Rise: Blood Hunter

Sure, the vampire myth has been with us forever. One of the very first films was a vampire movie. We are indeed obsessed with these blood-sucking trollops. And yet, lately, the vampire film has fallen into a rut that I worry it can never pry itself out of. We don't see the vampires of yesteryear anymore. Gone are green skinned, hairy-eared ghouls that haunted graveyards and sucked the blood from corpulent women. Gone are the baby-bird-headed stick figures that lurked in foggy London alleyways. Today vampires are all glamorous, leather-bound martial arts experts. They have great hair (that's a side-effect of living forever), nice shoes, and groove to industrial music. They are the Goth fashionistas who are as infatuated with sucking blood as they with collecting Ferraris and having swanky parties.

The vampires of Sebastian Gutierrez's Rise: Blood Hunter are struck from this very familiar mold. They inhabit the industrial night land of L.A. and stalk down the innocent. Lucy Liu stars as a reporter (she fittingly covers the Goth scene for an L.A. Weekly cover story) who, after being bitten by a vampire, becomes a "blood hunter," determined to take down the vamps who transformed her. In her quest for vengeance, Liu teams up with Michael Chiklis who plays, wait for it, an edgy and unstable cop whose own daughter was bled by the rampaging vamps.

Liu is naked in this flick, and I suppose that will generate some fan interest. However, she's rather lackluster in the role of vampire slayer vixen. While Liu attempts to channel some Crow-like despair (the film is more revenge fantasy than it is straightforward vampire horror flick) she comes across more bummed-out than anything. Chiklis just goes through the motions; surely he could play a role like this in his sleep. Carla Gugino (This Boy's Life), Robert Forster (Jackie Brown), and Mako (in his last role) are some of the more familiar faces in the cast.

Considering the talent in front and behind the camera here (director Gutierrez wrote Gothika, cinematographer John Toll worked on The Thin Red Line and Braveheart, and producer Sam Raimi needs no introduction) it's surprising Rise: Blood Hunter turns out so choppy and cheap looking. It's also incredibly graphic. Fans of spilled red stuff will be happy with the many gruesome vampire blood baths.

While Rise: Blood Hunter isn't a terrible film, it's a predictable one. This is meant to be a revisionist vampire film (no one actually uses the word vampire in the movie) but these are the same trendy vampires that have haunted the screen since Blade. Is it too much to ask someone to try and shake up the vampire film the way Kathryn Bigelow and Eric Red did with Near Dark? Or Larraz did with Vampyres (over 30 years ago)? Can't we just get a little Nosferatu around here?

Aka Rise.

Rise: Ketchup spiller.