Blade

"Yea, with the swords, and he throws it up in the air, yea catch it underneath - SHUT THE FUCK UP!"

Wesley Snipes plays Blade, a vampire killer, who has given himself the task of eradicated the planet of all vampires. This roots from the incident when his mother was attacked by a vampire while pregnant with Blade. His mother died during birth and Blade has swore lifelong revenge.

Now I am a big fan of vampire movies and I heard good things about this movie coming in so I was excited. The movie centers around a vampire, Deacon Frost, who is bent on fulfilling a prophecy where the "Blood God" is resurrected and pretty much lays waste to Earth and it's people, you know the drill.

Well the catch is he has to get the heads of the twelve vampire tribes (House of Erebus) together and in the blood of the "Daywalker" which just happens to be Blade. Now there is some tension between Frost and the leaders of the twelve tribes because they feel they are superior because they are "pure blood" meaning they were born vampires whereas Frost is not of pure blood because he was human once and was turned into a vampire.

This is my major gripe about the whole movie and it really puts a hurt on my experience. In the first scene you see the House of Erebus and they are sitting around a board table very Donald Trump like. They are unhappy with actions recently made by Frost and plan to reprimand him. However they call him in to the chambers and he pretty much pisses all over them. They do nothing to retaliate and just take it like pansies. We never see what really makes them so powerful and so feared and only see them being led around like lambs (especially in the final scenes). Likewise we never know what makes Frost so powerful and why he is so regarded among the vampires as he appears to be a normal vampire.

Oh and the ending sucked. This "Blood God" turns out to be a giant pussy and is killed pretty easily. Some threat to the Earth he was...

Now I usually do not watch the extras on the DVD often but I caught a little of them this time. I was curious to see an alternate ending was offered so I watched it. Apparently the "Blood God" was supposed to be this 6 story tall blood blob guy that really takes it to Blade. Now that is something I could get into. However it was scrapped because the special effects turned out bad and the test audiences didn't like that the villain wasn't a human actor. Whatever. Now the special effects were kinda bad in the scene but most of the effects in the moovie were not spectacular (but for back in the day they were decent).

The Ups: You have vampires, killing, blood, and loads of action. What's not to like there? This moovie came out right before The Matrix redefined the action genre and you can definitely see a lot of similarities between the two.

The Downs: Too much of the story is not explained well enough and I still can't get over that the House of Erebus are such pansies. Even in the extras where they go indepth on each tribe and they make it sound like these guys are nearly unstoppable but yet they can't even control a wussmaster like Frost. So unbelievable. (Yes and vampires are...)

Overall: I'm sure back in 1998 this was the shit. You have a pretty good action moovie with a good sprinkling of vampires and the supernatural. The special effects were kinda cheesy in places but it would be interesting to see what they came up with if they made this one today....oh wait they did. It's called Underworld.

The Verdict: Two bloody marys (Shirley Temple style)