Blood: The Last Vampire (Review)

Somehow they just made the maker of this poster sad...

Somehow they just made the maker of this poster sad…

Let’s check our ingredients shall we?

  • Demons?                                                                       Check.
  • Swordplay?                                                                  Check.
  • Cute chicks in schoolgirl outfits?                            Check.
  • Vampires?                                                                    Check.

Right that’s everything, let’s mix these suckers together and see what we can come up with.

________________________________________________________

We start in 16th century Japan. As those of us that did history all know it was of course beset by huge numbers of demons, the nastiest and most menacing was called Onigen.

Fast Forward to 1970, a young girl rides the subway in an almost deserted carriage, almost certainly not this one here. The young girl kills the only other passenger in the carriage.

For some reason even though this is set in Japan there are a lot of white guys hanging around, they all debrief the young girl, whose name is Saya.

We are told that it is her job to eradicate Demons, and her aim is to be successful enough that she draws out Onigen from hiding.

So that we can have more white guys in the film the next bit is set in a US army base school, I guess there is a limit for the number of Japanese actors onscreen before US audiences switch off.

Saya joins the school as the class’s only Japanese student, and she is initially ridiculed, the only classmate who stands up for her is Alice, the daughter the base’s General. Two other bitchy girls are especially aggravating in a “now come on, I know this is a film and you need to be bitchy but shut the fuck up” sort of way.

Turns out they are demons (of course!) and when they try to kill Alice Saya gets to fuck them up. Yay!

Alice is initially aghast at the apparent murders committed and goes to her old man, who more or less says get over it love. Shortly after Saya saves Alice’s arse again in a big fight scene involving lots of death and CGI generated blood.

The CIA get involved, the army suspects the CIA are withholding info or worse just having them on, and after an unfortunate incident Saya and Alice must look out for each other.

That’s about it really, they really gave up on the plot after that, re-reading the above I reckon they had about one A3 page’s worth of bullet points and  thought “that’ll fill and hour”, the Vampire in the title will get enough through the doors to make us some money. Thanks for nothing Twilight. You’ve allowed other filmmakers to make crappy phoned-in films that profit just by putting Vampire in the title.

This is more a TV show than a movie, the main characters, CIA, Army and Demons float in and out, each vanishing from proceedings for long periods. In fact the whole thing seems poorly plotted, as if they really struggled to stretch the running time out to even 90 minutes. Unfortunate, because any movie about a Demon Killing Vampire has a good chance of being worth watching if handled correctly.

In this case though I can only think of one scene that was actually genuinely cool, and that occurred at about the 1 hour mark. In a flashback that really had nothing to do with the main plot, but which was more a filler backstory to pad the time out.

The ending to the film was OK, but the journey was not interesting or enjoyable enough to derive any satisfaction out of it.

So after all that careful planning our recipe still flopped, and after we spent all that money on the ingredients!

Final Rating 6 / 10. A cool concept wasted with quickie cash-in film-making and a wafer thin plot. One cool scene cannot justify watching this.

About OGR

While I try to throw a joke or two into proceedings when I can all of the opinions presented in my reviews are genuine. I don't expect that all will agree with my thoughts at all times nor would it be any fun if you did, so don't be shy in telling me where you think I went wrong... and hopefully if you think I got it right for once. Don't be shy, half the fun is in the conversation after the movie.
This entry was posted in Film, Movie Reviews, The Grey Area. Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.