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Synopsis: A man wanders into a blood bank in Prague looking to make money by giving blood. The blood bank is a front for a cabal of vampires who are using the facility to select their victims. The man who wanders in seems a likely victim, but when the truth is revealed about the blood bank, he laughs and slaughters his captors. "I hate vampires," he says. Meanwhile, Blade continues his war on vampires in Prague. He has been searching for his mentor, Whistler, who the vampires have abducted and transformed. Eventually, he finds him, kept in a tank in a half dead, half alive existence. Blade rescues him and endeavors to "cure" him so the war can resume. After Whistler has revived, the vampires invade Blade's base of operations and deliver an offer for a truce. The vampires, it seems, have a more formidable enemy than Blade: the "Reapers," a new breed of vampire that feeds on vampires as well as humans. Blade consents to the alliance as a means of getting closer to the vampire high command. The reapers are frightful creatures: pallid monstrosities with jaws that open to reveal a mouth full of barbs. To this end, the vampires provide Blade with the Bloodpack, an "elite" force of vampire soldiers (who have been trained specifically to take out Blade, in fact), led by Nyssa, the daughter of the vampire king. Nyssa and Blade grow begin to have mutual admiration for each other. Blade and his new allies track the Reapers to a vampire rave where the true power of the Reapers is revealed: they are immune to silver and have a bone casing around their hearts, making them immune to most of the weapons normally effective against vampires. Only sunlight harms them. The Reapers deal Blade and his squad a conditional defeat, but armed with new knowledge and new weapons, Blade tracks them to their lair, where it becomes apparent that all is not as it seems....

Comic Book Confidential: If you are a member of my age group, it's entirely likely that you never read a comic book called "Blade" when you were a kid. The character was created by Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan for Marvel's Tomb of Dracula series in the 1970s, where he functioned as an occasional antagonist for the series's eponymous anti-hero. Tomb of Dracula wasn't particularly successful. It ran for seventy issues and was cancelled in 1979. Wolfman went on to revive DC's Teen Titans series while Colan worked intermittently until his retirement. Blade was all but forgotten until writer Roger Stern wrote him into a particularly juicy supporting role for Dr. Strange in the late eighties. In the early nineties, following the success of DC's Swamp Thing and Sandman titles, Marvel took a stab at reviving their supernatural characters in a new line of comics. Blade reappeared as part of the Nightstalkers, a team of supernatural superheroes comprised of three of the supporting characters from the old Tomb of Dracula series. Somewhere along the line, a deal was struck with New Line Cinema to make a movie out of the character and Blade was spun off into his own title in 1994--AFTER the movie deal was struck. That title fizzled, as did Marvel's attempt to ape DC's successful Vertigo line of supernatural adult-oriented line. Blade didn't reappear until the first movie hit the multiplexes in 1998. The first Blade movie was moderately successful and it was fairly influential. It can be argued that The Matrix owes a debt of gratitude to Blade's synthesis of Hong Kong-style action and CGI special effects. It also provided Wesley Snipes with a juicy, iconic role that he decided would make a good ongoing franchise. Which brings us to the present movie...

Scenes from the Apocalypse: The first film was directed by Stephen Norrington, a graduate of the MTV school of direction. The film works well enough on the strength of its performances by Snipes and Kris Kristofferson, but the whole is less than the sum of its parts. The new film has an actual director with an actual vision.

When last we saw Guillermo de Toro, he had produced a minor masterpiece in The Devil's Backbone. I noted in my review of that film that it was a shame that he was being co-opted for dumb comic book projects. It seemed like enormous talent misapplied. Little did I realize what de Toro had in mind for this film. What he has done is strip away all the fat from the previous film, leaving only the action scene. To this, he has added his own formidable visual sensibility. He has staged his action scenes against a backdrop of imagery drawn from the deranged lovechild of Francis Bacon and Hieronymous Bosch. There are scenes from the end times in this movie, from mounds of skeletons to a horde of scuttling demon-vampires. Some of the images are imported into the film from de Toro's last film: the bottled fetuses make a reappearance, for instance, and the scene where a number of vampires are picking at the spine of a victim recalls the very title of that film. Some of the images are unique to the film, particularly the ghastly feeding habits of The Reapers. The number of ways in which Blade dispatches his enemies has multiplied, too, and the film takes great delight in inventing new ways to inflict damage onto the (quasi) human figure. The world of Blade II is hermetic in its exclusion of everything that might hint of a broader civilization, too. There are only Blade and Whistler on the one hand, and the vampires on the other. De Toro isn't interested in anything else, but he films what he has like it is Hell on Earth.

Performances: This film is dominated by Wesley Snipes. He seems more at ease with his image as a bad-ass in this film and that ease lends his performance an elegance that is absent in his first turn as Blade. He certainly has the snarl down pat, and there is a hilarious note of irony in his voice in the film's concluding scene (which is the end of a shaggy dog story that closes a singularly nasty viewing experience on a much needed humorous note). Kristofferson seems tired, playing a grumpy old man--he's good at it, but it's pretty much the same performance he gave in the last film. On the other side of the fence, we have Leonor Varella, who LOOKS exotic decked out in fetish drag as the vampire princess, Nyssa, but who is a fairly colorless character. Her principal henchman, Reinhardt, played by Ron Perlman is another matter. He ALMOST upstages Snipes with his bad-ass mercenary-for-hire swagger and bad attitude. He certainly upstages Luke Gross, who plays the principle Reaper, Nomak, who seems like very small beer compared to Perlman. Keep an eye out for Hong Kong action stalwart Donnie Yen as one of the Bloodpack

Youth Misspent: It should be noted that there is absolutely NO possible adult rationalization for liking this movie. It has no social conscience, no redeeming message, nothing to offer but titilation to the senses and an appeal to the sadistic tendencies of teen-aged boys. In fact, it should also be noted that, as a comic book film, Blade II distills the essence of the state of the art of comic books into its purest cinematic incarnation.

Allow me to digress:

In the wake of such dark and gritty comic books of the late eighties as Alan Moore's Watchmen and Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, the mainstream superhero comic book took a cynical, nasty turn at the beginning of the 1990s. Artists like Todd McFarland, Jim Lee, and Rob Liefeld stripped away character development, pumped up the visuals with new computer coloring and elaborate page layouts designed to titilate rather than tell a story, and began to draw influence not from the past masters of comic book art like Jack Kirby, but from both video games (the superhero comic book's chief media competitor) and the WWF. The archetype of this trend is Todd McFarland's Spawn, which features grotesque demonic figures and copious bloodletting. Blade II is very much in this tradition, but by utilizing the current state of the art in special effects and by upping the body count and the volume of blood, it creates a standard against which even the most elaborately violent comic book might find hard to equal without going over the edge into outright pornography.

As I said, there is absolutely no way I can justify liking this movie as a rational, thinking adult. And yet, I would be lying if I said I didn't find it thrilling. I would be lying if I said that the adolescent sadist in me was completely dead. Within its very specific niche, Blade II is very, very good...