Blade - 1998

Designed to be cool, nothing special but cool enough. The boring part was the usual "forget what you've seen in the movies, the cross doesn't work, to kill vampires use silver, and of course sun-light",  like they do in all vampires-movies. Everytime they say the same speech about how in reality it's different from what you've seen in the movies. Boring. Only thing is that this time out bad guy Frost (Stephen Dorff) was not born a vampire, he was a human, he was turned into a vampire, so he can simply put on a lot of sunlotion and he can watch the sun rise, and walk during the day, as he does when he takes that little girl hostage to talk to Blade (Wesley Snipes) . There's also a lot of splatter scenes: when the old vampire burns in the sun, and every time evil vampires feed on humans, covering their faces with blood. It must be because they like to make a mess, being bad, because when Blade was so weak that Karen offered him his neck (like Buffy did for Angel), he fed for many long seconds, and not a drop of blood was wasted/visible on his face or on her neck, and when he stopped she was still strong enough to walk and take action. Every time a bad guy feeds it lasts a second and the victim is dead or transformed. Well, it's not an error per se, because they're evil so they like to kill and they like a bloodbath (they're quite disgusting, yes) but he has his soul in the right place so he doesn't kill her. It makes sense, it's not necessarily a mistake.
The story is simple: Blade hunts vampires down everywhere, killing as many as he can. Blade is a half-vampire because his mother was bitten while she was pregnant. He was found by Whistler (Kris Kristofferson) when he was thirteen, about to feel in him the bad sides of his vampire blood. Whistler helped him. Whistler also gives Blade a vaccine to keep his bloodthirst under control, and since then Blade has kept taking it every tot hours. During an attack he saves Dr Karen (N'Bushe Wright) and now she sticks to him and helps him, which is the second boring thing of the movie. Not her, I like her, but the fact that a common person, a doctor even, can take a gun and become a fighter without a second of training. This is more than boring, this is annoying. Moving on, Blade wants to kill them all to avenge his mother, while Frost wants to rule the Earth, to stop hiding like the old vampires did; he wants to bring out the power he read of in a prophecy (yep, a prophecy, it's so simple to invent a plot with a good prophecy at hand) for which he needs Blade's blood. They kill Whistler, kidnap Karen and imprison Blade, cutting his wrists to have his blood. Frost also kills the old vampires in the rite. It was a cool scene when a sort of skull-ghosts came out of them, funny. Karen escapes, frees Blade and gives him her blood to gain strength. He finds his mother turned into a vampire by Frost. He kills her and fights all the vampires on his way, although it's not clear why they don't keep fighting after he punches them. A few are killed, but many others are just punched, that could not be enough to kill them! The final battle is with Frost of course, but he has in him the power the prophecy told about, so even after Blade cuts him in half Frost gets whole again without a flinch and keeps fighting. Very conveniently Blade finds there is his vaccine, so he threw five or six syringes to Frost and he exploded. It happens in movies, sometimes, that to be stung by a syringe is enough, but it's usually not, and it wasn't for Blade, he needed Whistler to push it in, the vaccine. The movie ends with Blade refusing to try Karen's cure for his condition, because he still needs his abilities to go on with his fight. It's a mystery how can he know exactly when and where he will find vampires, but it doesn't matter. I was surprised, there was no word on him drinking Karen's blood. She had been infected before and she had survived without transformation, cured, so I had a thought on her blood helping him as a natural vaccine or something like that, but there was no word about that. I liked Dorff, he portrayed well this psycho, that had not only the powers and blood thirst of vampires, but also the greed, ambition, arrogance of humans. I also liked our two protagonists, very cool, and I'm glad there was no love story between them, this was not the movie for that. I kind of liked the old vampire too, pity he died and won't be present in the sequels. It's not a bad movie, although nothing special. It's designed to look cool, but it should have looked a bit more gothic/dark, and the action-scenes lacked something, they were not perfectly constructed, they looked to rehearsed. Of course they were, obviously, but a movie scene should not 'look' rehearsed, should not 'feel' rehearsed.