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Rise: Blood Hunter
The accidental vampire
2007
Review: February 26, 2008
Director: Sebastian Gutierrez
Starring: Lucy Liu, Michael Chiklis, Robert Forster, James D’Arcy
Won’t hurt, won’t help
THE SETUP:
Woman is turned into vampire, and is pretty annoyed that they didn’t even, like, ASK her.
DISCUSSION:
A friend of mine recommended this, saying it was not that great, but it did have Michael Chiklis with a goatee. When I saw that it also starred Lucy Liu, a favorite since Lucky Number Slevin, it went to the top of my list.
We begin with Liu luring a prostitute away from Robert Forster, taking her home and making her strip, etc. If you’re into lesbian stuff it’s probably erotic. Hell if I can tell. Anyway, Liu, whose character is Sadie, suddenly grabs the girl’s hands and asks if she’s washed them. We get a little taste of the snarky little Liu we like with her cold delivery of “I’m a little weird about that.” Soon the girl is strung upside-down and is being offered to a guy in a wheelchair. Then Sadie extorts information from the wheelchair guy and shoots him, setting the girl free.
Okay, so I’ve watched the whole movie and I still can’t quite piece together where that whole first scene fits into anything. This is one of those movies that tries to boost its energy and intrigue by telling its story out of sequence, which is coming to be among the last resorts of otherwise unexciting movies [thanks, Tarantino!]. I wonder if they finished the movie and then, as a way to try to help it, rearranged it out of sequence later. Oh by the way, this was never theatrically released in the US. It looks like something made for theaters, but then they watched it and, quite rightly said, “You know, it’s just not all that great.”
So Sadie wakes up in one of those big steel drawers in a morgue, and is all like “Oh my God, I’m, like, dead,” then she remembers what brought her here. She is a writer for L.A. Weekly, and her story about these undead-type parties made the cover. Then the requisite computer nerd tells her he found the location of this vampire party [through a bunch of very complicated methods] and Sadie decides to go. She arrives at this deserted house, then is attacked and taken to the big vampires, who are Bishop and some woman.
SPOILERS > > >
There she is presented with the computer nerd’s head, and Liu whips out the acting we all know she’s capable of as she seems genuinely traumatized and on the verge of losing her mind. It seems that the couple is into this whole sex-and-murder thing that obviously someone out there finds erotic but never did much for me. They rape Sadie while in the process of killing her. My favorite exchange is when Sadie begs “I don’t want to die! I’ve done you no harm! I’m a good person!” and the female vampire responds “Hippie talk, Sadie.”
Anyway, she’s issued a little knife with which to slash throats with [they don’t grow fangs], Michael Chiklis as cop Clyde sees her corpse, and next thing we’re back to her waking up in the morgue. This is where the jumping around in time can get confusing, because next thing we see her driving and are like: “Where’d she come by that car?” She picks up a hitch hiker and kills him so we know that she’s a vampire now, oooohhh.
Somewhere in here there’s a scene where Sadie calls her mom, who has been informed of her death, and thinks it’s one of those calls from a ghost. Then Sadie gets kidnapped and wakes up with some Hispanics who are going to train her to fight the vampires. There’s always some sensei just around every corner, right? Sadie trains and goes after them, beginning with her friend from work, etc., and in here I’ve had time to reflect that I really liked the Liu of Lucky Number Slevin because she was playing such a different character, but that I don’t like her nearly as much when she’s being a badass, like she usually is, and like she is here.
So already this is going on WAY too long and I am bored out of my skull. I actually watched this in three parts because I got so bored I turned it off twice. This is the unrated edition, so I don’t know how much they added back in, but there is no way this needs to be two hours. Anyway, soon enough Chiklis [yeah, lookin’ pretty good with that goatee, and my but he is a large fellow] arrests her, and they team up in life three minutes and it continues from there. I’m not even going to go into the ending, but I’m sure you could put it together in your head based on what I’ve told you already. < < < SPOILERS END
It was just really mediocre, which is fine, but if it’s going to be this mediocre, don’t make it this long. For one this kind of thing is just getting pretty generic by now, isn’t it? This movie does try to upend some of the conventions by having the vampires not have super powers and fangs and stuff, but, you know, WOW. Who cares? Liu is good, and I liked that her character remained fairly low-key and didn’t turn into an ass-kicking machine, but still, we’ve seen this kind of stuff a million times before. Whoever decided not to release this in theaters was smart, as it’s just not that good. Too bad they couldn’t have put the kabosh on it at the script stage, but whatever.
SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?
It’s mildly entertaining, but there are any number of more worthwhile things to watch.
