Rating: D+
Dir: Dwayne Labbe
Star: Jacinta Stapleton, Tai Scrivener, Matthew Blackwood-Hume, Mark Petlock
During 31 Days of Vampires, we covered Ferat Vampire, a Hungarian movie about a car that runs on blood. There, we talked about various other entries on the “vampiric vehicle” sub-genre. To that list, we can now add this Australian entry. It begins with film-maker Bambi Steele (Stapleton) celebrating funding for her new film by buying a 1968 V8 Dodge Phoenix. Unfortunately, funding falls through, and after drowning her sorrows at the pub, Bambi discovers her car functions just as well on blood as unleaded. With the aid of a book on voodoo, she installs a heart and helped by the love-struck and appropriately named Randy (Scrivener), begins to harvest the eight souls needed to give the car life.
The first problem is, it’s disappointingly tame. Outside of some typically brisk Antipodean language, there’s little here that would pass PG-13, and the lunacy of the central concept almost demands excessive violence and nudity. The script even makes Bambi a stripper: while this is frequently referenced, she might as well be glued into her clothes. I wonder if Stapleton was a late addition to the cast, and the makers were unable to afford the asking price for the Neighbours veteran to whip her baps out? However, that wouldn’t explain the film’s reticence on the gore front, where the opportunity to let the blood flow like premium plus petrol, mostly goes wasted. Resources may have been at a premium here as well.
For it feels like every time something potentially expensive happens, such as the pedestrian accident which provides the car’s first victim, the film switches from live-action into comic-book panels. To be fair, it’s a conceit which is executed reasonably well, and the general look of these sections might be the best thing the movie has going for it. Certainly, the script is not. The decision of Bambi to try fuelling her vehicle with blood comes out of nowhere. If she’d found the voodoo book first, giving her the idea, that would have been a simple fix for this problem. Similarly, Randy leaps on board as an accomplice with ludicrous ease: while I know he has the hots for Bambi, the jump to murdering their friends for her is implausible.
There are occasional moments where proceedings do embrace the madness inherent in the premise. For instance, the car falls sick, and lacking other alternatives, it’s taken to a dentist. He diagnoses the Dodger at gunpoint and delivers the immortal line, “Your car’s got AIDS!” Like a few other threads though (Bambi’s film-making being another example), it’s not a plot point which goes anywhere. You will likely figure out how the film is going to end, quite some distance ahead of time, and its execution is likely as underwhelming as the other elements. If this movie was a car, it would be up on bricks at the side of the street in Moss Side, stripped of almost everything, and with only the framework of much value.