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movie news
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Fri. 07 10. 2009 9:00 AM EDT
'Blood: The Last Vampire': Monster Mash, By Kurt Loder
Gianna Jun and Allison Miller on the Tokyo demon beat.
Gianna Jun in "Blood: The Last Vampire"
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Sony Pictures
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"Blood: The Last Vampire" is a Hong Kong-style action movie of the leap-kicking, sky-sailing, blood-spurting variety. It was made in English by a French TV-commercials director, with Korean, American and Irish stars, and lots and lots of demons of a
rubberish sort that recall the Toho monster movies of 50 years ago. It's a picture with the unbridled high spirits of its low intentions, and it's a reasonable amount of fun.
This "Blood" is a live-action remake of the well-regarded 2000 Japanese anime film of the same title, with much new backstory shoveled in to clarify the sparse plot of the original (which was distinguished chiefly by its innovative digital environments). Once again we meet 16-year-old demon hunter Saya (Gianna Jun) on the Tokyo subway. Black-clad and broody, she's stalking a nervous commuter whom she suspects of being a lizardy, red-eyed, flesh-rending demon in human form. After bloodily dispatching this character with the magical samurai sword she totes around in a case over her shoulder, she is greeted at the next subway stop by Michael (Liam Cunningham), her controller from The Council, a shadowy anti-demon organization that employs Saya to keep whacking these monsters until she works her way up to their ruler, an ancient and super-evil entity called Onigin.
Saya's next assignment is to infiltrate the high school at a local U.S. Air Force base. Here she encounters two mean girls of a snottiness that will be familiar to anyone who's ever seen a generic teen high-school movie. And it turns out — haven't we always suspected this? — that they're demons, too! But not for long.
After dealing with the mean girls in the only way that mean girls should really be dealt with, Saya acquires an admirer — a classmate named Alice (Allison Miller), the daughter of the airbase commander. Soon these two are embarked on a demon-elimination campaign that takes them from a rowdy GI bar (actually a demon watering hole) to a battle on a truck hanging halfway down a cliff to the requisite spectacular showdown with Onigin — who turns out to be unexpectedly hot. (She — it — is played by Japanese actress-model Koyuki, from "The Last Samurai.") Along the way, in occasional flashbacks, we learn that Saya is a demon herself, but with a human soul. (Whether she or any of the other demons on display are actually vampires is unclear; but it's jugs of blood provided by The Council that keep Saya going.) We also learn that Alice has been equipped — perhaps purposely — with dialogue of an awfulness that will be familiar to viewers of very bad movies of all sorts. (After watching Saya carve up a horde of demons in a blood-puddled, limb-strewn alley, Alice says, "You're not really a student, are you?")
The demon smackdowns here are nothing especially new — fight choreographer Corey Yuen has done it all before in various Jet Li and Jackie Chan movies — but they're highly energetic and rousingly bloody (and sometimes a little too long). The soundtrack score by Clint Mansell isn't one of his best, but it hammers the action along quite serviceably. And while director Chris Nahon is unfortunately an adherent of the edit-it-to-death school of action filmmaking, he has bathed the whole picture in lighting that's so elaborately lurid that it becomes a comical element in its own right. It's too bad that the final scene — a forthright attempt to set up a sequel — ends with Alice's last and very worst line. Whoever wrote it should be Saya's next assignment.
Don't miss Kurt Loder's reviews of "Brüno" and "Humpday," also new in theaters this week.
This report is from MTV News.
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