Blood: The Last Vampire   Starring: Gianna Jun, Allison Miller, Masiela Lusha and JJ Feild Pathé Distribution RRP: £15.99 P925501000 Certificate: 18 Available 02 November 2009

Saya has lived a bloody 400 year existence hunting vampire. A half breed herself she had been raised by Kato until he was killed and now she has a blood oath to kill Onigen. In the present time she works for a shadowy group calling themselves ‘The Organisation’ whose job it is to protect humans from vampire. Her latest mission takes her to Yokota Air Base where she strikes up an unlikely friendship with the base commander’s daughter, Alice...

Blood the Last Vampire (2009 - 1 hr, 25 min, 10 sec) is a live action adaptation of a short anime film, directed by Chris Nahon. The movie has been filmed primarily in English, presumably to increase its audience.

The original film was an interesting piece, but only really covered the attack on the base in any great detail. Here, in the live action film, the writers have attempted to flesh out the story a little more.

The film stars Gianna Jun as Saya, who is able to imbue her character with a sufficient amount of anger, even though the actresses grasp of English means that there is a lack of nuance in her performance. That said she still pulls off the most convincing performances of what is otherwise a very lacklustre bunch of actors.

Films like this rely very much on the quality of their CGI for the monsters and blood, and I find it very difficult to defend the film on this element. I honestly had to recheck what year the film had been made, thinking that it had been sitting on a shelf for a decade. I can understand that the idea was to make the special effects reflect the original anime, but in truth they just stank, and consequently pretty much guaranteed that the film would get a poor rating.

The picture is pretty good, if you don’t count the CGI, and the disc does come with a few extras, though why they didn’t include the original anime is beyond me; maybe they were afraid of the comparison. You do get six fairly short featurettes which consist of ‘watch only once’ material, a photo gallery and the trailer as well as the trailer for the superior anime film.

So an interesting if very flawed attempt to do a live action version of a manga. Sometimes this works, like Death Note or She the Ultimate Weapon and sometimes it doesn’t like Blood the Last Vampire.

5

Charles Packer