Blood: The Last Vampire

At a time when action blockbusters routinely clock at two-and-a-half hours or more (I’m looking at you, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen), one applauds the downright speedy eighty-nine minute running time of Blood: The Last Vampire. Unfortunately, that’s about the only thing one can applaud in this trashy, moronic film.

Blood follows Saya (Gianna), a four-hundred-year old vampire hunter whose own mixed parentage—human father, vampire mother—causes her to thirst for the same human blood as her enemies. After witnessing—at age sixteen—the grisly death of mentor Kato (Yasuaki Kurata) at the hands of master vampire Onigen (Koyuki), Saya vowed to hunt down and kill the murderous demon. (In a convenient twist, Saya’s physical appearance has remained frozen in its sixteen-year-old state.) Her search leads somewhat inexplicably to a Vietnam-era American military base in Tokyo. Here, she meets Alice Mckee (Allison Miller), the daughter of old-school General Mckee (Larry Lamb). After Saya saves her from an attack by a pair of sword-wielding fellow students turned demons, Alice finds herself enmeshed in Saya’s battles against the vampires on the base and, ultimately, her showdown with Onigen.

Through a series of alternately tedious and underdeveloped flashbacks, Chris Chow’s clunky screenplay sketches out Saya’s tragic background, tossing in some musings about her conflicting human and demonic impulses that seem foisted from the Buffy reject pile. The wearisome mediocrity of the performances only underlines the script’s paucity of wit, with cast members finding neither sincere emotion nor pleasurable camp within their roles. Blood’s severity of tone proves deadly as well as disappointing, given director Chris Nahon’s intriguingly oddball decision to pepper early scenes with musical and visual allusions to the intergenerational conflicts of the early 1970s. Such a move cries out for some nutso allegorical reading of the Vietnam era: unshaven hippies mutating into werewolves, or tight-jawed army lieutenants revealed to be Frankenstein monsters, or something. Nope. It’s just more lugubrious back story or “tender” moments between Saya and Alice that barely register on the emotional Richter scale.

Indeed, the only real emotional attachment seen throughout Blood is Nahon’s deep and abiding love for, well, blood: specifically when gushing from a freshly-severed artery or punctured limb. Nahon slathers his directorial attention upon the film’s stylized fight sequences, basking them in lurid neon lighting and smothering them with Clint Mansell’s assaultive score (miles away from his penetrating Requiem for a Dream music). These sequences also edited within an inch of their life, often reducing them to a blur of swinging limbs and emphatic screams. Ultimately, however, it’s the splatter that matters. Nahon highlights Saya’s sword hacking through a vampire’s head or slicing an entire body in two with fetishistic detail, often slowing down the image to further emphasize the gore. I can’t deny the pulpy pull of some of these moments, as when Saya disposes of a particularly vile enemy via a sword through the eyeball. But even these fail to transcend Blood’s junky aesthetic, thanks to some distractingly cheapo special effects. Spewing blood never looked so curiously gelatinous.

                                                          Matt Connolly