Swords, vampires, tedium

“Blood” is not the name of the last vampire. I guess the title suggests that blood is central to being the last vampire, since you’d have quite a harvest all to yourself. Or, that there is much blood in the film, even if it is the worst CGI blood I’ve ever seen.

The badly rendered blood is not the film’s worst effect, though. That would be the transformed vampire-as-plush-toy-demon, an ugly computer image that jerkily leaps through the air and sprouts wings like a misguided Pokemon from the mid 1990s.

Blood: The Last Vampire is a live-action adaptation of the popular same-named anime from just over a decade ago. This version suffers from being too faithful to its source material. Instead of developing its characters into something resembling humans, they remain as utterly one-dimensional as they were in animated form in 2000. It’s as if the director, Chris Nahon, knows how anime works but cannot adapt its strengths into a (barely) feature length live-action narrative. Why, pray tell, is the story (again) set in the 1970s? And why tell exactly the same story, without anything fresh or provocative to sweeten the deal?

Saya (Gianna) is a vampire with a conscience who hunts down other vampires. She collaborates with the Council, most prominently represented by Harrison (Liam Cunningham, who also has bills to pay). Council agents wear hats and coats and look secretive. They are a covert organisation aimed at eradicating vampires from the planet, and when the movie begins, the main vampire – the female Onigen (Koyuki) – is in 1970s Tokyo. Some of her minions have infiltrated a local American army base looking for food and fun, and this is where Saya enters as the new girl in class who quickly reveals herself to be the new girl with a sword and martial arts moves. She befriends a near victim, Alice (Alison Miller) whose father runs the army base, but anything that requires a pause in the bloodshed is quickly rushed through so as to get to the next beheading/impaling/plush toy bat transformation.

Blood: The Last Vampire is a bad martial arts movie, a terrible adaptation and an awful horror.

Travel with me to the early ‘90s, kung fu style

Somehow, the pairing of Jackie Chan and Jet Li has never appealed to me as much as the paring of, say, De Niro and Pacino (I’m referring to “Heat” here, not the forthcoming “Righteous Kill”). Yet, apparently fanboys wanted the two martial arts icons to join forces and here they are, together for the first time, in Rob Minkoff’s placid, harmless “Forbidden Kingdom”. Here is a film with such mediocre effects and far-from-dazzling wirework that it’s hard to believe that it was released in 2008, and not 1993. “Forbidden Kingdom” is a (unintended?) throwback to the cheesy, insipid slap & kick movies of the early 1990s. Watching this, I was reminded not only of “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” but also of the vastly superior ‘80s actioner “Big Trouble in Little China”. And knowing what Chan and Li are capable of, it’s hard to think of “Forbidden Kingdom” as anything but sub-par.

The story has something to do with a hero who doesn’t know he’s a hero; a drunken master; a silent monk; a white haired woman warrior with a whip; ancient immortals who take lunch breaks every 500 years; a magic staff and a Monkey King (also, embarrassingly, Jet Li). There is even a training montage where a character gets to know his inner warrior by exhibiting outer skill. And yes, someone actually says: “It has been foretold…” At first I thought that the film was conscious of its position in pop culture, but at the end I was not convinced. I suspect that all involved set out to make a film worthy of inclusion in the pantheon of martial arts movies, and failed.