Blood: The Last Vampire (2009)
I am surprised that Blood: The Last Vampire was not given a mainstream release here in the United States. With our Otaku lusting of everything Japanese, female and sharp I think it would have been a hit despite the awful CGI and acting of Allison Miller. I mean, you have a decent looking Japanese female in a sailor schoolgirl outfit, swinging a katana and killing vampires in a historical setting. If that doesn’t get your Asian fetish going, I’m not sure you could call yourself an Otaku. Of course I am being facetious but I am also a bit serious. If this does well I imagine a remake with some mainstream B-lister playing Saya (non-Asian of course) in an American version to come in a few years.
With credit to the creators of this live action edition of Blood: The Last Vampire, they really didn’t have much to work with to begin with and before I pick apart the movie I feel obligated to preface with this. As an owner of the original Anime and a fan of the Blood series in itself, I was looking forward to a nice tie-in with the saga of Saya the Femme Vampire Slayer. What I got in this movie was a nice collection of katana action, low-budget CGI and piss poor acting. This isn’t to say that BTLV is a bad movie, just one that I would only reccommend to fans of the series itself.
For the average viewer, BLTV is a story about Saya, a half-vampire girl who is cursed to never age whilst killing off the vampires who secretly live amongst us. Set in the 1950′s (or so it seems), the tale rings similar to that of Vampire Hunter D, Ogre Slayer, and Blade. It pretty much goes to show that most halflings hate their non-human side to the point of violence and Saya is no different. In the anime of the same name, we are given little to no explanation of Saya outside of her deadly skill with a blade and her hate for vampires. The anime depicted Saya in a Sailor Scout outfit attending American classes by day and killing vampires at night. It goes on like this until the end where Saya downs a flying vamp only to share her blood with it in a sympathetic way… our only indication that she shares kinship with it. Still this was enough for anime fans (myself included), we loved the mystery of Saya, loved her aggression and treasured it as a gem within our relative collections.
What the movie tries to do with the aforementioned anime, is take that exact same story and expand it a bit to give us some history on Saya. We are shown her human father, vampire mother and even a childhood love interest. Our Saya is given emotion (she even cries a bit) and worst than that, she is given a sidekick in Alice McKee (Allison Miller). Though I found Saya (Gianna Jun) to be a very good casting choice, which coupled with the choppy but interesting action scenes, made her seem similar to the anime Saya, I found Alice to be absolutely unbearable. The character Alice is the American element to the movie, being a rebellious teenager stealing daddy’s car, talking back and doing all the annoying things that teenagers in movies tend to do. After realizing about 45 minutes in that she wouldn’t be killed, it took all of my willpower to accept her as Saya’s friend (yes I found this odd too) and that she was in for the long run.
The jerky camera angles that seemed amateurish at best, made some of the early fighting scenes very confusing. However it does get better as the movie progresses and some of the battles are quite interesting once the camera settles down. The acting was not bad as a whole aside from Alice whose crying and screaming were so fake I found myself shaking my head every time she had a burst of “emotion”. The direction was good enough and we get a back story as it progresses unlike the original anime. Still when it ended I was a bit confused about Saya even with the history given and it made me wonder why they didn’t stick with more of the elements from the series.
If it were only up to actress Gianna Jun and her portrayal of the killer Vampire Saya, I would rank this with high points but the weight of the bad acting by the supporting cast, the already silly story, awful CGI and the unnecessary military portion of the movie drug it down way below that. Although I would watch it again, this would probably be due to my being a fan of the character moreso than a movie watcher.
STAR RATING: (6/10) ★★★★★★★★★★
Filed under Action, Horror, Thriller · Tagged with allison miller, Anime, gianna jun, saya, vampires
