{"id":16872,"date":"2024-10-20T21:00:48","date_gmt":"2024-10-21T01:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/?p=16872"},"modified":"2024-10-18T16:07:09","modified_gmt":"2024-10-18T20:07:09","slug":"blade-i-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/archives\/16872","title":{"rendered":"Blade I & II"},"content":{"rendered":"

Blade<\/em> (1998, Stephen Norrington)<\/strong><\/p>\n

I didn’t intend to watch Blade<\/em> within a week of The Blade<\/a><\/em>, but when you need a Kris Kristofferson memorial screening in SHOCKtober it’s either this or The Jacket<\/em>. Snipes and Kris hella cool, perfect genre writing by Goyer, and expensive-looking, New Line’s money put to good use. Wesley’s stunt double gets a good sword fight, even some wire jumping. The hair and music is very 1998 (complimentary) and so is the cutting (derogatory), with judicious use of instantly-dated CG in the finale.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Donal Logue gets set on fire in the first fight and the movie makes a running joke of destroying him over and over. He’s a henchman for sneery Stephen Dorff (who hasn’t been in a good movie since Public Enemies<\/a><\/em> but as the kid from The Gate<\/a><\/em> he will always be a horror prince), who disagrees with vampire lord Udo Kier’s strategy of lurking in the shadows, preferring to rise and enslave humanity. Dorff uses a PowerMac with OS7 to AI-translate the ancient texts to enable his plan.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Meanwhile Blade and Kris gruffly help prevent a hot Donal-victim (N\u2019Bushe Wright of Fresh<\/em> and Dead Presidents<\/em>) from vamping out while sleuthing Dorff’s plan. Unfortunately Blade turns out to be the plan, his daywalker-blood required to bring about an apocalypse. Dorff sunrises Kier to death, and bullet-dodges (the year before The Matrix<\/a><\/em> came out). Movie portrays police as the dumbest people on the planet. Norrington went on to direct The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen<\/em>, and after that travesty he deservedly never worked again.<\/p>\n

–
\nBlade II<\/em> (2002, Guillermo del Toro)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Guillermo’s fourth feature and it’s still showy-expensive, a harsh transition from the practical 1998 to the CG 2002. Worse and less coherent than part 1, more of a horror. The lighting and colors are cooler anyway, but it’s got overstuff’d sequilitis (adding ten new characters and giving short shrift to Snipes-Kristofferson).<\/p>\n

The Man:<\/em>
\n<\/p>\n

After a rescue operation, Blade works on rehabilitating vamped Kris, while Kris’s old job is being filled by vamp-spy Scud (Cigarette Burns<\/a><\/em>), a fan of Powerpuff Girls and Krispy Kremes, making me wonder which production designer was from Atlanta. Meanwhile some new immortal vampire-hunting creatures are running amok out there. Either Resident Evil 4<\/em> (game) ripped off the head-splitting creature design of Blade II<\/em> (movie), or vice versa, or they both ripped off a third thing. Our guys team up with way too many elite vampires (including Ron Perlman and Donnie Yen) to fight the new beasts, tables are turned and poor Wesley’s blood gets harvested again, nearly everyone dies, and thus far I have avoided literally every Ryan Reynolds movie so let’s keep that going and not watch part three. In the Elm Street<\/em> tradition<\/a>, the only blu extra I watched was the Cypress Hill video.<\/p>\n

Ron explodes someone using pure love and light:<\/em>
\n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Blade (1998, Stephen Norrington) I didn’t intend to watch Blade within a week of The Blade, but when you need a Kris Kristofferson memorial screening in SHOCKtober it’s either this or The Jacket. Snipes and Kris hella cool, perfect genre writing by Goyer, and expensive-looking, New Line’s money put to good use. Wesley’s stunt double […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[198,3140,1313,909,3331,1212,56,62,186,3250],"class_list":["post-16872","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie","tag-apocalypse","tag-donnie-yen","tag-double-feature","tag-guillermo-del-toro","tag-kris-kristofferson","tag-memorial-screening","tag-ron-perlman","tag-udo-kier","tag-vampires","tag-wesley-snipes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16872","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16872"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16872\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16922,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16872\/revisions\/16922"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16872"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16872"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16872"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}