnipotent conglomerate Heart, which also, surreptitiously, runs the Blood Drive race. The show hasn’t revealed much about Heart as of episode 2, though it does show one of their corporate recruitment ads, a brilliant Verhoeven-influenced gag which displays empty infographics while nattering on cheerfully about the company's cutting-edge investment in “morally questionable fuels.”

Heart's insouciantly rapacious capitalism is, appropriately, the grossly throbbing heart of the series. Blood Drive is soaked in blood because it's soaked in financial desperation. The spiky-toothed host of the Blood Drive, Julian Slink (Colin Cunningham), spends most of episode 2 in the lobby of Heart's offices, worried that he's about to be fired. He sweats, he fidgets, he uselessly begs the receptionist to pay attention to him… and then finally, he beats his potential replacement to death with his briefcase. (Heart admires his initiative.) Along the same lines, Cox, the guy who uses human beings for meat, explains desperately when called to account, "I'm just a small-business owner trying to survive in a tough economy." Grace, for her part, feeds a man to her car not because she's evil, but because she needs the $10 million prize to get her sister adequate mental health care.

Image: Syfy

Earlier in the second episode, when Cox's waitress is worried that their cannibal allies won't be able to defeat the Blood Drive racers, Cox waxes philosophical. "Then we'll serve the losers to the winners. Everybody tastes the same on the griddle," he assures her. That's a good thumbnail description of the classic Reagan-era dystopian vision of a war of all against all: feral gangs raping and pillaging in the Mad Max movies, or corporate robots feeding humans to evolutionarily perfect space creatures in Alien.

Blood Drive loves those awful Social Darwinian futures, red in tooth and claw. And it loves them all the more because they've all come true. High-concept shows like Legion or Westworld are lauded for their intricate plotting and puzzle-box plots, but Blood Drive understands that to be true to our current moment, you need to be bloody, and you need to be dumb. While Congress moves to throw millions off health care and we stumble toward our deregulated, environmentally catastrophic wasteland, Blood Drive is the show to have on in the background. Turn it on for a satisfying snicker as we all pick up our briefcases and beat each other to death.

New episodes of Blood Drive air Wednesday nights on Syfy.