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version seven. http://demongin.org |
Blood: The Last Vampire (2009)
Chris Nahon
Impression published on Friday, 2010-03-05 | Film | 2 stars
Meh.
I hesitate to use the word "remake", since it's not really accurate--one doesn't "remake" an animated feature using human actors and (mostly) real sets--but since it's the only word I've got to describe what's happening here, it'll have to do: this remake of the technically impressive (if somewhat contrived) 2000 anime of the same name has fun reenacting those original, animated scenes with meat-actors, but takes the expansion of the source narrative as its goal and ultimately fails to do anything remarkable or interesting with that narrative.
I say this because, to me, it looks like Nahon et al. took a look at the original, animated, not-quite-feature-length feature, some of the less hokey/otaku-oriented spin-off stuff (but not very much) and, in the effort of attempting to synthesize a "proper", feature-length swords-and-sorcery franchise, end up walking off the same cliff as their source material: once you get beyond the kind-of-cool premise (which, real talk, is basically just Vampire Hunter D without the D), there's just not a whole lot you can do with a katana-wielding Japanese girl that doesn't get really hokey really quickly.
Even if you award this production its due novelty points for a very sharp-looking production and for fusing it's premise with a more traditional samurai revenge plot (and staging a pretty awesome ninja battle in the process) however, it still won't score very high overall. The pacing/editing are generally pretty questionable, some of the fight choreography leaves much to be desired (and smacks of film school), the special effects are weak, and, most annoyingly, a lot of the stock characters (e.g. mysterious American agent-type dudes, vengeful Japanese demons, hard-as-rock old samurai fighter guys, American high school mean girls, etc.) who get called off the bench to act as foils for the laconic protagonist, Saya, just don't get enough lines to do anything but narrate. Which, as you can imagine, gets to be pretty tedious.
So yeah, "meh": this isn't an insufferable picture, but it's not a particularly good one either.
