Blood: The Last Vampire (2009)2

Blood: The Last Vampire (2009) is adapted from the Japanese manga writ­ten by Benkyo Tamaoki about a half-vampire, half-human girl Saya who hunts the vam­pires for the evil they do. From the start, we know that she has one pur­pose in mind – to find the most pow­er­ful demon, Onigen, and destroy her. On the quest to kill Onigen, Saya meets a friend, Alice, and the two con­tinue on the jour­ney and over­come many obstacles.

In my opin­ion, the film is weak in terms of char­ac­ter­i­za­tion and theme. The rela­tion­ships were not well devel­oped — for most part of the film, Saya and Alice are together but yet the con­trast between them was poorly exe­cuted. A human being and a vam­pire who is half human — more inter­ac­tion could have hap­pened between both of them to con­trast their dif­fer­ent per­son­al­i­ties and high­light the humane part of Saya. The movie seemed to have included Alice’s exis­tence but not well develop her part in the film. I almost found she had no need to be there except to make Saya look like a hero­ine, res­cu­ing her from the mon­sters’ clutches. Ironically, she was the one to save Saya at the cru­cial moment – maybe that was why she even appeared in the film. To add on, I feel that the film did not do well in high­light­ing its theme. There were sev­eral themes to expand on, such as human nature and iden­tity. The film could have expanded its theme by high­light­ing the con­trast between the mon­sters tak­ing the form of human beings and humans in real life who also con­ceal them­selves under­neath their masks. The many sides of iden­tity could be explored — Saya is a half-vampire, half-human but it is the choices she makes that defines her as a human. Likewise, man can choose to be good or evil. More could have been done in place of the action sequences which did not appear to be spec­tac­u­lar either. The film con­sists largely of action scenes which could have been bet­ter chore­o­graphed. I felt that there was not enough kick in the action which also con­tains a lot of con­ti­nu­ity errors, espe­cially when it comes to the katana. It was obvi­ous that Saya had lost her katana in sev­eral fight scenes but the weapon con­ve­niently appears in her hand each time she needs it to kill her foes. Unless it’s a mag­i­cal wand like Harry Potter’s, I don’t think katanas work this way. Another thing I dis­liked was the way the film build up is inten­sity towards the last bat­tle. The film had gave us the impres­sion that Onigen is a cun­ning and hard to defeat demon right from the start. We had seen how much effort and skill Saya took to kill the other demons and even got hurt in the jour­ney. When she comes face to face with Onigen, we would prob­a­bly expect the fight to be over­whelm­ing. However, what should have been the great­est bat­tle in the movie was a let­down. It seemed minor com­pare to the ear­lier bat­tle scenes with weaker demons, so much for being the most pow­er­ful demon of all. To sum up, the movie is quite pre­dictable after awhile. There is almost no humour in the movie but I feel Alice’s exis­tence in the film is one big joke itself. Not the very best of vam­pires movies, I’d rather watch the Twins Effect again if I want to see an Asian girl por­tray­ing a vam­pire slayer. For one, it had bet­ter action scenes though not as much spe­cial effects. Winnie