What happens when you entrust a Korean actress and cosmetics model to a Luc Besson protege, recruit them to adapt a celebrated Japanese anime title in English, and give them a visual effects budget that makes Megan Fox's ghetto demonface look extravagant? Blood: The Last Vampire happens. And boy, am I glad it did.
It would be easy to laugh Blood off as a misbegotten D-movie lark, an accident of international scope, ambition and hubris. But then you'd be missing the real fun, in which the Vietnam War provides the backdrop for an American-Asian girl-power tandem whom whole squads of U.S. military personnel, quasi-CIA and fantastically cheap-looking monsters can't quite take down. It doesn't hurt the girls' chances that one of them, Saya (played by the Korean starlet Gianna), is a teenage-looking half-vampire actually nursing a grudge from about 400 years ago.
Back in the day, evidently, the dark vampire boss Onigen wiped out Saya's family in the bloodiest, most merciless of fashions. Grandpa got it worst, but not before instructing the girl in the ways of the sword and advanced martial arts, thus preparing her for the centuries-long payback mission -- not to mention the existential crisis of being a kind of tormented bloodsucker mulatto, determined now to eradicate the evil legions to which her beloved mother belonged.
At least Saya's got the blood-procuring part down: By the late 1960s, she's partnered with a top-secret crew of government spooks on their own anti-vampire mission. She offs a few of them, they keep her in hemoglobin. Except she's getting sloppy of late, slicing innocent people in half on the subway in her instinctive quest for revenge. The agents plunk her into school on a U.S. army base in Tokyo, where, after saving her military brat classmate Alice (Allison Miller) from vampirey death, power struggles explode: mortal vs. immortal, East vs. West, military vs. civilian, one colonial class of monsters preying on another, and that one preying on yet one more.
Which is when Blood finds its true voice -- in clipped, dubbed English usually, but a voice nevertheless. Alice is more curious than smart, and director Chris Nahon, whom the legendary Besson hand-plucked from the music video and commercial ranks to direct 2001's Kiss of the Dragon, rewards the girl's frequent inquiries with a succession of violent Saya-saves-the-day set pieces that truly must be seen to be believed. Not for Gianna's grace or their exquisite choreography (though there are traces of each), but rather for the CGI massacres that ensue.
Or maybe I should say massacred CGI. I have never seen digital visual effects this terrible in a mainstream film -- which I really mean as the highest compliment: The flying creatures, the voluminous cartoon-blood spray and the exploding heads are so garish, so willfully bad, like what you might get if Uwe Boll remade Delgo. They improve somewhat by the time of Saya's otherworld confrontation with Omigen (SPOILER ALERT: Another hot Asian chick), but by then you're along for Blood's human element; you literally have no other choice.
Thankfully Gianna and Miller pull through, with the earnest Miller leavening Nahon's wild spectacle. In fact, Blood legitimately works when the actors buy into it against all better judgment. You can see Nahon's lingering direction in their faces, the work-a-day genre helplessness that follows listening to some profoundly skunky dramaturgy -- and then suddenly hearing "Action." Watch for the sequence when Alice's wounded father dies in her arms, muttering, "I love you, sweetie," and tell me these aren't professionals giving it their all. Or maybe he was just eager to get a good take and wind up his last day on the shoot. Either way, it's the difference between art and trash, a straight-up bad movie and a bad movie you love. Bring on the sequel.