Blood: The Last Vampire or Seriously, why did that just happen? It makes no sense!?!

I've had on my Blu-Ray shelf for a while now Blood: The Last Vampire. I picked it up on the cheap, but honestly, I probably would've bought it at full retail purely because I liked the Anime it's based on (the 40 min movie-ish thing, not the TV series). Though after finally watching the movie, I'm glad I didn't buy it at MSRP.

Blood: The Last Vampire was an anime about a girl named Saya who kills vampires, she's sent to a military base in Japan to kill Vampires. You see, she's only half-vampire and really good at killing full vampires. That's really about it, it was pretty short, yet fairly cool, it was all style and being animated by Production I.G. looked great.

The first 30 mins or so of BTLV (the movie) is practically identical to the BTLV (the animated short) right down to how it ended, but includes some horribly useless characters and some unfinished subplots. This is about where it all goes horribly wrong. It's as if two movies got mashed together formed this awful screenplay with some good ideas and crap follow through.

During her adventures at the school Saya manages to save the General's daughter Alice. Alice comes home to witness the Council (the shadow organization that guides Saya's sword) doing something bad. Something so bad that it's one of those things that seems jammed into the screen play because what Alice witnesses doesn't help anyone and their motives in the slightest. In fact, you would think that The Council might have a bigger hand to play later in the movie but is nowhere to be seen for the rest of the play time.

Saya once again saves Alice and turns her into that cliche companion, she's so shoehorned into that role it makes no sense, but I digress. Saya explains her past to Alice and that her care-taker Kato was a total bad ass that took on a ton of Ninja trying to kill Saya. A truck falls down a crevice and Saya fights Onigen, from here it becomes a visually confusing mess and ends. Seriously, it kind of just ends, hardly any explanation given and no epilogue.

You know what, screw it. Hell, because this movie sucked, I'll spoil it for you. The people that Saya works with, The Council decide to kill the General after the General has a man steal a suitcase full of stuff used to clean up scenes where Saya was killing stuff. So one of the The Council shows up at the General's place claiming he's going to give them Saya for whatever reason. He tells the General the address she's staying at and the second a soldier writes down the information he springs into action and injects the soldier and shoots the General. Then Alice walks in and see's everything.

Okay, 2 things, why bother killing The General? It's kind of a bad idea, actually it's a horrible idea. It does no one any good and serves to only further a really bad plot point. Secondly, the daughter grabs the notepad the soldier was writing in to track down Saya for help... meaning the guy actually gave away her real address, if he was planning on killing these guys, why not fake the address? Why bother telling anyone anything and just kill them?

This just proves that Alice was shoehorned into being some kind of buddy for Saya.

I was with this movie until this "twist". Well, sort of. It's got other problems, like the acting isn't too great and the fight scenes were over-edited. I love fight scenes, but you know what? Just let them play it out.. don't speed up some action, use slow-mo or that weird choppy motion that was over-used in every movie in 2005 it seemed. All 3 of those were used in one scene. In a scene that could've been a show stopper where Saya has to fight off a ton of vampires.

The one saving grace this movie had was a really cool fight in the middle of the film with a bunch of Ninja.

I'll keep going with the spoilers too, because I really didn't like this movie! That lack of an ending I was talking about? It ends with Saya killing Onigen, this evil chick who can blow apart peoples heads with the snap of a finger (none of that gets used btw.. which is sad) the fight wasn't very good or long and took place in a fantasy.. why? Who knows, and then it ends with Alice talking to police and saying how Saya is trying to figure a way out of the looking glass... (GET IT? CAUSE HER NAME IS ALICE!! HAHAHAHA ugh...) then it closes on a shot of an old Japanese farming village and then again on a shot of Saya on the train from the beginning.

WTF?

MOVIE SCORE: 1.5 out of 5
and honestly, it gets that .5 because of the Ninja part.


VIDEO: 4 out of 5
The video is pretty darn good looking, far better then this movie deserves at any rate. It was shot pretty stylishly, lots of use of colors and the disc shows it off well enough. There are times where the video quality looks a little soft though. The one really distracting element is the bad CGI and the picture is clear enough to show just how bad it really is.

SOUND: 5 out of 5
If there were ever a reason to watch this movie, it'd be more to listen to it then to actually.. watch it. A DTS-MA HD 5.1 track throws it's weight around during the action scenes with plenty of discretion. The Ninja scene in particular sounded great with rattling chains coming every corner of the room. It's almost demo worthy, and certainly the best part of this viewing experience.

OVERALL
BTLV should've been a decent movie, at least a guilty pleasure, maybe even if they embraced practical special effects instead of computer processed ones it would've been a better ride. Too many idea's and not enough money to make use of it I'm guessing. Honestly, the movie should've just been a motion picture version of the anime, simplified with a few showy fight scenes and less garbage to pad a screen play.

Unless you're like me and love a great surround sound presence in your movies AVOID IT.

Starting Over

Okay, I decided to start this back up. Why? Because why not?
Also I have a new 58" Panasonic 3d Plasma set (Viera VT25) and a new Denon A/V receiver because the Onkyo one didn't do 3D pass through, which is something you need, unless you'd rather connect audio via toslink and video directly to the tv.. but pfft, why bother?

Either way, other then my oldish speakers I'd love to upgrade my Home Theater is the bomb diggity. So come, sit, read and enjoy my ramblings on things you probably could care less about.