Sunday, January 2, 2011

Scolding Reviews: Blood The Last Vampire



"There's a city behind this drywall! Look!"
My relationship with Anime has always been a bit...distant. I mean, I've liked it ever since I learned you can show boobs on it, but honestly, I've never followed any series with any excitement. Well, there was one but that's another thing.

So coming in to Blood: The last Vampire, all my knowledge came from the TV series Blood +. It was a nice distraction while I waited for the boobs to show up, but I  wasn;t exactly a savant on that.

This movie, though, it is not as turgid and sad and mopey as the anime. However, it also doesn't have a guy whose main weapon is a Cello case. Also, I don't remember the Anime being batshit insane.
He's got a piece! Watchout!

What it does have, is the kind of fun you and your friends could make if you recieved a million dollars to make an adaptation, but only had 2 months to make it, from script to post:

I guess what I'm saying is this film is so bad, it's hilarious.



The film starts with subtitles narrating the a story about  a brave Samurai, the Demon's he cut down, when the baddest Demon cut him down. It doesn't figure a lot into what I could understand of the plot.

Then we meet Saya, an introverted young Woman in 1960s Japan who also kills bloodsuckers. Yes the demon-vampires are from this point on referred to as bloodsuckers. I guess Vampire: the Last Bloodsucker  didn't test out well as a title.
Saya it ain't so!


So Saya straight up murders a man on the subway, who could be a bloodsucker. This causes tension between the two spooks Saya works with. One of them thinks Saya is out of control, and that the man she killed could be a regular human. We'll call this one Stache. The other one believes Saya. We'll call him Boss. He's the higher ranked one, so Stache has to just doo what he says.
"Blabla, Saya's our only hope!"
"Fuck Saya!"




So they cook up a plan to send Saya undercover to a military base as a schoolgirl, because ,as the old saying goes and I quote "when bloodsuckers are careless, Onigen is near". With that predictable a pattern, it's a wonder they haven't caught the bitch yet.

Yes, Onigen is the higher ranked Demon. She's a looker too. But she speaks in the demonic helltongue that is Engrish!

So then we meet our other heroine, a free spirited(reckless), noncomformist(a total whiner) girl named Alice. Alice is the daughter of a general, so she has to go to school inside a military base. But she is a free soul, and she's had it with her dad, and his war and dammit she's walking right off the car and showing him by...heading straight into school. HER WAY.


In school, most people are orderly except this two girls who are at first making fun of Alice because she knew stuff and then of Saya because she's Japanese. In a military base that is in Japan.

This girl look crazy high. Everyone else is calm, except for them. So much for that vaunted military discipline.
The calm before the storm...

Later, Alice's martial arts teacher, played by that one guy in Resident Evil who got turned into luncheon cubes, wants her to stay later for practice because she's letting down the team. But the practice apparently involves the two class bitches striking at her with real Katana while she only has a training wooden sword.

This school is weird.
This is not how B-Ball works.

But then Saya tags her out, and starts fighting the girls. It turns out they where bloodsuckers. I guess the saying IS true. So Saya does quick work of She Bulk and She Skull while Alice watches.

Then the government spooks come to the school, and get into an argument with Alice's Dad. Alice's Dad is highly concerned about a bunch of secret agents poking around and what not and being secretive.

So the spooks cover up the whole thing, but Alice's dad sends one of his men to investigate. However, he does not believe her version of the story, where the girls where demons that spewed fudge when struck. He wants her leave it alone. But she's a free spirit, dammit! So she goes and searches for her teacher, the one who ostensibly agreed, or actively sought her dead.

This proves to be wise as it sounds, as the old professor(and everyone at the bar he's drinking at) turns out to  be a vampire bloodsucker! The Bloodscukers are part Chupacabra, part Castlevania's Dracula 2nd form, combining the worst form of CG and guys in suits. It makes Underworld look like Stan  Winston's masterwork. I'm not sure Blood +'s mosquito/rat like designs could have worked, but these aren't great.

Rwar!

So seemingly half of Akihihabara starts chasing her, until Saya jumps in again to save her ass.
Back-to-back badacting
Then a long, looong wire fu battle takes place, but only 3 things happen in it. Monsters harass Alice, Saya helps her, Saya kills more monsters. It happens 30 times, and not in creative, Popeye-like ways.

Then  there's a longwinded battle with Alice's professor in monster form. Eventually, he tries to escape Saya by latching on to a plane. Even though he could theoretically fly  real high into the sea, thus escaping...it doesn't matter. What matter is that Alice gets to drive Saya to the airport to fiinish him off. It's never adequately explained why she does this. I guess she had so much fun being with Saya...
Seriously,this is her role for the rest of the film.

Meanwhile, Alice's Father is murdered by Stache, because he had robbed evidence of what the spooks wanted.  Stach keeps telling him how Saya's out of control, even though he totally shot him. He don't care, dude. He's DYING.

Eventually this leads to Stache cornering Alice and Saya at gun point. Then Boss corners Stache at gunpoint. They disagree about what should be done about Saya and about Alice. Until the best thing ever happens.

Boss puts down his gun, and Stache sells him he's getting soft. Boss tells him that at least he isn't getting stupid.  Then Stache puts a bullet on his back seconds after he makes his way to Saya and Alice and then he goes:



"Who's stupid NOW?"




Honestly, I fell in love with Stache right there. I don't know his motivation. I felt he might be a bloodsucker, but mostly he's the most childish secret agent ever. Until Saya kills him. I mean, what else could have happened here?



 So Saya, and Alice wander about a bit until, talk about their families, and then Saya has an expository flashback about  an old man fighting  ninjas with  super kung fu. The scene has no subtitles, and narration only begins very late into it at which point they BACKTRACK.  Bottom line, he was like her father, they cut his shit, and then she got revenge using a a master technique we just learned about and is never showing up again.
"Overly elaborate non-lethal eye stab!"


Except the person she's wanting revenge against now was mostly a mastermind it seems. Oh, and the Ninjas don't seem to be Oni. Like at all.

When they come back from the flashback, Alice is stoned as hell. She's slurring, and basically say: "you don't ever stop believing in yourself".

More hilarious engrish from Onigen follows as she instructs  her henchmen to kill Saya. He objects, I think and she's all " Dun be redicuros! Har powar is nut war it use to be". Do the makers of this movie hate subtitles that much? I NEED THEM FOR THIS SCENES.

In short, they get into an elaborate super fight atop a falling jeep near a cliff, where the flying monster once again fails to use his one advantage over Saya. They kill him, so maybe he wasn't being too redicuros when he said he didn't want to fight her. Then they fall off a cliff, to their deaths.

No, they live. Aparently just off the cliff they fell down escaping a flying monster was Onigen's village. Or maybe it's a dream sequence, or it's in another plane of existance. Well, Alice say's it's not real, but the jeep is there  No one mentions it. My guess is, someone declared the movie HAD to end real soon, and there was no budget for reshoots. . Either way, Onigen is there and Saya fights her. Onigen is charmed like it's a date. She says things like "Sirry Gerrl" and "I gabe you immotarrity". Saya can't handle this much power. But Alice decides her only skill in this shouldn't be driving and she stabs the hell out of onigen with a gardening tool of some sort. Onigen explodes into rage. No, for real.

You HOE!

Not content with that, she throws the less out of Alice into a puddle. I think this movie hasn't quite got the grip on  what is lethal and what is not. Saya discover's Onigen is her mother, but I don't think that's a surprise at all. I man, she's half Bloodsucker, so any of them could be. Might as well be the most powerfull one, who also killed her father. At any rate, Saya kills Onigen, and heads over to the fallen Alice. Then it turns out Alice was telling the story, because she was being investigated for her father's murder, and she's going to the nut house. Funny, earlier the official story for her father was a heart attack. Still, Alice has a positive outlook on all this, and says she knows Saya is out there, somewhere, stabbing monsters and being immortal.

This movie's crazy. A bunch of disparate action elements and cliche's, low budget effects, the worst parts of Asian, and Western mainstream cinema and mostly unmotivated characters saying  movie sounding things. It's so bad, though, it's good, and if you like making fun of movies, this one will do. Sirry Gerrl.

2 comments:

  1. The original Blood the last vampire animated movie was really great. The Blood+ series was a huge disappointment because it was basically 51 episodes of Saya getting her ass kicked over and over again.


    You know you should really put commas between each word when you are creating tags otherwise they all get pumped together.

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  2. Thank you for your advise, and for your insight. I was wondering what was the problem with my tags!

    ReplyDelete