The first time I saw the full trailer of Blood: The Last Vampire (Live Action) I knew already that it would be crappy. You know why? It was too flashy for a trailer. Most shitty movies usually put all their best clips in a more than a minute cinematic trailer (like cheap slasher movies and most of our mainstream local movies) and you will realize that the whole movie is already in the trailer. But I think I judged the film too much on the trailer.
Blood: The Last Vampire is an adaptation of an animé of the same title. The film features Saya, a half human-half vampire who hunts other full-blood vampires. She’s like Blade, a daywalker, not a vegetarian, doesn’t glitter like Edward Cullen and she’s Japanese (played by Gianna Jun, a Korean). Saya is a tough kickass vampire with her samurai which Edward Cullen can’t do because she only kill girls with his looks and bad hairdo.
The movie is a one big mess. How will you make a 40-minute animé into a full-length 2-hour live-action film? It’s this way. Let’s stick how it began and ended in the animation and tweak it a little bit. Now, you already made a 50-minute film. No, it won’t make the cut. Let’s change the characters a bit, the setting, and add what-happened-in-between-to-make-the-movie-more-understandable parts. Yay, you now have a 1-hour movie… which is good for TV release only. Let’s add the tale of her origins; who taught her to fight, did she fell in love, whatever. Hurrah, you made an 80-minute film! You’re close. Add slow-motions to the fight scenes and add all the unnecessary visual effects to make it longer. Then, you watch it and you’re assistant said, “Sir, I think we only made a mess”. But you as the filmmaker spoke in firm tone, “Just serve it to them, we don’t have budget left.”
I don’t say the movie is totally bad. It’s just messy. CGI-bloodspills during the fight scenes are really unnecessary. It’s like 300, you can see the blood spilling everywhere but you won’t see the characters get stained. Yes, the CGI is bad, really bad. The CGI monsters are also awfully done. I know that monsters are supposed to be ugly, but not plainly ugly.
So far, what I like in the movie are the fight sequences. The fights are really amazing (without the ugly CGI bloodspills). Imagine Saya, our half-vampire heroine against hundreds of vampires and her foster father against dozens of ninjas coming out of nowhere. The plot is half-baked and if developed, it could have been great.
Overall, I underestimated the film too much. It’s not bad. It’s just a mess, but if they’ve reduced and put things in the right place it would be better.
Ratings:
- Visuals: 2 out of 5 stars
- Intellect: 3 out of 5 stars
- Plot: 3 out of 5 stars
