Plot Details: This opinion reveals minor details about the movie's plot.

Rise: Blood Hunter is a rather bland movie starring Lucy Lui as a vampire who goes on a revenge killing spree against the vampires who turned her into one of them. It was written and directed by one of the guys who wrote Snakes on a Plane.

I remember seeing the previews for this movie and thinking it seemed interesting, but then it only played a few dozen movie theaters and ended up going straight to video. The DVD contains an ‘Unrated Undead’ version of the movie that is nearly 30 minutes longer than the original. I do not know what the differences are between the two versions, and I guess the 20 or so people who actually saw it in the theaters would probably be the only ones who did. The thing is, I doubt those people would want to see this movie again.

The movie starts out with Lucy’s character picking up a woman in a bar and taking her back to a mansion somewhere in California. The girl ends up getting caught in this steel cage trap, then some old guy in a wheelchair wheels in and we’re supposed to believe he is a vampire set on eating her. Lucy kills the guy before he touches the girl, then she lets the girl go and she runs out of the house crying. It never explains how Lucy got mixed up with the old guy or really anything else because after that, it shows Lucy working as a reporter for some kind of magazine. For a while, I thought she was supposed to have a twin sister or something.

At the magazine or newspaper, Lucy was working on some kind of article dealing with some goth kids, and this involves her with some kind of cult. Out of nowhere, once of her co-workers get killed and Lucy is kidnapped by these vampires. She then wakes up in a morgue and finds out that she has been turned into a vampire. She now must go kill off the people who did this to her so that she can finally die and be at peace. How she figures this out, I do not know. She just does.

The vampires in this movie are the sloppiest eaters I’ve ever seen. They don’t just bite and suck blood. Instead, these use these little knives to slice open the victims neck and slurp it out, complete with awful slurping sounds. When it is all over, the victim and vampires are completely covered head to toe in this really fake-looking bright red blood. It’s just ridiculous.

Lucy Liu’s character uses a crossbow pistol to dispatch the vampires. The little crossbow thing she has is an incredibly weak weapon that only works at close range, plus it even looks small when she’s holding it, and she’s not a big person. I found it hard to get into the idea that this cute little lady would suddenly become some kind of master crossbow pistol shot and be able to take out all these vampires.

The vampires in this movie might as well have not been vampires. I don’t know if it was because of low budget constraints, but they don’t even have vampire teeth. Nobody’s face changes and they don’t even appear pale. They just look like regular people and like to drink blood. I think this movie has the lamest excuse for a bunch of vampires that I’ve ever seen. They’re not even cool! Vampires are supposed to be either scary or cool, or both. In this movie, they were neither.

Sebastian Gutierrez wrote and directed this crappy movie. He co-wrote the script to the stupid Snakes on a Plane as well as Gothika and the Elmore Leonard adaption The Big Bounce. I noticed all kinds of continuity errors throughout the movie, like stuff changing scene to scene. The way the movie opens then jumps back in time without any kind of transitional sequence is confusing as hell. It’s just a poor way of telling the story, and there’s not much to the story. I was really surprised that the director of photography on this movie was John Toll, who previously won Oscars for his work on Braveheart and Legends of the Fall. How did someone that good get involved in a movie this bad?

Rise: Blood Hunter is just an all-around bad movie. The action is weak, the story is incoherent, and the whole package is generally lacking. Combine that with a two hour running time and it’s just a big waste of time. It comes off like somebody scrapped together what they could of an unfinished project and tried to make a movie out of it.

Recommended: No

Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age