Blood: The Last Vampire (R)
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streaming sites: Vudu

This is a 2009 live-action adaptation of the 2000 anime movie Blood: The Last Vampire. This may seem like sacrilege to movie fans in general and otaku in particular, but personally, I think I liked this movie a bit better than the original. At least it seemed to me to make more sense. But... I may revise my estimation if I ever get around to rewatching the anime. Meanwhile, I can certainly say I didn't like either movie nearly as much as I did the anime TV series Blood+.

Anyway, there are of course some changes from the source material. This movie is mostly set in Toyko in 1970. There's a girl named Saya, who appears to be a teenager, but is actually centuries old. She uses a sword to kill creatures which aren't really named... in this movie they're just called "bloodsuckers," or "demons." And we eventually learn that Saya herself is half human and half bloodsucker. And she works with a clandestine group called the Council. Her one goal in life is to find and kill the oldest and most powerful demon, Onigen, who killed her father (whom she never knew). There are flashbacks throughout the film to Saya's youth, centuries ago, when she was raised by a man named Kato. But in the present, Saya goes undercover as a high school student on an American military base. Here she meets Alice McKee, the daughter of the general who runs the base. And Alice gets caught up in Saya's fight against the bloodsuckers, as well as an internal struggle between good and bad members of the Council. Or whatever.

I guess that's all I want to say about the plot. There were a lot of fight scenes, which were pretty badass, even if there were some moments that I felt looked unnatural. (That may have been an intentional attempt at a certain visual effect, but it just came off as choppy editing, to my eyes.) Meanwhile, I was torn about the inclusion of the Alice character. In some ways she and her whole subplot seemed kind of tacked-on, possibly even pandering to an American audience, but on the other hand... I dunno, maybe it kinda gave the movie more structure than the original had, maybe humanized the story a bit. Though of course the best character is still Saya. Anyway... the ending was fairly predictable (even if it's different from both the anime movie and TV series), and the story in general wasn't great, but it wasn't bad, either. Mainly the movie is to be watched for the action, of course.