4 out of 5

Created by: James Roland

I know, I know, me too: this show’s over-the-top attempt at exploitation (redundant?) certainly can’t make for a tolerable show; the premise of a drag race in which the cars run on blood – a character named Clown Dick; a femme fatale luring victims into her body-chewing engine with a short skirt and tongue-twirled lollipop; plenty of rock music and over-exposure photography plus “gritty” digitally added camera scratches – must be a SyFy Asylum-bred fever dream, amped up to Spike TV testosterone-fueled bad taste and certainly only worthy of ire from those with more than half a brain.

…Okay, the in-yer-face brashness of that mentioned body-chewing scene is humorous, and the femme fatale – Christina Ochoa – seems in possession of her faculties, chewing the scenery knowingly.  And what’s this followup sequence with cop Alan Ritchson and Thomas Dominique, in some vaguely Escape from L.A. / Mad Max setup in which gas prices have skyrocketed and police forces have been privatized?  Is Blood Drive actually attempting some world building?  And characters?  Why is Ritchson’s do-good dialogue as Arthur delivered with believable earnestness?  Why is this show building a plot?

And for the weeks that followed, I continued watching in disbelief of my own entertainment, as Blood Drive spun up a strange tale of uber-company Heart Enterprises and their meta attempts at creating a TV show promoting Blood Drive, based on the event run by master of ceremonies Julian Slink (Colin Cunningham), while also showcasing a hilariously self-aware display of grand guignol and satisfying nods to every horror genre under the sun.  I mean, the show also embraces its own disgusting m.o.: there’s tons of sex and bodily fluids; uncensored swearing and gross-out moments.  The photography has a permanent layer of sleaze; the men are be-abbed and the girls cleavaged.  But that’s just it: it seemed like equal opportunity for all tastes, juggling a subversively (mostly) smart twisty-turny plot with sex-appeal eye candy and muscley action for the reptile brains.  I kept expecting the series to drop the ball, but instead it kept swerving in an unexpected way, offering up a clever parody or winking at its own gregariousness and then throwing a wrench into its already wrench-filled storyline, just to make things more difficult for itself.

Arthur and Grace (Ochoa) get conscripted into the Blood Drive via – of course – neck-implanted bombs that will detonate should they go off course, come in last, or, in the case of our duo, get separated from their racing partner.  The prize is fame and money, and racers are prevented from offing each other to ‘sup their blood hungry engines, but anyone along the way is fair play.  This is a no-no for Arthur, who wants nothing more than to shut the whole operation down, but Grace needs the dosh to save her sister something-something, one of many seemingly shallow character aspects that BD slowly turns into a mythology.  Tellingly, for a show that’s about a lot more than it initially seems, the whole race premise takes a back seat to a ton of other shenanigans along the way… and, yeah, it proves to be a bit too much toward season’s end, with some forced character resolutions and reveals that are both jaw-dropping and under-whelming at the same time, but the show legitimately tries the whole way through, and puts a fuck-ton more effort into it than most series would, not factoring in all the hilariously gross splatter layered atop this thing.

The B-plot of Arthur’s partner Christopher doesn’t fare as well, but it offers up its own oddball aspect of the mythology.  Otherwise, Ritchson, Ochoa, and Cunningham (especially Cunningham) are an insane thrill to watch, each embodying the 2-dimensional traits of their characters while also fleshing them out into believable people (within the nonsense context of Blood Drive…).  It’s a shame this bundle of madness was severed after a season, but I get it: it takes a bit of dedication to get past the grime.  However, it would’ve been a hoot to see where this creative team would’ve taken the show, given the time.