Welcome to the Century of the Vampire, an ongoing weekly feature where Goonhammer managing editor Jonathan Bernhardt watches some piece of vampire media, probably a movie but maybe eventually television will get a spot in here too, and talks about it at some length in the context of both its own value as a piece of art and as a representation of the weird undead guys that dominate western pop culture who aren’t (usually) zombies.
Last week, Bernhardt reviewed the 2005 Michael Goguen film The Batman vs. Dracula. Today, Greg looks at the 1998 Stephen Norrington film, Blade. This article will contain spoilers.
This is an odd movie to review, 25 years down the road. As an action movie, it’s pretty standard fare, just more supernatural. As a vampire movie, it’s actually markedly less supernatural. As a comic book movie – which it is – it’s an almost entirely different beast from most of the genre. I don’t think Blade particularly bends genres – it’s a 90s American action movie through and through, you know what you’re in for – but the trappings of the source material, the horror elements, and bits of a detective story (Blade as a character has more in common with Batman that you might expect) all combine in a way you don’t see often.
For one, it’s an adaptation that isn’t an origin story, though it did launch a short (by current standards) franchise. Blade simply exists. He knows about vampires already. It was also released in the late 1990s, in the fallow period that quip-based dialogue went through after the action-comedy trend had ebbed, but before the 2000s Joss Whedon boom really took off, and so it takes itself, and its hero, seriously. Not that there aren’t jokes, but there isn’t any irony. It generally plays the premise straight. Say what you will about Wesley Snipes, but the man doesn’t do anything he isn’t completely invested in.
What’s striking watching it now is, paradoxically, how unremarkable it all seems. I remember having strong positive opinions about the costumes, the soundtrack, and the action, but I watched it again and none of that has aged well. None of it is bad, but nothing about it feels particularly impressive anymore either. The replacement-level feel begins to make sense when you consider that the director, Stephen Norrington, basically only made this and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen before Hollywood gave up on him, and the writer, David S. Goyer, has made a long career for himself, albeit with work that we could charitably call inconsistent. This is a perfectly serviceable action film that does what it sets out to do, but in every aspect that made it interesting almost 30 years ago, it’s been surpassed to a ridiculous degree. Still, it has its charms.
Blade does start on a high note, with the most enduring visual from this entire film: The blood rave (we’ll get to the most enduring line – not just from the movie but maybe Snipes’ entire career – later). Some Shaggy-looking doofus has been lured to a warehouse rave by a woman out of his league, and in about a three minute span from their arrival, the fire sprinklers begin spraying blood, Shaggy clocks that everyone except him is a vampire, Blade (Wesley Snipes, obviously) appears in his signature ensemble of trench coat and katana, and then Blade wastes a ton of people.
This first taste of the action sets the tone for the rest. It’s entertaining enough, and employs a mix of machine guns, shotguns, and edged weapons, but it feels a little perfunctory. Blade just lays into these guys effortlessly, and the vampires don’t seem to take significantly more killing than the regular jamokes. It’s fine to establish your hero as an untouchable badass in his introductory fight scene, but he also doesn’t seem to be exerting any effort. It comes off a bit casual. He sets a vampire named Quinn (Donal Logue, in rare form) on fire and chops off his hand, but the rest of these faceless goons don’t even earn a cool death. Most of the fights will be this way, with the innate coolness of Wesley Snipes and his outfit doing a lot of the heavy lifting to make up for bland fight choreography.
Blade’s next stop is the morgue, where Karen (N’Bushe Wright), his about-to-be sidekick, is assisting her loser creep ex-boyfriend on an autopsy of the guy Blade just set on fire. The ex eats it, and Quinn tries to draculize both of them, before Blade shows up and beats his ass again. It’s a pretty unique meet-cute that also gives us one of the legitimately funniest parts of the movie. Some dumb cop ignores the charred lunatic biting people and shoots Blade instead, who no-sells the shots, looks at this guy like he’s an asshole, and indignantly says one of the most Wesley Snipes things possible, and also exactly what you should say if you’re a samurai vampire hunter and a regular guy shoots you with a gun: “Motherfucker are you out of your damn mind?” He will, incredibly (and you know what I’m getting at if you’ve seen the movie), top this line read later. A thing that happens a few times in this movie is that Blade is in the middle of being very serious, but the script can’t quite suppress Snipes’ genuine gift for action-comedy. A self-satisfied smirk and a fistpump to himself after he crucifies someone with a 12-gauge stake launcher, that sort of thing.
Rounding out the cast are Kris Kristofferson’s Whistler (Blade’s handler/father figure), who does hot girl shit with an angle grinder, and the movie’s heavy, Deacon Frost, played by Stephen Dorff. Frost is introduced getting chewed out by his vampire boss – Udo Kier, who has somehow been in like four of the movies this column has covered already – and man, Dorff is chewing scenery here. He is extremely fun to watch throughout the film and embodies a very specific kind of douchebag; what we would call a fuckboi today, but the technology for that didn’t exist at the time. In short, Deacon Frost is an upstart young vampire who smokes cigarettes and has to deal with a lot of Vampire Racism due to being turned instead of born into the life, but has some frankly somewhat reasonable ideas about vampire supremacy, and spends the movie almost making it happen. He rules.
This is a more plot-heavy and action-light movie than I expected or remembered, but the middle part does a better job of handling its exposition than many. Instead of a single pace-ruining dump halfway through, it’s drip-fed through a couple of what feel like video game cutscenes inserted between the fights (and one car chase that features some extremely obviously sped-up footage). These are generally back at Blade’s base where Whistler is doing more hot girl shit (gassing up Blade’s muscle car while smoking cigarettes), or checking in with Frost at the library, where he goes to listen to trance music.
It’s gradually revealed that Blade’s deal is that his mother was bitten by a vampire while pregnant, causing her to go into labor and die, and him to be born half-vampire. As such, he has all their powers – strength; regeneration – combined with all the powers of a regular human – a cool car; can go outside. He doesn’t drink blood, but an engineered serum, and as a nice character beat that is a matter of personal taste rather than anything particular to his half-breed biology – he can drink blood, but refuses to, because refusing to admit what he is lets him keep the moral high ground. He’s keeping vegan.
Deacon Frost, by contrast, is hedonistically living the Draculan-American dream: setting his boss on fire. The effects here of Udo blowing up are not great, but they get the point across. Frost’s deal is that he wants to build some kind of blood cannon, and use it to become the blood god (no, not that one, a different one), La Magra. Unfortunately, he needs Blade’s blood to make the machine run.
Karen, the mortician and blood scientist, ends up being one of the movie’s most interesting characters, and has shades of a prime 1970s Pam Grier character about her. She’s a quick study who takes to murder almost immediately, and her enthusiastic competence positions her far more as a sidekick or co-lead than a romantic interest. This woman could have been a stock femme fatale/damsel archetype, but Blade (the movie and the character) never shows the slightest interest in sidelining her for that. She cures her own vampirism, and for good measure also develops a somewhat more vigorous cure, that works by making your blood explode. It’s just too bad she never shows up in the sequels.
The stage is set for the final showdown when Frost has Karen kidnapped and Whistler mostly killed – Blade arrives too late to do much but finish killing him, in probably the only accidentally-funny scene in the film, because the music is telling me this is supposed to be emotional, but I just can’t get over the absurdity of Whistler nobly mercy-killing himself with Blade’s comically huge machine pistol, which I think is just a full-size Uzi with dress up parts on it that he one-hands. It doesn’t help that this is followed by a baffling spin on the classic action movie gearing-up montage, where Blade meditates, loads up on grenades and shotguns, then for some reason throws a potted plant on the ground.
It’s pretty on-rail after that: Blade drives a motorcycle into a lobby and kills some guys. It rules. He does karate moves in a hallway and kills more guys with Karen’s reverse-serum, who explode in bad CGI Akira fashion. It also rules. He bumps into his mom, who is Frost’s dracula girlfriend now. This is as close as the movie gets to a plot twist. Blade is arrested, and locked in the blood jail (he’s low on serum and thus vulnerable to tasers). Karen, for her part, is thrown into the reject nosferatu bin with her dickhead ex from the start of the movie, and kills him on her way out of it. This is an Indiana Jones snake pit type of inescapable trap, but she is in and out in under a minute. Queen. She even takes time to rescue Blade from the twin horrors of being juiced and having an awkward conversation with his mother. Logue, finally, regrettably, after surviving three separate fights with Blade, is killed. In the aftermath, Blade proceeds to do Ip Man shit to a bunch of guys, in what is probably the best action sequence of the film, though arriving much too late and not lasting nearly long enough. By the time he gets his sword back, it’s pretty much just Frost left, and wouldn’t you know it, the blood god is immune to swords. Ain’t that just the way. He is not, to his detriment, immune to getting explosive blood juice syringes stuck into him like ninja stars.
And then, finally, gloriously, we arrive. Snipes growls the hall of fame one-liner, “Some motherfuckers are always trying to ice skate uphill”, roundhouse kicks the final syringe into Frost’s forehead, and he explodes.
There are a handful of quotable lines from this movie, and the common thread between them is that they all contain the word “motherfucker.” This is simply from a different era. Back then you could actually make an R-rated action movie where your hero unapologetically says cuss words and bloodily kills a ton of people, including several cops, and the studios would let you release it, because movies weren’t exclusively aimed at children. It feels weird to describe a movie where vampires get chopped up with samurai swords as “for grownups,” but that’s where we’re at.
This was before the trend that started with X-Men and got properly going with Iron Man, so one can be forgiven for not even realizing that it was a comic book movie – I didn’t actually notice it myself, until years afterward. Loaded with profanity and violence and not even remotely a parody or deconstruction of the genre (I’m looking at you, The Boys), there isn’t much else in superhero cinema like this, before or since. It also featured the first and last black-led Marvel cast until – and I’m pretty sure I’m not making this up – Black Panther, fully 20 years later.
That’s about the only enduring thing about Blade. The apartment and club sets are somewhere below your average Michael Mann movie, to say nothing of John Wick. The action would be easily eclipsed by the Matrix a year later, and there frankly isn’t enough of it anyway. Wesley Snipes is as jacked here as ever, but flatly I don’t think he kills enough people, or does it in cool enough ways. The soundtrack might not even be that good anymore, now that we’ve invented new bleeps and bloops for a computer to make. It’s certainly not on the level of either Mortal Kombat album. The only thing properly iconic about it is Snipes’ hair and wardrobe, which remain inescapably cool as hell. Otherwise, there just isn’t a lot going on that hasn’t been done better, but it does still work as a straightforward type of action romp.
To turn that last point into more of a positive, there’s a purity of purpose here that I can appreciate. Blade has no wider ambitions toward a cinematic universe. There is no love story, no personal growth, and no voiceovers. You get just enough backstory for events to make sense, but not enough to support the kind of world-building that studios would grow to demand. Blade arrives fully formed, and spends the next two hours frowning while he beats the shit out of people. It takes maybe five minutes for him to kill his first guy, and he doesn’t stop until five minutes before the end credits roll. This movie is just Blade clocking in for a particularly busy week at the vampire genocide factory, and it feels like they could make 20 of these things, and let you watch them in any order with no regard for continuity (I absolutely would). I’m surprised we even learn Blade’s real name. And there’s a reason why this all works: if you strike the part about vampires, almost that entire paragraph applies to another movie I adore – 2012’s Dredd.
As for the non-Blade vampires, they’re pretty normal science-based vampires of the blood disease sub-type: weak to sunlight and garlic (but explicitly not crosses) and also allergic to silver, but somewhat unscientifically they instantly melt into ash when they die (which is at least helpful for knowing whether someone Blade kills is a vampire or just a familiar). What’s more interesting than their biology is the social aspects of vampire culture in the Blade universe. Namely, that there are a lot of them running around, enough to have a society in the first place. These vampires have long existed as a shadowy cabal of aristocratic criminals, and you can see it in the vaguely historical “bronze age through hapsburg” way most of them speak and act. They survive by laying low, while also controlling most of the human institutions. Think of John Wick’s world of the high table, and its ridiculous assassin population density, but make them all vampires. It’s a different take from most of the folklore-based vampires, and many of these ideas would be be present when White Wolf Publishing released the second version of its vampire TTRPG, Vampire: The Requiem, in a few short years.
In the end, I’m forced to admit that maybe this movie is not as good as I remember.
What’s unambiguously used to good effect is the cast. Snipes is at the peak of his powers, and this is a masterclass in early career dirtbag shit from Dorff. Kristofferson looks young by Kristofferson standards, Logue is having a good time with the material, and old reliable Udo Kier shows up to do his thing.
Snipes would go on to do two more of these, followed by god knows what martial arts schlock, and federal prison. Dorff would follow it up with, of all things, a starring role in a John Waters movie, though a fun piece of trivia is that he would later appear in True Detective’s third season with Mahershala Ali, who was (and maybe still is?) lined up to be the next Blade. Dorff is genuinely very good in that show, though far less fun than he is here.
Blade II would end up in the hands of Guillermo del Toro, a fact that seems absurd now. The less said about Blade Trinity, the better. [Bernhardt will, of course, be reviewing both of those films over the next two weeks.]
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