Blood: The Last Vampire (2009) [zero]
It’s been a while since I’ve engaged in such an egregious waste of bandwidth that it seems only fair and proper to tell you about it. The movie is a shitfest called “Blood: The Last Vampire” and it’s about a hundreds of years old immortal Japanese schoolgirl named Saya (Gianna, but not the one with naked pictures on the internet---she’s too top heavy for even some obviously CGI’ed stunts) who hunts demons for some mysterious government agency that goes in and cleans up after her when she dispatches ghouls. They also leave containers of blood in the fridge for her. The latest stop on her journey involves a high school on a military base where she kills some snooty blonde bitch and her fat friend while some general’s daughter witnesses it and becomes embroiled in the demon huntresses quest when she goes to confront her fencing/martial arts teacher for leaving her to the wolves. Her teacher and everyone in the bar turns into demons and then for the second time our little Japanese friend saves her ass before we discover she’s looking for a demon named Onegin who killed her guardian. Also, (spoiler) it turns out the demon is her mother, but this aspect is never milked for any grand tragedy.
If you can imagine a movie like this being awesome then I’d really like to see your version because what I saw wasn’t awesome in the least. It is perhaps the most pedestrian route you could take with a premise like this. There were moments that reminded me of “Versus” and “Underworld: Evolution” and while those films certainly vary in quality from pretty damn good to braindead kind of fun, it only succeeded in making me wish that I were watching either of those films instead. It also, made me sad that so few movies get to live up to their title. When I see a movie called “Blood: The Last Vampire” I want a film that feels definitive, like the last word in vampire movies with killer showdowns and martial arts fights but what you get from director Chris Nahon is a film that lacks any real energy, has a few cheap retreads like the confrontation with the winged creature on the mountainside road (the aforementioned “Underworld: Evolution” rip-off) and the samurai showdown in the forest (“Versus”) that somehow incorporates a childhood flashback that makes the scene hilarious. I liked the high energy of Chris Nahon’s “Kiss of the Dragon” with Jet Li, but I think a crucial missing ingredient to multi-national crossover success is the Luc Besson/ Robert Mark Kamen factor. Usually the two of them are only credited as screenwriters but perhaps they have more creative control than we imagine, even a misfire on par with “Transporter 2” has some energy and boasts production values that make it easier to label as something other than some sort of SyFy Channel product that accidentally got a somewhat small theatrical showing. “Blood: The Last Vampire” certainly boasts some incredible TV movie quality demon effects.
Also, the acting is not very good. Gianna’s english is terrible and there are plenty of other so-so performances and lots of older dudes that look like they’ve played politicians in crappy DTV stuff, but no one tries to do one single interesting thing with their characters. Maybe Chris Nahon doesn’t know English and the cast couldn’t communicate with him so nobody could spitball ideas to make things better so people kind of did their own thing and hoped all the elements gelled together in the final product, I don’t know for sure but if that is the approach they took then it cretainly didn’t work. And if they thought they had something good and just rolled with it then that too was a fail. This is not a good movie, I would not recommend that you see it on cable nor do I even feel the urge to recommend it for the completist who must see every Asian schoolgirl uniform available. I think perhaps it could cure your insomnia, but that’s about it.
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