Blood: The Last Vampire Live Action
I guess this is somewhat related since it IS an anime adaptation.
*Ahem*, anyways, my friend got some invitations for the event so I tagged along to watch it despite having zero interest and expectations in it. Quite normal after the Chun-Li and Dragonball movie, but I am kinda glad to say that the movie actually exceeded my expectations and provided me with about one and a half hours of hilarity and comedy. Of course of the unintentional kind.
The movie actually got off to a pretty good start since they did keep to the story pretty well in the first 45 mins or so where they faithfully adapted the original material, up to the B-52 takeoff scene. Saya was actually… Saya and the action scenes were pretty acceptable for the B-Grade level-ness they exuded. It was kinda marred by horrible censorship, random afro brothers, random explosions, Assasin Creed roof jumping and the final clincher of Saya taking a shortcut of the cut-through-the-damn-walls kind.
Then they ran out of the original material and the REAL hilarity ensued. There was this whole “main plot-ish” thing about Saya hunting for the leader of the “Oni”, called Onigen (seriously, OniGEN?) and the scriptwriters went on a walk in the park with their own original storyline. And we all know how Hollywood scriptwriters are when it comes to original writing. Seriously, Hollywood, don’t you guys have any decent scriptwriters? And are you guys even paying these people properly? Sigh….
So how hillarious was it? Remember Onigen? Supposedly the leader of the Oni, oldest, cruelest and vilest of them all? It’s actually a woman. And she’s Saya’s mother. Which they revealed in a Star Wars-esque moment in the climax of the movie which would’ve been an incredible twist EXCEPT FOR THE FACT WE ALL SAW IT COMING FROM MINUTE 46:00:00?
And the dialogue was gawdawful horrible. There’s one part where token blonde… well, actually the smartest character of the show, Alice says to Saya… “There’s more to life than just Onigen.” I kinda replied, “For everything else, there’s always Mastercard.” which earned the wrath of my friends, ha ha ha. Not to mention Onigen, played by Japanese actress Koyuki, is speaking in ENGRISH ALL THE TIME. So yeah, HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO TAKE HER SERIOUSLY WHEN SHE SPOUTS LINES LIKE “Your power I gave you. Your long life I gave you too.” Should’ve just fucking made her speak in Japanese instead of forcing her to speak English.
Saya’s character also got totally turned 180 degrees after the middle of the movie and she turned from the cold, no hesitation Saya to the brooding emo driven-by-revenge type of character. Who I must mention was so fucking useless that when she and Alice was getting attacked by an Oni on the highway she didn’t respond to it at all, leaving poor human Alice to fend it off by herself until the truck they were on fell in to a ravine. What the shit was that?
And there was also random shit like Weekly Shounen Magazine appearing in the movie (I swear I saw either Negima or Tsubasa in it), the aforementioned afro brothers, SuperSaya-n flying scene and a lot, and I really mean A LOT, of tsukkomi chances for this movie. Only good part of it was when Saya’s guardian, an old guy named Kato, squared off against a whole team of ninjas by himself. Pretty GAR and doomed too. He said like 3-4 deathflag-confirmed lines before going to fight them, LOL.
But overall, this is a B-Grade movie that really knows it’s a B-Grade movie and revels in the B-Grade-ness of it. Highly recommended to go watch if you kinda want to laugh yourself off with cheesy action scenes, cheesy dialogue and cheesy storylines that end abruptly without explaining anything.
