![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Lucy Liu makes a very attractive looking corpse. Unfortunately, her dainty, kick-ass hotness isn't enough to save Rise: Blood Hunter from its needlessly convoluted plot and holes in logic big enough to drive a bus through. The film is dark and gritty, everything washed in shadows and blues to remind us that we are now in no man's land where vampires are sadistic but not quite equipped to deal with their cravings, fangless as they are. The vampires make an appropriately bloody mess of their meals, leaving body parts strewn across crime scenes, aided by various accoutrement to make up for what nature failed to give them.
Rise: Blood Hunter remains faithful to vampire lore only moderately, which really isn't such a problem, but the fact that the movie is bloody boring to boot makes it par for the course in the reinvention of the genre that seems underway. Everyone wants to shake things up, but go too far or not far enough. Thus far the most interesting shift in the emo vampire trend, I found, was 30 Days of Night (released four months after Rise: Blood Hunter) which hearkens back to a more folkloric vampire.
Sadie Blake as our inquisitive girl reporter, happy-go-lucky and clueless about the darkest part of the city's underbelly goes from flowered skirts and denim jackets to a post-transformation ensemble of skin tight jeans and a cheeky haircut that shouts, I am a New Woman, Beware! Trained by a semi-mystic guru in the arts of killing vampires, Sadie dispatches her enemies (in this case the pack of fiends who turned her, so it's your standard revenge plot) with laughable ease. Michael Chiklis, our brave and emotionally wounded detective, gums up the works for her just a bit, but is almost a non-entity, popping up randomly and not doing much except pissing the other cops off.
There's a lot of unresolved plot elements, including the true motives of Sadie's benefactor, and fellow vampire, Arturo. But I suppose they're leaving all of that for a direct-to-DVD sequel seeing as how Sadie,begging to die and stabbed through the heart (we assume) with a silver crossbow bolt by Detective Rawlins busts out of the morgue for the second time just before the credits roll.
It's a pretty lame movie and watching it reminded me, AGAIN, of how much I hate the Sci-Fi channel these days. I still don't get the point of dropping a quality show like Farscape in favor of a string of bad movies and a couple of hours of WWE.
Rise: Blood Hunter remains faithful to vampire lore only moderately, which really isn't such a problem, but the fact that the movie is bloody boring to boot makes it par for the course in the reinvention of the genre that seems underway. Everyone wants to shake things up, but go too far or not far enough. Thus far the most interesting shift in the emo vampire trend, I found, was 30 Days of Night (released four months after Rise: Blood Hunter) which hearkens back to a more folkloric vampire.
Sadie Blake as our inquisitive girl reporter, happy-go-lucky and clueless about the darkest part of the city's underbelly goes from flowered skirts and denim jackets to a post-transformation ensemble of skin tight jeans and a cheeky haircut that shouts, I am a New Woman, Beware! Trained by a semi-mystic guru in the arts of killing vampires, Sadie dispatches her enemies (in this case the pack of fiends who turned her, so it's your standard revenge plot) with laughable ease. Michael Chiklis, our brave and emotionally wounded detective, gums up the works for her just a bit, but is almost a non-entity, popping up randomly and not doing much except pissing the other cops off.
There's a lot of unresolved plot elements, including the true motives of Sadie's benefactor, and fellow vampire, Arturo. But I suppose they're leaving all of that for a direct-to-DVD sequel seeing as how Sadie,begging to die and stabbed through the heart (we assume) with a silver crossbow bolt by Detective Rawlins busts out of the morgue for the second time just before the credits roll.
It's a pretty lame movie and watching it reminded me, AGAIN, of how much I hate the Sci-Fi channel these days. I still don't get the point of dropping a quality show like Farscape in favor of a string of bad movies and a couple of hours of WWE.
