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spoilers
“I forgot the wheatgrass!”
OMG Anna Chlumsky is back 
And this time it’s not societally reprehensible to fancy the hell out of her lol. Which, it goes without saying, I do. This is one of those movies that, even before I finally saw it, seemed to get better the more I heard about it. The concept – guy accidentally invents a car engine that runs on human blood which, in a future where fuel prices have risen to a prohibitive level, is handy – pauses … I mean, come on, you have to applaud that concept, it’s frankly genius, lol, but wait there’s more. I then found out it features one of my earliest movie crushes who has been pretty much off the map almost a decade (not that I’m complaining – her “farewell”, a straight-to-video movie with Christina Ricci, Gold Diggers, actually felt genuinely like I was dreaming when I found it on tape lol, so much did I fancy them both at the time). Then the movie begins, Chlumsky puts me immediately in mind of Angela Bettis in May – then I realise, the blood thing? It’s totally Little Shop of Horrors stylee!
Chlumsky is a kooky blonde girl in thick-rimmed glasses who works in a little nondescript vegan hut selling wheatgrass to our hero, a kindergarten teacher who’s more anxious than the kids to leave at three in the afternoon to get home and use said wheatgrass in his experimental engine project. Chlumsky’s hut is in a little clearing opposite another hut which, a handpainted sign tells us, sells Meat and is owned by a sexy brunette in black. Somewhere in the vicinity is a grey building that a typing-challenged subtitler tells us is the GOVEMREN- GOVERNMENT. It’s almost a Lars Von Trier/Thomas Vinterberg type world, a la Dogville, Manderlay, Dear Wendy – everything either labelled, or might as well be because there’s only one of each thing.
“Oh. God. I needed a whole person.”
It’s also another in a series of horror movies I’ve watched this past week or so which has that wonderful (for want of a better word) moment where it suddenly stops being funny. The government man’s monologue at the end almost reaches the level of South Park in its insanity – “Killing people for fuel is not racist … us has beaten ‘em. Us. Spell it out. U.S.” Yes, the concept of the movie isn’t just a funny coincidence. And the ending – all heart-stopping 2 minutes of it – is really, really, far from funny. It really took me aback for a second and I didn’t like it, but as the credits rolled, I suddenly realised how insanely good this movie might be.
I’ve had a number of false starts on my marathon this year. I can’t think of a better way of starting a day or night (or both!) of horror movies than this, though. Hilarious, bloody, short, fresh, freaky and finally more serious than you’ll ever see coming – I don’t think there’ll be a blacker comedy outside of Sweeney Todd this year. I honestly didn’t want this to end. My only criticism is there’s nowhere near enough of Anna – and though I won’t deny the effectiveness, I think I really could’ve done without the point blank shooting of the little girls at the end.