Blood: The Last Vampire is a classic example of style over substance. With its lame acting and horribly overused CGI blood, this nearly plotless martial arts film turns into a series of fight scenes with very little story in between. It's based on a popular Japanese anime series, and features a katana-wielding school girl.

The main character here is a girl named Saya who is many centuries old. Her father slept with a demon and so she's part human and part demon. Basically, she's a Japanese schoolgirl version of Blade, but doesn't speak much. She works for some group with the incredibly generic name of ‘The Council' and they are killing a bunch of vampire/demons in order to root out the main demon, who is quite ancient. It's a light mix of Japanese legend and modern martial arts.

At the center of it all is a white girl who gets caught up in things when some demons wind up on the military base run by her father, the general. It doesn't take long before she befriends Saya and they find themselves on the run from a horde of vampire/demons. This means there's a couple of big fight scenes, a car attack, and one big showdown before it is all over. A little backstory is given in the form of flashback sequences, but there's nothing much to the overall plot that was very original to me.

I really wasn't that impressed with the fight scenes in this movie. There are a couple of big group fight scenes with lots of extras, but most of the way it was filmed took away from the potential epic nature of the fights. A lot of random slow motion blurs and cuts are used and the action didn't flow that well in some parts. Worst of all, big globs of CGI blood fly out when people are slashed, and it is so unrealistic that it takes away from the action. Really - it looked BAD.

There was some decent wire work done during the fights, and I thought it was cool to see people actually flying around as opposed to CGI superimposing and such. You can tell the difference. There's a short feature in the bonus materials on the Blu-ray where it talks about all the stuff they did and how hard it was to be slung around on a wire all day. It looked like back-breaking work.

Saya is played by Korean actress Gianna Jun, and I thought she did a decent job with the material. She doesn't have much in the way of dialogue, but she deserves credit for doing most of her own stunts. The American girl is played by newcomer Allison Miller, and I thought she did OK given that her role was pretty much just a ‘damsel in distress' kind of character who constantly needed to be rescued. Other than them, the reason why I thought the acting was kind of lame is that the movie features a bunch of British actors trying to put on fake American accents, and it wasn't that good. The base general tried doing some kind of John Wayne thing and it was laughable.

This movie was directed by Chris Nahon, who previously did Jet Li's Kiss of the Dragon in 2001 and a couple of movies I'd never heard of in between. This was produced by some of the people behind Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. I have never seen the animated movie upon which this is based, so I can't compare the two.

In the end, I still got some enjoyment out of watching Blood: The Last Vampire, but I wasn't expecting much from it. I think younger people who don't pay much attention to plot or character development will enjoy all the martial arts. I just think it could have been much better.

Recommended:
No

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Fit for Friday Evening
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older