Now, this is how you translate a work to the big screen. Of course, it helps if it came from a comic book. After all, it worked for "Spawn," a film I kept thinking about when watching the similarly engaging "Blade" starring Wesley Snipes, back in the action mode again.

The vampire genre must welcome a new member fluttering through the window, although the censors in Jamaica don't share my enthusiasm for this most engaging action/horror flick of Wesley Snipes. That Caribbean nation objected to the intense violence when it was released there in theatres, which only fueled home rentals here.

But "Blade" just kept layering on the action about a modern day high tech vampire killer who has all of their strengths, but none of their weaknesses.

Called the Daywalker because he need not fear the UV rays that makes toast out of the average vampire, Blade is analogous to a supernatural crack baby. His mother was attacked while he was in the womb, and he survived to become a genetic link to both the humans and Homunis Nocturnis, or the Night Stalkers.

In the film is what you'd expect if vampires really walked the night; there's garlic and silver nitrate mace for the vigilantes, with automatic weapons that rapid-fire silver bullet dum-dums and hollow points filled with a garlic core. Another gang of bloodsuckers bite the dust! "John Carpenter's Vampire" is similar to the hard-core nature of this one, but not as stylish.

This modernizing of the Vampire legend was given a further twist by using Kris Kristofferson as Whistler, a modern day Van Helsing. He almost killed the youngster in an alley during his nightly prowls for vampires. "He was living off scraps and the homeless when I found him," Whistler relates. He fixed him up and trained him to carry on his vendetta against the vampires who slew his family.

The two became supernatural vigilantes, hacking and slicing their way through vampire dens whenever they find them. "There's a war going on" Whistler tells the young female blood researcher who makes the mistake of getting between some blood and a vampire at her hospital. " We try and keep it from spilling over. Sometimes people like you get caught in the crossfire."

N'Bushe Wright is the researcher who helps devise a serum for Blade to keep him from giving in to a thirst for blood, and poison for the bad guy vampires. Her presence is a plus, and apart from her shooting near the climax of "Dead Presidents" this is among her first sustained action films.

Vampires are being used as society's version of organized serial killers. The films, which comprise a genre all their own, come in clusters and we seem to be in another wave. In recent ears we've seen the campy and serio-comic films "From Dusk 'Til Dawn" and "Bordello of Blood." There was the Leslie Nielson spoof "Dracula: Dead and Loving It," the original film "Buffy The Vampire Slayer" ; the artsy and well-received "Interview With The Vampire" and "Bram Stoker's Dracula."

Somebody did a search and came up with more than 300 films based on vampires, such as Nicolas Cage's "Red Rock West," and the newest, the hard core "Vampires" with James Wood and Daniel Baldwin.

Black folks were into the vampire genre from way back. "Blacula" and its sequels from the 1970s were joined by Eddie Murphy and Angela Bassett in the entertaining but underrated "A Vampire In Brooklyn."

There are some undertones in the film that I found very interesting. The interplay of power, caste, race loyalty, and sex were freely intertwined in "Blade," in an unselfconscious way that was most refreshing. Blade is considered a turncoat by the true vampires, who throw it in his face. "Spare me the 'Uncle Tom' routine," Blade's nemesis Frost says. "You'll never be accepted by the humans."

Stephen Dorff from "The Power of One" and "Judgment Night" is superbly cast as the renegade Frost, who's trying to break the Treaty with the humans by marshaling the vampire forces. Apparently, there's an Olde World vampire Cabal which has an agreement with our misleaders that specify how many hapless humans are to be culled from the population, like sick and weak calves by wolves. "These nightclubs of yours are dangerous," Frost is told. "If we gather in numbers we draw unnecessary attention of the human politicians to our kind!" 

The sneering, arrogant Frost declares "They are our food! We should be ruling the humans, not making back alley deals with them!!... They're just pieces of meat, and we're the top of the food chain." The vamps use high finance, real estate and political corruption, even high speed mainframes to increase their power. I guess compound interest will add up when you live for hundreds of years.

"Interview with the Vampire" had the bloodsuckers of 1800s Paris with their own theatrical venue. In "Blade" they have a Techno Pop club where black is definitely in. These children of the night dress and live well, of course you know the nightlife is on from dusk 'til Dawn! Their coffins are even high tech, with hydraulic ceiling -uspended stainless steel lids.

Slathered in the strongest sun block, they can go out during the day, wearing lots of leather making sure the visors are down on the motorcycle helmets! Stuff like this keeps the film fresh and enjoyable for modern tastes, where it could have easily dropped into the camp trap that caught "The Avengers," one of the longest two-hour blocks of time I ever wasted.

"Blade" also resembled a war movie with the weaponry used in the film, and the numerous battle scenes. Snipes, who is a devotee of the Afric-Latin martial arts called Capoiera used lots of it in the movie, and the violence and bloodshed is tremendous, in a stylistic sort of way. If Hong Kong filmmaker John Woo had made it, it would be praised in advance for its "stylized and balletic violence." Blade slices and dices his way through multitudes of bloodsuckers, and the moves aren't connected to reality, but that's the fun of it.

N'Bushe Wright gets caught up in the action as a hematologist who makes herself useful when she can whip up potions for Blade and against the vamps. "Don't try and cure me" the taciturn Blade tells Dr. Karen. "If you want to help, make me a better servant," after he's told a cure would remove his powers, and he'd be a normal human again. "You'd better wake up little girl" Blade tells Karen after she tries to get him to be merciful to a vamp he's caught. "There's the candy-coated world you live in, and underneath it there's the real world!"

There's lots of dialogue like that in the film, as well as some fairly heavy symbolic subtext involving race, power, and some Oedipal stuff I can't get into in this video view. But this made the film a lot more enjoyable than I expected, and I was very satisfied and pleased by "Blade."

I haven't read any of the comics it was based on, but when I interviewed Wesley Snipes a couple of years ago for "Sugar Hill," he said that he would be doing some comic book based characters through his production company.

Marvel's Black Panther was supposed to be his first, about the comic book world's first African descended super hero. It's probably languishing in development hell somewhere. Meanwhile "Blade" is from the Africentric oriented Snipe's Amen Ra production group, named after the top statesman, healer, inventor and architect of ancient Kemet, or Egypt, as the Greeks called it.

The film was more than an adequate translation to the big screen as so many films are these days, from several sources: TV shows, cartoons, video games, even comic strips are fueling the Hollywood machine these days. "X Files" and "Rugrats" the movies join games like "Mortal Kombat."

Marvel Comics has supplied more than its share of direct to film characters, and more are being planned. A big budget "Spider Man" from James "Titanic" Cameron looks like it finally might get out of the gate, as well as either a feature length "X Men" or "Wolverine." "Fantastic Four" was just a dream until modern computer animation such as that used in Cameron's "The Abyss" and "Terminator 2" was created.

BLADE is from New Line Cinemas, who learned from "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" how to milk a comic book franchise for all it's worth. Directed by Stephen Norrington, it co-stars Donal Logue, Kris Kristofferson, and N'Bushe Wright, and rated "R" for language, martial arts and combat shooting action, as well as vampiric violence. Actually, the screen version I saw was "Not Yet Rated." Your home video version may differ because they put stuff back in for home use that upset the censors --the American ones-- so it may be even more hard-core.

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