Review: Blood: The Last Vampire

Jul 3 2009 by The Journal

THE live-action version of Hiroyuki Kitakubo’s animated feature steps back in time to the 1970s, when the Vietnam War continued to dominate newspaper headlines.

Against this backdrop of conflict, a very different battle rages in Tokyo between humans and vampires, the latter dispatched with spurts of computer-generated blood.

As the fanged fiends take on their demonic form, a miasma of clumsy digital effects allows the bloodsuckers to take flight and soar over the rooftops of their hunting-ground.

Perhaps the effects, which almost resemble stop-motion, are supposed to jar with the live action as a clever nod to the retro ’70s vibe.

More than likely, it’s sloppy workmanship and the meandering screenplay isn’t much better, continually interrupting the narrative flow with flashbacks.

You can’t take any of this film seriously.

The unintentional hilarity reaches a crescendo when the heroines drive a truck into a ravine and defy gravity to fight a winged demon.

The film opens on the Tokyo underground where beautiful 17-year-old Saya (Gianna Jun) sits patiently, concealing a terrible secret.

She is a halfling, the product of a marriage between a human father and vampire mother, doomed to suffer the same bloodlust as the creatures of the night she detests.

Armed with her trusty samurai sword, the sympathetic heroine works for a clandestine organisation called The Council under a CIA handler, in the hope that one day she will be granted a showdown with the all-powerful matriarch vampire, Onigen.

She goes undercover as a student at a US military base to clean up the vampire infestation, while Onigen prepares to lure the slayer to her doom.

The films has well-orchestrated action sequences – the body count is absurdly high, but the face-off with Onigen doesn’t live up to the promise. It aims for the jugular, but next to the Blade or Underworld films, this doesn’t quite make the cut.