BLOOD: THE LAST VAMPIRE
Manga Entertainment, $24.95
HIROYUKI KITAKUBO’S animated splatter-flick may go down in the record books as a harbinger of a new entertainment genre: the made-for-DVD movie. Blood is being marketed, accurately, as the first fully digital Japanese anime and, less accurately, as a follow-up to Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell. But Blood was developed by Oshii’s project team, not Oshii himself, and it shows. This movie has none of the crafty storytelling and character development of Oshii’s 1995 cybercop buddy-pic, and at 45 minutes—too short for feature exhibition, too long for half-hour TV airing—there’s no room for such refinements anyway.
On the positive side, Blood includes some nifty if overworked CGI lighting effects and a couple of interesting character concepts: a drag queen/prostitute who hangs around the demon-haunted ’60s American air base where the story unfolds and a dumpy, timid school nurse who’s a reluctant witness to the gory goings-on. But the main character, a last-of-her-kind teenage undead, may be the least engaging antiheroine in film history.
If, as I suspect, Blood was originally conceived as a pilot for an adult TV series, no wonder the result went straight to DVD. (Still, for those pining to see it on the big screen, Blood shows up as part of ResFest, Thurs. Sept. 13-Sat. Sept. 15 at the Egyptian.)
Roger Downey
