Blood: The Last Vampire Review

Synopsis:
On the surface, Saya is a stunning 16-year old girl, but that youthful exterior hides the tormented soul of a 400 year-old "halfling." Born to a human father and a vampire mother, she has for centuries been a loner, obsessed with using her samurai skills to rid the world of vampires, all the while knowing that she herself can survive only on blood like those she hunts. When she is sent to an American military base in Tokyo by the clandestine organization for whom she works, Saya immediately senses that this may be her opportunity to finally destroy Onigen, the evil patriarch of all vampires. Using her superhuman strength and her sword, she begins to rid the base of its evil infestation in a series of spectacular and elaborate showdowns. However, it is not until she forms her first human friendship in centuries with the young daughter of the base's general that Saya learns her greatest power over Onigen may well be her ability to make a human connection...

Review:
What an interesting film. I don't really know what I was expecting. I think I was expecting it to be a bit more groundbreaking or epic for some reason. Maybe because it's from a producer of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Hero. Don't get me wrong. There wasn't really anything wrong with the film. It just didn't leave me as "wowed" as I was expecting it to.

The story was simple enough, yet not to an elementary level. It was just easy to follow. It was just enough to leave a lot of room for action and not complicate things too much. It's a good story with a good level of emotion in the character of Saya to empathize with her. Scriptwriter Chris Chow (The Eye 3, Jet Li's Fearless) adapted this for the screen from original characters created by Kenji Kamiyama (Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex) and Katsuya Terada, who wrote the original 2000 anime version of Blood: The Last Vampire.

The cast was relatively unknown to me except Colin Salmon, who has been seen in three of the Pierce Brosnan James Bond films, AVP, Resident Evil, Punisher: War Zone, and many others. A lot of the English actors were pretty bad. They just didn't seem to grasp their characters and overacted. The girl that played Saya and most of the Asian actors were spot-on.

The cinematography in the film was great. It had very sweeping and breathtaking shots mixed with high energy wire-fighting moments of intensity that somehow came across as beautiful. The mix was well handled and didn't come across as forced or artificial. You could tell right away that it was shot by a seasoned veteran behind the camera.

Lastly, the special effects were pretty well-done. You had scenes of people getting cut in half down the middle, which were pretty brutal. There was a scene where the vampire leader is floating in the air with her long pieces of gown floating around her that were just gorgeous. The creature effects were very cool. At one point, one of the bat-creatures is running along the sides of buildings and jumping from rooftop to rooftop and it left me going "wow, that's pretty cool."

In closing, I would say that if you're a fan of wire-fighting fantasy films and horror movies, you'll probably enjoy this. I would compare it to Buffy, the Vampire Slayer meets Iron Monkey with a weird kind of 1960's Quentin Tarantino-vibe going on. I think it would have been better if it was completely done in an Asian setting with no ties to the American film industry at all. Also, I failed to mention that the American version looks to run about an hour and 22 minutes while the Japanese version is 91 minutes long. That's almost 10 minutes unaccounted for in the U.S. version. I'd love to see what happened in that lost ten minutes and hopefully will when it hits DVD. (Review by Eric Shirey)

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