Blade
Director: Stephen Norrington Year:
1998 Rating:
7.0
October comes to a tepid end and I finally watch
a horror film if Blade is considered horror. Yes, vampires, but Blade is
so much more. Action, adventure, romance, comedy, vampires becoming unseemly
blobs and blowing up, fuckfaces getting arms and heads severed like its harvest
time and Wesley Snipes at his ultimate coolness in shades and black leather.
Blade is at its roots a super hero film based on a Marvel comic, but not
part of the Marvel Universe. At least not yet. Not sure how all that shit
works but Blade was the first Marvel hero film to make money. Thus two sequels.
This is one of the few Marvel films that is worth a re-watch for me. From
that opening rave party bring your own food buffet it takes off like a rocket.
If you have to be eaten, I suppose Traci Lords would not be a bad choice.
Was Blade the first film to imagine a whole
society of vampires? I know the Underworld series did it later. Perhaps the
Anne Rice films? I have always thought of vampires as basically solitary
creatures, home bodies except the occasional night when they go out for a
bite to eat. None of the classical vampire films had them mingling with other
vampires. Trading jokes and body parts. But it sort of makes sense that there
would eventually be a lot of vampires if each one they suck becomes one and
never dies. Unless Blade kills them. Population control. If you keep turning
humans into vampires, some day there will be no food supply left.
This is the world of Blade. There are vampires
everywhere. They still can't come out in the day time, but at night they
could be the girl giving you the eye from across the room or the guy taking
your order in a falafel restaurant. Some humans have been recruited to help
them. We always have a price. They have governance just like humans. A counsel
of "pure bloods", vampires that were born that way - headed by Udo Kier.
They like to be discreet. Not showy or too hungry. But a younger generation
of vampires who were bitten want more. Led by Stephen Dorff, they want to
rule the world. Make us cattle. Have children like veal on special occasions.
Only Blade, a Daywalker can stop them. Born
from a mother dying from a vampire bite, he has the powers of vampires but
not their weaknesses. And he wants to kill them all with special weapons
designed by Whistler (Kris Kristofferson). A whole lot of dead sizzling vampires
- though I hope Traci survived - and a few fine action set pieces. I could
have done without all the supernatural gibberish at the end, but a terrific
fun film with Snipes going kung fu crazy. N'Bushe Wright also stars as the
bitten woman that Blade saves and then save Blade later.
Blade II
Director:Guillermo del Toro Year:
2002 Rating:
7.5
"Forget what you
think you know. Vampires exist." And Blade could have added, and things worse
than vampires.
This film had some nice surprises waiting
for me. First, it is really good, better I thought than the first one which
I quite liked. Then I was very happy to see Whistler (Kris Kristofferson)
return. If you have seen the first one, you will understand. And though he
gets shortchanged in the action, there was Donnie Yen yielding a sword -
and helping out with the action choreography. Finally, as the end credits
rolled was my last, "oh, so that's why this was so good." Directed by Guillermo
del Toro. This was a brave choice by the producers. At the time he had directed
two foreign horror films and another about mutant cockroaches. But he directs
this big action film with a sure hand and an understanding of what the audience
wants and doesn't want. Keep the film moving and don't let it get bogged
down in dialogue and characterization. They are vampires and we already know
Blade.
Sequels can be tricky. You have to find
a middle point between something new and some of the same. Sure, we love
watching Blade (Wesley Snipes) obliterate vampires into ashes, but we got
lots of that in the first film. So del Toro gives us a taste of it at the
beginning as Blade rescues Whistler and then moves on to the new. His HQ
is infiltrated by two ninja vampires who after some swordplay, tell Blade
they have come with an offer of a truce. Their leader (Thomas Kretschmann)
tells him that a mutant strain of vampire has emerged. One that kills both
humans and vampires and is turning them into Reapers. At an incredible speed.
Will Blade lead a group of trained vampires to hunt them down. Blade accepts.
Among this vampire group are the female
ninja (Leanor Varela), Donnie Yen, Ron Perlman and a few others. This is
the set-up. Much of the rest of the film is action. A great set-piece in
a vampire rave party - vampires just wanna have fun and then later in an
underground labyrinth. Suspenseful and action packed. These Reapers apparently
lose their hair and become ashen white to resemble Nosferatu - but they are
much more powerful than vampires and they cannot be killed in the regular
way. And when they open their mouths to suck blood, it is something out of
an alien movie. Very enjoyable and I loved having Whistler by his side.
Nothing personal,
but when a film brings in Ryan Reynolds to constantly spray out his glib
asides, the film has lost its purpose. This third film in the trilogy gets
nearly everything wrong after the first two films got so much right. I am
not sure why. The writer of the first two films is the director of this one.
But it isn't really so much David Goyer's direction as it is just a terrible
humdrum predictable script. Most third films run out of gas and imagination,
but I was hoping this would be the exception. This feels very much the B
film that one would expect though in fact it had a larger budget than the
first two films. In my review of the second film, I wrote that director del
Toro knew what the audience wanted and didn't want, "Keep the film moving
and don't let it get bogged down in dialogue and characterization.". Between
Reynolds and vampire Parker Posey there is more smart-ass dialogue than a
high school boy's locker room after a win. I had no idea that vampires had
to talk you into a coma before they bite you.
Blade (Wesley Snipes) and Whistler (Kris
Kristofferson) are up to their usual shenanigans. Killing vampires. The vampires
under Posey trick Blade into killing a "familiar", humans who work for the
vampires. They get it on tape and send it to the cops. At the same time,
they have gone to the Middle-East and dug up the first vampire from his happy
sleep. With him they will conquer mankind. Or something. Not sure what you
expect the first vampire to look like - Bela Lugosi? Christopher Lee? Someone
sinister and sexual? But Drake as they call him looks like a doorman at an
exclusive disco as played by Dominic Purcell.
Turns out Blade is not the only vampire
killer in town. In a scene a woman baits four hooligan skateboarding vampires
to follow her. They are soon ash. The daughter of Whistler. Jessica Biel.
Cool. Jessica Biel is always welcome. Team up with the Blade and get to killing.
But she is part of a group, including Reynolds, Natasha Lyonne and Patton
Oswald - and the needed little girl for drama. It all goes south from here.
They have developed a virus that if injected into Drake will kill all the
vampires. But then there won't be a sequel. And there wasn't. As a film.
But there was a TV show called Blade: The Series that lasted for a year and
did not star Wesley Snipes.
