Holy Schnikes! 15th Anniversary October Movie a Day!

[stethacantus]

#26 Man-Thing ( 2005 )
Why? Someone went through a lot of trouble to secure the rights to Marvel Comics Man-Thing, an then proceeded to make a movie that uses absolutely nothing from the source comic.  Marvel's Man-Thing comics were the doppelganger of D.C.s Swamp-Thing comics. Both were about scientists with labs in swamps who are attacked and mortally wounded by thugs trying to steal the secret formula they were working on. Both inject themselves with the formula in order to save themselves, and both fall into the swamp as the formula transforms them, turning them into mucky plant creatures. Both comic books debuted at the same time with Marvel and D.C. accusing each other of stealing each other's ideas. It should be noted that one of the Marvel staff developing Man-Thing and one of the D.C. staff working on Swamp-Thing were roommates at the time, so speculation was that one leaked the idea to the other. Neither sued, because both were basically ripping off a story that appeared in one of the E.C. Comics horror anthology titles. This movie is nothing like any of those comics. Instead, it is about a vengeful swamp spirit that takes the form of a plant creature that goes around killing everyone who wanders into the Swamp. Doesn't look like Man-Thing, doesn't act like Man-Thing, has none of the supporting characters from the comic books, none of the villains.  What's the point? It's like as if some studio got the rights to Batman, then turned it into a movie about a guy with pet bats. So basically Man-Thing is a monster movie with the standard plot of something killing people, then the heroes discover where the monster is  and try to kill it.


#27 From Beyond ( 1986 )
Another one of those films I probably bought because of an erotic scene. Possibly because of a dominatrix scene with 80s scream queen  Barbara Crampton. A scene I found very sexy when me and my friends rented the movie on VHS back around 1987. But watching it today am not as turned on as they have done more on an average episode of a CW series many times. This movie was made at a time when H. P. Lovecraft was a thing. It reunited most of the cast and crew from Reanimator from a few years earlier. Jeffrey Combs plays Crawford, the assistant of Dr. Pretorius, who comes running out screaming from the creepy house they were experimenting in, and when the police go inside to investigate, they find Pretorius' headless body. Charged with his murder, Crawford is sent to an asylum where his doctor ( Crampton ) thinks that maybe he is telling the truth about a machine called a resonator when turned on, opens a doorway to an alternate dimension.  So the only logical thing to do is take Crawford on a field trip to Pretorius' house so the resonator can be fixed and turned on again. When it is turned on, creatures can be seen floating in the air, soon to be joined by Pretorius who's head merged with something in the other dimension turning him into a half Pretorius half monster that keeps getting gooier as the film progresses. Monster Pretorius tries to drag everyone into his dimension so they can merge with them, but Crawford shuts the resonator off, causing everything from the other dimension to disappear. At this point the smart thing to do is dismantle the resonator and smash every single component to bits. But when are characters in a horror movie ever smart. So it gets turned on again and again, each time bringing out Pretorius and more monsters, causing everyone in the house to go nuts, and causing Crawford to grow a worm like pineal gland out of his forehead. People are grotesquely killed, and slimy things are everywhere, all which I doubt was ever in the H. P. Lovecraft short story this was allegedly based on.

[stethacantus]

#28 Tentacles ( 1977 )
I found a couple of my Jaws rip off films. This one, an Italian American co-production, replaces the shark with a giant man eating octopus, and aside from being a Jaws rip off is best known for almost being John Wayne's final film. He had accepted and was cast in one of the lead roles, but then the producer decided he looked too old and sickly. It was the closest Wayne came to filming a movie after The Shootist.  This movie is full of award winning actors who's characters are nor on screen much, and who all disappear by the third act. The Orcas that eventually fight the Octopus get more screen time.  It is perhaps the dullest of the Jaws rip-offs. The sort of dull you get with Asylum films. The best way to summarize this film would be: "Oceanographer begs his trained Orcas to take revenge for him after an octopus eats his wife."  ( BTW, this was on a double feature disc with Empire of the Ants, which I have determined is a Science Fiction film, so will not be watched tomorrow.  Also, there were three more horror films beneath the double feature disc I want to see much more than a movie about giant ants turning Joan Collins into their slave. )

[stethacantus]

#29 The Car ( 1977 )
After Jaws became the most successful movie in motion picture history, there was a brief period when other studios tried to rip it off, which would subside two years later when Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind surpassed it, and studios began making sci/fi fantasy films instead.  No one could be sure what the magic formula was that made Jaws a hit. Some simply made more killer shark films. Some tried other killer aquatic animals. Some felt any gory film with a predator, even a land mammal, was the formula. Since the shark in Jaws was huge, some studios surmised any movie with an oversized animal would be a hit, which is why Universal and Paramount went to court to fight over the rights to remake King Kong, which both studios were convinced would be the next Jaws. And then you got something as inventive as The Car, which replaced the ocean with roads, and the shark with a demon possessed car that goes around running pedestrians over. Someone did their homework on Spielberg and realized the similarities between Jaws and Duel. Killer truck, killer shark, why not killer car? The black car in question shows up for no reason and kills two bicyclists, then proceeds to pick off residents one by one before the sheriff realizes they are dealing with an indestructible demon car. Eventually the car begins killing residents in their own houses, beginning with the sheriff's girlfriend.  Now it is personal, so they decide to lure it to a canyon full of dynamite and blow it up. This was the first film to attempt to emulate Spielberg's style, and the result was a dumb yet entertaining killer car movie. Just when you thought it was safe to cross the street.

[stethacantus]

#30 Train To Busan ( 2016 )
I am ending this challenge with two of my favorite Asian zombie films. Train To Busan one ups every zombie film that ever existed. In Seoul, a zombie plague breaks out due to the leak of a mysterious substance a bio company had been developing. Once bitten by a zombie, the victim is converted into a zombie  within the hour, sometimes within minutes. These aren't the lumbering zombies from most films, but highly energetic rabid zombie that will run after you.  Soon most of Seoul has become a rabid army of zombies with the survivors fighting for their lives. Meanwhile, a train departs from a depot for Busan with passengers and crew not aware of what is going on yet, and believing what they are seeing in the news is just riots. An infected victim of a zombie had jumped onto the train just before it disembarked, and soon most of the cars are infected with the surviving passengers trying to keep the zombie hoard out of their car, and unable to stop as the plague has already spread to cities across the Korean peninsula.  This is among my favorite films of the past 20 years, and I have to admit, I sort of knew which box it was in and as the month grew short, began purposefully digging into that box. I had to disqualify an ant film, but I am glad to have watched this one again.

[stethacantus]

#31 Train To Busan Presents: Peninsula ( 2020 )
Well, did it! This is the 31st film, only interrupted a dozen times by trick or treaters.  But I managed to watch 31 Horror films in 31 days.  I had a lot more horror genre films in my library I had hoped I would find. Silent films like Hunchback of Notre Dame, superhero films like Ghost Rider, most of the Scream franchise, Poltergeist, Gremlins, Arachnophobia and others produced by Spielberg.  The Granada version of Hound of the Baskerville, and a whole lot of other Asian horror films. None of those were found. My library is scattered in many boxes stuffed with hundreds of discs, and any film can be anywhere. I knew where all the Abbott & Costello films were. Universal put them in a sizable box shaped like a luggage trunk for God knows what reason, so is kept with the other oversized collector box sets. I decided to make this more of a challenge.  So just the one Abbott & Costello film I had on Laserdisc. Gave me more of a variety of film than a bunch of A&C films in a row, and did away with having to debate if Hold That Ghost, Time of Their Lives or Abbott & Costello meet the Killer, Borris Karloff count as horror.  There are many who criticize Train To Busan Presents: Peninsula for being too much of an action movie and not enough of a zombie movie. But I like it. A sort of mash up of Escape From New York, Road Warrior and a zombie movie. Perhaps this movie has more thrills than chills, but I am getting my full fill of horror from those non stop political commercials that make every single candidate in every contest out to be the most dangerous monster ever.  So, either vote for one candidate and end up in a dystopian dictatorship, or the other candidate and hordes of migrants will kill us all, eat our pets, then steal our jobs. Dracula and Jason are looking tame in comparison.

[SJP]

And done.  I'm actually surprised that this year that I only watched one riffed movie (though I have had Rifftrax on while doing other things, only one did I sit down and watch for the month), and this may be the only year I didn't have to make up a day at all.  I don't know how that worked out, as this is probably one of the busiest years outside of this, but somehow I did it.

25: 13 Secrets (2016)
A young girl with the ability to see ghosts gives a ghost hunter show its greatest ratings...but will they go too far?
The movie itself is middling, with a somewhat cheesy finale that (to its credit, since not too many do) tries to tack a happy(ish) ending on, but...oh, my.  The dubbing.  There must be a version in the original Thai under its original name of Bangkok 13 somewhere (I was unable to find a copy), and if you want to watch this, watch it with the original language and subtitles.  The dub is bad.  Not even funny bad, just...flat, and everybody from a twenty-something guy to a near retirement guy they keep calling 'Uncle' are all voiced by the same smarmy person.  This might be the single worst dubbing job I've ever heard in a film...I'm not joking on this.  It really does make the movie less appealing.

26: Lone Wolf (1988)
A bunch of college students are being attacked by a werewolf, and they have to figure out who it is before they become the prime suspects in the killings.
A bit more character development in this than you might think for a low grade B-film, since most of the cast has to live until the end to keep the mystery going (though about twenty minutes in, when they started focusing on certain characters, I suddenly realized who would be the villain...and was proven right). Kind of sad that the spoiler tag no longer exists, since I would have used it here.  But for MST3K fans, this is a MUST see...the owner of the nightclub of the movie, in his first role as a bit part?  SAM THE GROUNDSKEEPER FROM WEREWOLF!  "Weird things a'doin, around here..."  Sadly, he does not say those lines, but it's wonderful to see him in something else.

27: The Lair of the White Worm (1988)
Doctor Who digs up a skull, revealing that an ancient snake god was worshipped millennia ago.  The priestess who keeps the tradition alive tries to sacrifice everyone she can, but Hugh Grant is there foil her plans and to be a rich aristocrat when that was the part he was required to play in movies.
If you've never seen a Ken Russell movie before...well, this is probably one of his most normal films.  And considering what the priestess straps on, that's like saying this green M&M has slightly less chocolate in it than this brown M&M.  It's decent, and has a few memorable moments, but I did expect a movie of its reputation to have more to it.  It's watchable, but I have other 'cult classics' I would watch more often.

28: Nosferatu (1979)
Werner Herzog directs Klaus Kinski and the guy who played Hitler in the Downfall movie (and memes) in this remake of the silent film.  People occasionally talk in Herzog-style monologues.
This is not a movie for everybody, since it is very 'arthouse' at its foundation, but...I liked this movie.  I really liked it.  I agree with Roger Ebert that it's not 'scary,' and it's slow as molasses, but it's a beautiful movie to look at.  I mentioned in my Substack review of it that it's not like a dream, but a fugue state, as the movie wanders in a daze to its next plot point, and suddenly it gains focus, and then drifts off again.  But, there's slow with a purpose, and there's slow because you have no budget and no story.  This is the former, and it's probably the best movie I watched all month.  But I mentioned the guy who played Hitler (a Swiss actor named Bruno Ganz)...he's since died, but he is a really good actor.  He's in that movie whose name escapes me at the moment where Liam Neeson runs around saying, "I AM Doctor MARTIN HARRIS!" and he's the single best part of that film.  Heck, he seems like he's actually been spliced in from a better film for most of his scenes.

29: Night Vision (1987)
A writer from Kansas goes to Denver to hit it big...but runs afoul of a cursed TV, a cult who wants it back, the low-rent thief who caused the trouble in the first place, and the gal at the video store who finds herself falling for him.
This movie didn't have much of a chance following Nosferatu, but then, I didn't expect anything to.  It's a cheap little film, but I found it charming in its own way.  The romance feels realistic, but at the same time, it also sucks up three-quarters of the plot, and the ending feels like it was rushed into because they just didn't have time or money to do the cult stuff the way they wanted to.  It just hit me a lucky time, because most days I probably wouldn't have cared for it, but it felt like giving it a hard time would be like kicking a puppy; it's earnest and trying, even if a little mangy around the edges.

30: 13 Ghosts (1960)
Family on the skids are informed a dead uncle has a house that they can afford to live in.  Catch is, it's haunted, because said uncle caught ghosts for a living.  The ghosts, though, are no match for the human element that is after said uncle's hidden fortune.
This really feels like House on Haunted Hill, family friendly edition.  Nobody and nothing is in any real peril until the third quarter of the movie, and even so, the ghosts don't really do a whole lot except wander around in the best superimposed technology available at the time.  Shame the gimmick with the Technicolor blue background and red ghosts are desaturated into black and white on this release; even if it didn't work right, it still would have been nice to see it.  Charming 60s Castle flick, but I still think I like Haunted Hill better.

31: It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown and Garfield's Halloween (1966/1985)
Not really going to get into these too deeply, because if you haven't seen them, you should.  The kids have never seen Garfield before, though, and it was a treat to watch it with them.  Still waiting to see which of them is going to be the one who loves horror the most, in the end.

I know it was a quiet year this year, but I have been reading the reviews...I hope everybody had a good time, good and bad movies alike!

[Charles Castle]

Unfortunately I just have not had the time to view or write much this year at all, so I will leave a stake here and try to get back with as much as I can.

1. The Boogeyman (2023)
2. Brightburn (2019)
3. Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice (2024)
4. The Fury (1978)
5. Jennifer's Body (2009)
6. The Amityville Horror (2005)
7. The Conference (2023)
8. Longlegs (2024)
9. Cold Blows the Wind (2024)
10. Megalopolis (2024) - The horror! The horror!
11. Pet Sematary (1989)
12. Salem's Lot (2024)
13. Haunted Mansion (2023)
14. Shadow of a Doubt (1943)

15. Woman of the Hour
16. Immaculate
17. Evil Dead 2
18. Blade
19. House of the Devil
20. Friday the 13th (2009)
21. Lovely, Dark, and Deep
22. Apartment 7a
23. Rosemary's Baby
24. Last Night in Soho
25. The Vourdalak
26. Panna a netvor/Beauty and the Beast (1978)
27. Good Manners
28. Lord of Illusions
29. Frankenstein (1931)
30. Candyman (1992)
31.Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me


Some reviews to come, and maybe minor comments for the rest. That's twice as many as I have seen in one month this year. Maybe I should establish themes for every month to motivate my wife, who seemed almost to be in better health with the challenge as a goal.

[Charles Castle]

I know I'm late on this, but for posterity...

I don't think more than five minutes had elapsed at the start of Immaculate (2024, directed by Michael Mohan) before I started thinking about the Magdalene laundries and residential schools. What goes on in the convent depicted in this film is not so far outside the actions of the actual Roman Catholic Church that the film can be dismissed as mere exploitation. Don't get me wrong, it IS exploitation, but that's beside the point. It has such theological and ideological axes to grind that it was bound to find Evangelical Christians and devout Catholics and right wing trolls of all sorts squawking when the film reached its end. This film hasn't got time for their bullshit. It has a particular shape of reality it wants to express and it uses bludgeons to present it. It's crude, but it's brutally effective.

The plot follows American novitiate Sister Cecilia traveling to the convent in Italy where she will take her vows. Cecilia has felt a deep religious calling since surviving a drowning in childhood during which she was "dead" for several minutes before being revived. She has been invited to the convent by Father Tadeschi, and in due course takes her vows. The convent is a hospice for nuns at the end of their lives. Cecilia feels a bit adrift at first, given that her Italian is poor. She befriends Sister Gwen, who speaks English. As she explores her new environs, she notices strange occurrences. Some of the nuns have crosses branded or scarred on the soles of their feet. The convent's private chapel is a reliquary in which, she discovers, is one of the nails used in the crucifiction. One night, she dreams of hooded figures gathered around her against which she has no ability to resist. Afterward, she finds that she has become pregnant, though her maidenhead is intact. The other nuns view this as a miracle, save for Sister Isabella, who attacks Cecilia and tries to drown her before throwing herself from the roof of the convent. The pregnancy goes poorly for Cecilia, and when she loses a tooth, she demands to be taken to a hospital. Father Tadeschi refuses. Meanwhile, the old nuns who are the convent's patients begin to view Cecilia with religious awe. Sister Gwen, however, takes a stand against her superiors, and pays a price for it. After faking a miscarriage fails to liberate her from the convent, Cecilia becomes resigned to her fate, especially after her own feet are branded to keep her from escaping. But she's got a plan. She bides her time until right before her labor. When she manages to escape her confinement, she discovers the true horror of what the Church has planned for her.

One right wing reaction to Immaculate holds that star Sydney Sweeney was shoved into this film because she was popular among conservative Christian men and that the film is intended to degrade her in the eyes of that audience and make them sad in their pants. I am sincerely skeptical of her alleged popularity among this demographic because have you actually seen Euphoria? I mean, really. Additionally, nobody shoved Sweeney into doing anything. She originally auditioned for the role a decade ago, never forgot it, and bought the rights herself to get it made. It's right there in the credits: Producer Sydney Sweeney. It is fair to say that the actress herself has an ideological interest in the film. The elephant in the room when listening to these kinds of critics is that this is a film about abortion and reproductive rights that is categorically opposed to the anti-choice right and to the Catholic Church and to Evangelical Christianity more generally, all of whom it views as anti-woman and anti-life. And because it was released by a small distributor--Neon has a history of releasing lefty content (they release films by Laura Poitras, for crying out loud)--it comes to the screen more or less unfiltered.

I don't typically like devil movies or possession movies all that much. They tend to act as propaganda for religion, for Christianity, and for the Catholic Church more specifically. This film acts in opposition to that impulse, and I think that it's about time that impulse was questioned. The Exorcist, after all, came after a decade of upheaval created by young people and its central thesis was that foul-mouthed young people were driving the world to hell in a handbasket almost literally and the only way to stop it was to coerce the acceptance of the authority and supernatural power of the Church. It paved the way for the politics of the Reagan era. Its effect still echoes in contemporary politics, so I welcome a countervailing narrative.

It doesn't take a detective to see this film as a reflection of the Dobbs ruling overturning Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court of the United States in 2022. A woman who is forced to carry a baby not of her making by a patriarchal Church? Yeah. That's obvious. This film re-writes the end of Rosemary's Baby with the mother nipping things in the bud in the way that Rosemary Woodhouse should have done once she saw that her baby had "his father's eyes." Perhaps less obvious is a broader culture war being fought over religion and secularism. This is a film with overtly religious themes, but it is hostile to religion in a way that its contemporaneous fellow traveler, The First Omen, is not. In spite of its trappings, this is not a devil movie. This is a "God" movie, where the villains of the piece are trying to engineer The Second Coming. Even dressed up in horror movie trappings, this is nakedly opposed to the project by the religious right to bring about exactly the same thing in the real world outside the movie screen. The Evangelical project in Israel, for one example, is inspired by this very impulse. The Jews must remain in Israel/Palestine for Jesus to return in their framing of the end times. Immaculate is a film that both speaks to its moment in time and is of its moment in time.

The genre horror here functions in three other separate keys beyond the reproductive nightmare it presents. At the outset, it functions as a paranoia thriller, in which its central character doesn't know who to trust and who is blocked at every turn from saving herself by people she trusted. It also functions as a Christian version of a folk horror film. The scene where Sister Cecilia is dressed up as the Madonna and worshiped by the nuns who are in on the plot is of a piece with Florence Pugh's flowery get up in Midsommar. The ultimate plot, in which a priest who used to be a geneticist attempts to clone Jesus Christ from the blood remaining on one of the nails used in the crucifixion is the sort of thing Nigel Kneale might have written if he had had a taste for irreligious mockery. All of these strains weave together with the dominant narrative to create a bigger picture that is so much more horrible than any of these ideas alone. Each narrative twine leads to Sister Cecilia biting the umbilical cord that ties her to their plot, to the Church, and maybe to faith generally. She does this both figuratively and literally. The villains here would have done well to heed their own holy book, which says that no man knows the hour of the second coming, that it will come like a thief in the night.

I know plenty of people who question whether Sydney Sweeney is a good actor or not. I get that. She has a tendency to mush her words like a teenager and some viewers won't like that. But for this film, she's fine. She performs every emotion she's asked to perform. The final scene, when she finally gives birth and has a choice to make, asks her to go beyond where most actors will usually go. She's up to the challenge and performs it with a convincing mix of pain and horror and rage. She absolutely nails the landing. The scene where she fakes a miscarriage as a means of escaping the convent also works because Sweeney is even up to acting that she's acting, which is not an easy thing. Moreover, the rest of the cast has few native English speakers, so they throw Sweeney into stark contrast. She's on her own in this movie and she holds the camera.

I will mention yet again that I am a seriously lapsed Catholic. The Church has done so much evil in the world, from preventing Catholics from using condoms in the Global South in the face of HIV to the Magdalene Laundries and residential schools I've already mentioned to sex abuse scandals without number to financial shenanigans through the Vatican Bank to its complicity with fascism during World War II to its role as the handmaiden of Colonialism and so on and so on, that it's impossible for me to recognize it as a moral authority on anything. It's certainly impossible for me to recognize any moral authority on matters of bodily autonomy. This is an institution that used to castrate young boys to preserve their voices for singing in the Church's choirs, after all. Seriously, the last castrati died in the 20th Century, so it's NOT a medieval practice. The gall it takes to tell someone what they can and can't do with their own bodies after that boggles the mind. It's safe to say that I'm a key member of the demographic for any film that questions - or obliterates - the Church's moral authority. This one hits that itch just so.

[Charles Castle]

Blade (1998, directed by Stephen Norrington) didn't seem like a landmark film at the time of its release, but time has been kind to it. It remains a shock that this film and this character were the first foundations laid in what has become the Marvel Entertainment empire. Blade never had a comic book of his own prior to the movie. He was a supporting character from the long-forgotten Tomb of Dracula series in the 1970s, and yet was the first Marvel Comics character to become a big screen success after previous attempts--famously Howard the Duck, less famously The Punisher and Captain America--crashed and burned in spectacular fashion. But more than that Blade ushered in both a cinematic idiom and design aesthetic that would spread like wildfire throughout cinema. The Matrix movies were the immediate inheritors of Blade's fetish-attired action look, but you can see it in the Underworld movies, too, and in the Resident Evil movies, and in countless vampire films and television shows littering the backwash in the film's resulting wake in the myth pool. Pick up any given "urban fantasy" romance novel these days and you'll see an echo of Blade's influence right there on the cover. Guaranteed.

Blade follows the exploits of the eponymous hero as he fights a secret war against the vampires that live among us. Blade has the advantages granted to him by an accident of his birth: his mother was in labor when she was bitten by a vampire, and Blade was born with all of the powers of a vampire, but without the weaknesses. He can walk around in sunlight, he is unaffected by silver and garlic. Although he feels the thirst for blood, he can control it with a serum that's made for him by his mentor, Whistler. The vampires call him "The Daywalker." Opposing Blade is Deacon Frost, an upstart vampire lord who is upsetting the ancient order of the vampire clans. Frost is a "turned" vampire, rather than a pure vampire who was born as one, and the heads of the vampire clans distrust and dislike him. He has power and followers, though, and he has made a mission of translating parts of the Book of Erebus--the vampire "Bible"--whose meaning has been lost for millennia. His long game is to summon the vampire god, La Magra, and lead the vampires in a cleansing war to supplant humans as the dominant species on Earth. Caught in the middle of all of this is Dr. Karen Jensen, who is unfortunate enough to be an attending physician when the vampire, Quinn, is brought into her hospital as a burn victim from a run-in with Blade. Quinn revives, of course, and bites Karen as he makes his escape. Blade rescues Karen as Quinn makes his escape, then takes her to his lair in order to treat her for her vampirism. Whistler thinks he should have killed her, but they're in time and prevent her from becoming a vampire. She has a useful skill, though: she's a hematologist, and Blade is building up a resistance to the serum that keeps the thirst at bay. Meanwhile, Frost completes his project, and discovers that Blade himself is the key to summoning the vampire god.

Blade exists at a cinematic nexus between the action movies of the Hong Kong new wave, the CGI special effects movie, the superhero movie, and the horror movie. Unlike many films that occupy so many cinematic idioms at once, Blade seems to arise naturally from all of them. It announces itself as a horror movie right off: comely vampire Traci Lords leads an unwitting dudebro into the depths of a meat packing plant where a secret door hides a rave. The assorted clubgoers seem disinterested in him until the sprinkler system douses the entire room with blood. Like the punks a generation earlier, Goth culture is associated with deviance and villainy, but given that the heroes of this film are Goth-styled badasses, that's okay. It has an even hand with such things. Blade's arrival on the scene is the kind of iconic framing that action stars crave but either never get or which wind up looking ridiculous when they come. Wesley Snipes, done up in black armor, black duster, and bearing a silvered katana, does not look ridiculous. He looks like he means business, and the film proceeds with its first action sequence with Blade chopping up vampires like they're so many extras in a samurai film. The interplay between Blade and Quinn in this scene suggests a much longer story without actually having to stop and provide exposition ("I'm getting a little tired of chopping you up. Thought I might try fire for a change."). The war has been going on for a long time. Other elements of the film play like scenes from the apocalypse, whether the grotesque vampire archivist or Dragonetti's unfortunate encounter with the rising sun.

This is a lean action film, edited with propulsive forward momentum and rarely stopping for very long. The scenes that examine vampire politics are as close to resting points as the film permits. It's edited with a surprising clarity of action. The geography of characters is usually clear, and scenes flow from one to the next with a purpose. Director Stephen Norrington comes to the director's chair from a career in special effects, which wouldn't suggest he's a skilled director of bodies in motion, but he's mostly good at it here (his subsequent career, however...).  Norrington is a little too enamoured with digital effects, though, and when the film presents us with vampire disintegrations a la Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it begins to resemble a video game. When the film presents the god version of Deacon Frost, the special effects really let the film down (and did in 1998--this isn't just a matter of two decades plus worth of special effects advances). This doesn't hurt the movie as much as it could have, but it's a blemish on the film's otherwise sleek surfaces.

This film wouldn't work without Snipes. Snipes had been trying for years to get a Black Panther film off the ground, but wound up "settling" for Blade. He acted as a producer as well as a star and his investment in the role is visible in every scene he's in. Stephen Dorff, by contrast, seems like a frat boy playing at being a vampire, though this is of a piece, I think. Certainly, Frost earns all of the disdain Udo Kier's vampire chieftain feels toward him. Kris Kristofferson (RIP) is fine doing the crusty old man part as Whistler. He gets some of the film's best lines, and alone of the supporting cast members got invited back for the sequel. He's a good addition to the character's mythology. N'bushe Wright has rather more to do than most damsel/girlfriend characters, which is refreshing, but she's not co-equal with Blade himself. This is a one-man show.

In truth, I had mostly forgotten how much fun this film is in the wake of Guillermo Del Toro's sequel. This film is generally pretty good even if it doesn't have the visionary sensibilities of that second film. And Blade, not its sequel struck the spark. The conflagration is still burning.