Blood: The Last Vampire – 2009, Chris Nahon
The original Blood The Last Vampire is a 50 minute animated film (is 50 minutes feature length?) made in 2000, it’s really good. Even though it’s so short, it still manages to build the suspense slowly and reach a satisfying climax (not in a sexual way you perv). Set on an American Airforce base in Japan in the 60s, it manages to squeeze in a well structured and tight plot about a female vampire who hunts other vampires and who works for some mysterious ‘council’ or ‘agency’ or whatever. The audience is told enough to understand what’s going on, so the lack of back story doesn’t matter. Less is more in every sense.
Live action adaptations of popular and beloved anime rarely stir up enthusiasm amongst fans of the genre (live action Akira anyone?), but given that the original Blood offers such a good premise, I was looking forward to this one. What a shame they turned it into a crappy Japanese B-Movie.
Not that Japanese B-movies have to be all bad. Godzilla and its’ sequels is perhaps the most charming collected work of films there is. I’ve not seen Machine Girl, or Tokyo Gore Police or RoboGeisha or either of the Tetsuo films, but it’s clear from the trailers that they are completely honest. They intend to thrill and shock the audience, and they have some kind of original idea at the core, some ‘thing’, some ‘idea’ is being explored. And even if some of them are complete drivel, at least they had an original idea. To be honest, I’m not even sure if Blood is a B-Movie as they clearly put a lot of money into it, but the CGI effects and the acting are of a B-Movie standard.
Blood The Live Action Version swiftly gets through the whole story of the original in 30 minutes. The original ending becomes the peak at the end of the first act. Then we go off and discover the origins of the main character. Descent into unnecessary back story, peppered with attempts at ‘awesome’ action sequences, although there is an old man fighting ninjas at one point which is quite good. It’s actually remarkable they got it so wrong. Entire auditoriums of Japanese directors must have wept when they saw this. A shot for shot remake stretched out to 120 minutes would have been better
That they made such a mess of it is criminal. Whoever it is who owns the rights to the source material must have been keen for an international blockbuster, so they happily went along with a western director, a cute American girl to co star with the cute Japanese girl, and to use an English script (although given that the animated version will have been widely seen with the English soundtrack, that makes sense I guess).
Watch this one, not this one.
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