Blood: The Last Vampire

Saya isn’t your average Japanese schoolgirl; while she looks 16 she’s actually going on 400 years old. These things happen when you’re part vampire.

Blood: The Last Vampire was initially a relatively short animated film. It came out in 2000, and when I saw it I’ve got to admit I wasn’t that impressed. It looks nice enough but the story is a bit bland. The idea was also developed into an anime series that I checked out but didn’t like enough to keep watching after the fifth episode.

So I’ve seen Blood in all its iterations and to be frank my expectations for the live-action film were pretty low. While it wouldn’t take a lot to surpass the franchise’s humble beginnings, live-action films that come from animes aren’t good most of the time. I’m somewhat surprised to say that Blood: The Last Vampire isn’t all that bad. It has a lot of failings, but overall the film is bloody, violent, and entertaining.

Saya (Gianna Jun) is at least part vampire, but she works for a mysterious council that supplies her with blood and sends her out on dangerous missions to slay other vampires. Her weapon of choice: a katana. When she’s sent into a US Army Base in Japan, she quickly makes mincemeat of a couple of vamp students and saves the life of Alice (Allison Miller), who happens to be the daughter of the base’s general. The two wind up running and fighting, and fighting, and fighting. There’s a lot of fighting.

The fighting contains both the best and the worst parts of Blood: The Last Vampire. On one hand there’s loads of it, and while there’s some shaky-cam and annoying editing, the fights grow more solid as the film goes on. There’s a lot of wirework, fast edits, and other tricks to make Gianna Jun look like she’s actually deadly, but overall the fights are fun to watch. Saya slices her way through vampires, ninjas, and anything else that gets in her way like she’s a human Cuisinart.

The worst element is undoubtedly the use of a lot of questionable CGI, mostly to add spurting blood as enemies are mowed down by Saya’s sword. The blood effects didn’t bother me that much, but if you’re one of those people that just hates CGI blood you’re going to have a hard time watching this movie.

When fighting isn’t happening you’ll be subjected to some pretty bad acting, particularly from Alison Miller. Her role requires her to spend most of her time screaming and weeping, and she’s terrible at both. The supporting cast is uniformly lousy with the exception of Colin Salmon (Hex, Punisher: War Zone), who has a pretty brief role as a kendo teacher.

All in all Blood is a decent time-waster; nothing to write home about, but it’s worth a watch if you like unrealistic, over the top swordplay and can stand some dodgy, low-budget CGI. As far as anime-to-live action films go, it’s not bad.