CINEMA VIEWS by Kevin J. Walker, Film Critic

"BLADE 2" -- A MOVIE YOU CAN SINK YOUR TEETH INTO

SNIPES IN "BLADE 2" KICKS ACTION INTO HIGH GEAR; VAMPIRES MADE SCARY AGAIN

"Is the enemy of my enemy my friend? Or my enemy?" The leader of the vampire mutant Reapers asks Blade

Now this is what an action-adventure comic book inspired film is supposed to be about! "Blade 2" is off the effen hook, with action, fighting, and hard talking Man Stuff squeezed into every place it would fit. Pay no attention to the limp-wristed bi-coastal critics who wouldn't recognize a good entertaining action film if it ran up and bit them on the neck: this is what people go to the movies for, and they will not --I repeat -- will not be disappointed.

Let's get all the clichés out of the way early, and Ignore those pain-in-the-neck pansies who'll complain about all the violence. "Blade 2" is a movie you can sink your teeth into. It's going to make a lot of cash after this opening weekend, and you can take that to the blood bank. There, all out of the system. Except to say there are rivers of blood, fangs bared, et cetera.

I see these movies a week, sometimes a month before regular theatre goers, such as the Mike Epps and Ice Cube action comedy "All About The Benjamins" and "Showtime," both recently featured here. I see them with other critics in a 25 seat theatre with Surround Sound, and we're hard to please. At the screening last Monday morning, It was like being at a theatre with your homiez and other paying patrons on a debut Friday night as the small audience of mostly male critics "ohhed" and "ahhed" to the fight moves and effects.

in the film as Blade and the Vampire Nation decide to join forces against a threat that makes them forget all about their animosities. A new breed of vampire has evolved, and their thirst for prey makes the regular vamps seem like sweethearts. The Reapers have to feed every four hours, and they pass on their blood-borne affliction to their vampire victims on whom they mostly feed.

Blade hasn't heard anything that disturbs him so far. "So? Sounds like he's doing my work for me." Dead vampires is OK by him, weather he kills them with his sword, portable UV lamps, garlic juice injectors, or silver nitrate bombs.

"Do the math," he's told by one of the vampire leaders. "In a few months after they're finished with us, they'll have exhausted the food supply. Then they'll turn on your precious humans. In a few years there won't be a human left on the planet."

If "Mimic" director Guillermo Del Toro wanted as he said to put the gasp and revision back into the genre, then mission accomplished! I saw more starts and winces than mines during the vampire reaper autopsy when they cracked open one of the dangerous new mutations. Their face opens up like an insect's as they hold your head so you can't move, like the face grabbers in "Aliens." When you see an alley in "Blade 2" you have a little voice in you that says "don't go down there!..."

There are wisps of "Aliens" and "Highlander 4: Endgame" as the pack hunts for their pray and are being hunted. Another kin is in Ice Cube's "Ghosts of Mars" science fiction siege film, with the Reapers closing in almost to clutching range as the Blood Pack's bullets run and out and then the semicircular slicing blade built into the bottom of their machine pistols comes into play, as the Blood Pack slices their way through to an adjacent tunnel after they've invaded the Reaper lair.

Parents will have to wrestle with the appropriateness of the film for the little ones who will be clamoring to go and see "Blade 2." I ran into this myself when I wanted to take my young fellows to certain blockbuster films, only to be stymied by their mother. "How come it's not all right for me, a film critic, to take then to see the films in the theatres, but it's okay for you to show them the same films you rent on video six months later?"

"Because I can fast-forward past those spots, and I watch them first," she said. Oh. Never mind then.

"Blade 2" is smart, sexy and stylish, with some good dialog and care and attention to the Vampire Nation culture; how they procreate, and recreate. Have you ever thought what a vampire day spa was like? Picture vats of blood in which they luxuriously soak, absorbing the lifeblood into every pore. Their night life is something to see also. Being called the "life of the party" takes on a whole new meaning when you're human cattle invited by dark-garbed Goth looking types to a secretive rave party in the industrial part of town, where they won't hear the blood-curdling screams when the fangs come out!

A sadistic vampire called Reinhardt plays with a ray of sunlight coming through a hole to the outside from their just completed gunplay. He turns his hand to and fro, watching the smoke coming off his arm, like holding a palm over a flame. It gets too hot and he snatches it away. We can feel the buildup when Reinhardt asks the dark-skinned Blade "we were wondering earlier -- do you blush?" Wrong choice of words, as they tangle right then and there. Ron Perlman is Reinhardt ,who has made a career of playing non-humans, especially in the TV series "Beauty and the Beast" with "Terminator" co-star Linda Hamilton.

The buildup of tension in "Blade 2" is well done, as the moviegoer is filled in on just enough to know the various players and agendas, and there seemed to be a lot of them. The movie also introduces some new characters and subplots to take the film in new directions. The vampire Warrior Princess Nyssa is played by Latina actress Leonor Valera. A new sidekick for Blade is Scud, the weapons and tech head after Whistler played by Norman Reedus. Handed a rifle with ultraviolet lamp, silver nitrate slugs and garlic capsules, Scud passes it back. "I'm a Lover, not a Fighter." He'll stay in the armoured truck.

The stakes are high, and they have to work together with the Blood Pack but there is no trust. "They'll turn on us the first chance they get," opines the taciturn Daywalker who smiles genuinely from happiness only once in the film, in a gesture that's like the eyebrow lift of Mr. Spock in "Star Trek."

"Better get you some sunscreen, buttercup," Whistler pops off to one of the Pack.

"Listen up old man, you're just a hair away from Hillbilly Heaven!"

"I love it when you talk dirty," he says, later calling one of the pack "sissy": when he wouldn't touch the jaws of a dead Reaper for examination.

The leader of the Reapers philosophically asks Blade "Is the enemy of my enemy my friend? Or my enemy?" We just know that the alliance will break down between these blood foes, just not when. "Blade 2" keeps the tension and storyline such as it is in an action film high, and it has an appeal to those who might not think they'd enjoy an action adventure film.

There is lots of swordplay, hand to hand fighting, and martial arts action in "Blade 2," which gained by waiting an extra year after "The Matrix" rewrote the rules for comic book inspired action adventure. The vaunted computer graphics special effects I could have done without. Jet Li made "Kiss of the Dragon's" as a reaction of the wirework and effects in "Romeo Must Die." (Of course, that was followed up by "The One").

I think the geeks that dream this efx stuff up must have a lot more fun than regular people do. They're easily spotted in "Blade 2", especially the first major one where Blade and what would be a love interest in Nyssa are introduced. They fight and fight in front of a bank of UV lights meant as a sort of intruder weapon against an invasion of the "Suckers" or "Suck Heads," as they're derisively called by a returned Whistler. The lights helped to mask the flaws of the graphics as well, but not enough. Gravity can't be defied quite so easily, and Nyssa's form flows much too fluidly. In other scenes the stuntwork is augmented, such as impossible leaps, and the requisite wall-running. The WWF has also made its influence known, and there are wrestling moves aplenty in the film.

The last "Blade" movie didn't allow for romance; indeed action adventure films often dispense with them, but there are hints of what can be sprinkled throughout. Blade may have found his dream woman in the vampire princess Nyssa. The Romeo and Juliet attraction of Nyssa to Blade the Daywalker, who she called "the Boogyman" of their childhood dreams wasn't missed by her Blood Pack hunters and Whistler.

"You and Miss Muffett were getting real cozy over there. You might want to remember what side of the line you're on," Whistler tells his protégé Blade. "There's a saying 'keep your friends close, but keep your enemies closer.' You might want to remember that," Blade says back to the conflicted Whistler, whose loyalty is questioned because of the strange circumstances of his return.

Kris Kristofferson is a good fit in the role of the crusty cynical hunter Whistler, who almost impaled the heart of the young child whose bitten and pregnant mother gave birth to him in an alley. The child was a mutant, later called the Daywalker because he was a vampire who could stand the deadly sunlight, with the aid of a special blue serum that keeps the immunity alive in his blood. The dark wrap-around shades are extra protection for Blade's sensitive eyes, and a trademark. You could no more picture Blade without his shades than Arnold Schwarzenegger's Terminator.

The return of Whistler was a welcome event, although I could have also welcomed a reunion with the beautiful black highness N'Bushe Wright of "Fresh", "Three Strikes," and "Dead Presidents." But as "Blade" is a franchise they can bring her back in the next one, since her scientific skills as a biologist could be useful in reformulating Blade's serum as she did in the original. She needed to because she had been bitten herself, and as an extra incentive was under a death sentence by Blade unless she could cure herself. Blade is a hard taskmaster, and the only good bloodsucker is a dead one.

One thing director Del Toro wanted was to put the scariness back into vampires, who've become stylish and sexy, supermodel and comical disco-dancing types over the last century or so in such genre films as the comedies "Love At First Bite" and "Love At Second Bite" starring George Hamilton in the first. Black people have gotten into the bloodsucking act as well.

Eddie Murphy and Angela Bassett co-starred in the well-done "A Vampire In Brooklyn" with Murphy as a Jamaican vampire king seeking a suitable queen to extend his line. Bassett is a NYC cop who works the night shift where she's always felt more comfortable. As well she might! The girl has some vampire in her via her mysterious father. She didn't know much about him, but it seems Murphy's Caribbean blood lord knows a lot. Then of course there were the two 1970s "Blacula" films with William Marshall, Shakespearean and "Star Trek" actor ,and the creator of M-1. Trekkies would understand.

There is no end to the twists and tweaking of the vampiric genre. There have been Asian Martial Arts vampire movies; westerns, even science fiction with one running around a spaceship biting people. One of my favourites is a Mafia Vampire film called "Innocent Blood" starring the original "Le Femme Nikita" Anne Parillaud, the Queen Mother to Leonardo DiCaprio in "The Man In The Iron Mask."

Michael Nouri was a night time party animal and a disco dancer in the teen oriented "Fright Night." Anne Rice, whose "Interview With The Vampire" became the hit film with Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt also gave birth to "Queen of the Damned" starring the late Aaliyah. There Lestat becomes a rock star, and whose weird lifestyle of sleeping all day and night life would fit right in. His music wakens the sleeping Kemetan queen, the Mother of All vampires.

"The Lair of the White Worm" was the other Vampire book by Bram Stoker whose books in the 1800s started the whole thing, such as "Bram Stoker's Dracula" starring alleged shoplifter Winona Ryder and Keanu Reeves. Then there's the much --and I might add unfairly-- maligned "Dracula 2000" based in New Orleans with a new take on the origins of vampirism. Around the same time there was a cinematic feeding frenzy with a vampire glut. John Carpenter has a thing for vampires, adding a twist with his modern Western one starring James Woods, Sheryl Lee, Daniel Baldwin and Maximilian Schell.

The first film by TVs George Clooney was "From Dusk 'Til Dawn," a comedy horror film co-starring Harvey Keitel as an itinerant preacher as they're holed up in a vampire bar in Mexico under a siege that lasts the title. Comedy also was the basis for the second "Tales From The Crypt" movie after "Demon Knight;" the entertaining and almost "R-Plus" rated "Bordello of Blood" with Dennis Miller against a bevy of female bloodsuckers with a Super Soaker filled with holy water and garlic juice!

Scary movies should be scary, and Del Toro knows this, especially after making the claustrophobically scary "Mimic." "Blade 2" has all the ingredients for a lucrative franchise, and I foresee lots of profits as long as the makers ignore what we critics and continue to give the people what they want. And what they want is action, more action, blood and guts, shooting and stuff blowing up, conflict, heroism and sacrifice, with the bad guys getting theirs in the end. Maybe.

"BLADE 2" is rated R for copious violence, explosions, beheadings, slicing and dicings, buckets of blood and much gunplay, but not much sex or nudity throughout this time. -- kjw

"Blade 2" Cast:

Blade -- Wesley Snipes

Nyssa — Leonor Varela

Whistler -- Kris Kristofferson

Assad — Danny John Jules

Scud — Norman Reedus

Reinhardt — Ron Perlman

Nomal — Luke Goss

Director: Guillermo Del Toro

Studio: New Line Cinema

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