Blade
Director:Stephen Norrington
Screenplay:David S. Goyer, based on characters created for Marvel
Comics by Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan
Starring:Wesley Snipes, Stephen Dorff, Kris Kristofferson, N'Bushe
Wright, Udo Kier, Traci Lords
John's Review
��� Now, I've never read the comic, although I am familiar with the
comic book character as seen� in a couple of Spider Man comics. The film opens rather
oddly, with a lot of blood. The pool of blood first appears in the movie's opening in
which a young man is escorted by a sinister-looking Traci Lords (her only 2 minutes in the
entire film, but for some reason she's listed in the opening credits) in a red wig into a
disco hidden behind a metal door in the back of a meatpacking plant.Sound weird? I thought
so.
��� As the frenzied dancers gyrate to a crunching industrial beat, a sign
suddenly lights up announcing a "blood bath." The music intensifies, and shower
heads on the ceiling begin spewing blood onto the ecstatic crowd whose heads strain upward
to suck in the precious liquid. Just when the horrified visitor realizes he has been lured
into a vampire club having its Saturday night orgy, he is overcome by gnashing fangs.
��� Then who should arrive, spreading panic among the revelers, but an
ominous figure dressed in black leather embellished with what look like automobile seat
belts. This avenging vampire buster, who starts blowing the orgiasts to smithereens, is
none other than Blade (Snipes), a semihuman warrior whose life is dedicated to eliminating
the night-walking species that claimed his beloved mother moments before she gave birth to
him.
��� Although the opening scene suggests a dark urban satire, Blade
quickly turns into a cartoonish futuristic action-adventure story in which Blade is
apparently one of only a few keeping humanity from being exterminated by vampires in a
hematological holocaust.
��� The movie is awash not only in blood, but in the demons' mythical
arcana as well. The battle scenes are pure���� comic-book derring-do,
thanks to Snipes rather adept mastery of martial arts. When a vampire is destroyed, it
goes through a nice special effect transformation, becoming cinder and dissolving into
dust. At one point after being injected with some sort of hemoglobin, two vampires bloat
to fantastic proportions before being splatted all over the walls.
��� The story is rather simple, Blade; his scraggly-haired human mentor,
Abraham Whistler (Kristofferson), and Karen (Wright), a resourceful hematologist,
(convenient) face off against the forces of evil. Leading the bad guys is sneering Deacon
Frost (Dorff), a rancid hippie-style rebel who wants to overthrow the fussy over-cautious
vampiric old guard and get down to the business of world domination. In one of the
nastiest scenes, he and his fellow rebels, wearing 45 SPF that protect them from the sun,
lead the senior leader (Kier) to a beach where they yank out his fangs with pliers and
gleefully watch as the rising sun decomposes him.
��� As Blade, Snipes's performance is fever-hot and artery-deep. With his
close-cropped hair carved into an aerodynamic V and the flaring trapezius of his neck
tattooed like the fenders of a racing-striped muscle car, the actor becomes a
nitro-burning vehicle for his larger-than-life alter ego.
��� I liked this movie, I really did, of all the comic book translations to
the silver screen, this is one of the better ones. Some of my other favorites include: Batman,
The Crow, The Phanton, The Mask, and yes believe it or not Superman. Go
ahead an add this one to the list.
�
Grade: B-
