It’s easy to forget now that comic book tie-ins are the only kind of movie Hollywood makes. But the genre was closer to Cultural Ground Zero than perhaps even sci fi in general.
The summer of 1997 brought the fan and critic-panned disaster Batman and Robin. That movie was such a debacle that smart players in the industry predicted that comic book movies, which had thrived since 1978’s Superman, would be moribund for a decade.
But for better or worse, it would only be a year until a picture came along that did for comic book movies what Nintendo did for the post-crash US video game market.
That unlikely hit was the action-horror flick Blade.
If you’re Gen Y or older, right now you’re probably thinking Oh, yeah. I remember that one. And your fondness for it is as nebulous as your recollection.
Because having just re-watched the original Blade, it’s still not clear to me why the movie was such a game-changer upon release.
The setup is simple: A vampire-human hybrid who can withstand the daylight hunts down the bloodsuckers that secretly run society.
One major distinguishing feature that sets Blade apart from prior vampire movies is its blend of action and horror – in particular its specific style of action.
In the half-century before Blade, most vampire movies were either of the Hammer horror or gothic romance types.
Sure, you had the occasional comedy. But nothing else in the subgenre featured the same slick, stylish action. From Dusk till Dawn is the closest precursor you can point to in American cinema.
Hong Kong cinema is another story. Wire-fu movies were a major influence on Blade, and it shows.
Western audiences were ready for Hong Kong style action to go mainstream, as proven by The Matrix, which came out a year after Blade and has since overshadowed it.
But you can see Blade’s kung fu DNA when somebody lands a hit, and unlike in PG-13 American style action flicks, the camera doesn’t pull away.
Other than that, the production values don’t hold up today.
The CG is bad, even by 2004 video game standards.
Speaking of VtM, Blade scribe David S. Goyer (of Christopher Nolan Dark Knight trilogy fame) seems to have taken more than a few pages from the World of Darkness:
- Vampires have a rigid hierarchy.
- Vampires in large cities secretly pull the strings behind the scenes.
- Edged weapons are more effective against vampires than (regular) bullets.
- A vampire sect seeks to resurrect/awaken an ancient creature referred to as a blood god whose existence mainline vampire society denies.
The only problem is that Blade‘s secret vampire society isn’t as convincing as VtM’s.
Here are some reasons why.
- Just biting a human is enough for a vampire to turn a victim into another vampire. So why isn’t the earth overrun with vampires?
- The fact that vampires can still reproduce naturally compounds this problem. It also leads to another issue, namely …
- Any class conflict created by the pureblood vs turned vampire dichotomy comes off as arbitrary when former-humans-turned-vampires are shown to be far more powerful than the purebloods.
- The question of what all the vampires will eat if the blood god achieves its stated goal of turning everyone into vampires is left unaddressed.
An even bigger oversight: In the course of the movie, one character discovers a cure for vampirism. The moral question of why Blade keeps killing almost every vampire he meets thereafter instead of curing them doesn’t even come up.
That omission is almost enough to push the title character out of the antihero category and into villain protagonist territory.
Not that Wesley Snipes does a bad job. In Blade, he turns in his most delightful action performance since 1993’s Demolition Man.
His martial arts scenes are still exciting, even if they feel a little choppy compared to post-Matrix fare.
And he has solid on-screen chemistry with buddy character Abraham Whistler, played by Kris Kristofferson in a scene-stealing performance.
Even the kind-of forgettable female lead is competently played.
But one weird casting choice that demands comment is the main villain role.
To be honest, when somebody says, “We need an evil, ruthless head vampire,” my first thought is not of Stephen Dorff.
It shouldn’t have worked, but to Stephen Dorff’s credit, he just manages to pull it off.
Also, I don’t care who calls it cringe, Blade’s description of Dorff’s character as “always trying to ice skate uphill” was evocative and funny then, and it’s still evocative and funny now.
Blade may have its faults, but you can’t deny that revitalized the flagging comic book movie genre.
Viewed today, it’s a definite product of its time. Hollywood was struggling to come up with something new, so they bashed Bram Stoker and the Shaw Bros. together to buy time.
And the field was so clear of competition that it worked.
As a movie watching experience, it’s OK.
You could throw it on in the background while you’re doing something else that doesn’t require your full concentration.
One of those movies.
And one reason it’s remembered at all is because it was followed up by a movie better than a Blade sequel had a right to be but worse than its director had an excuse to make.
More on that next time.
For now, get your horror fix with my award-worthy space-pirates-in-Hell novel:
Vampires able to reproduce biologically is a complete violation of what vampires are supposed to be: frozen in time in an animated death. They should not grow from young to old–save perhaps if they require blood not just to live but appear young. But even then, one should not mature from child to adult, but simply be an elderly child.
The only time I see this work otherwise is with Declan Finn’s books, where he takes the time to think out precisely how it all should work.
You can do vampires in multiple ways, but not all of them at once. Blade’s track is my least favorite part of the movie and one of the things I hate about the genre.
For “reproducing” vampires you need to follow the old high class nobles path where the only way to be a vampire is to be born of an elite aristocracy. Feeding on humans can temporarily make them your slaves, but they cannot be turned because it is a bloodline phenomenon. This makes them a different sort of threat than a monster mob needing extermination.
For “infectious” vampires there has to be some kind of a ruleset to turn humans. One of the aspects I hated about post Interview With A Vampire creatures is that one bite turns a person to a vampire as if it is a zombie plague. This clearly doesn’t work or make sense because then everyone on the planet would have been vampires by now and then died off because there is nothing to feed off of. Lasting for thousands of years undetected is simply impossible in such a situation.
Declan’s books have very strict rules for how vampires operate and it in turn makes it far better than how something like Blade handled the creatures. I’m not sure how vampires got so rote and generic as fast as they did back in the day, but it has a taken much time to rehabilitate them into proper and threatening monsters again.
Then again, most classic monsters have had that problem. We don’t even need to go into how badly werewolves were obliterated as well.
Vampire Hunter D also has vampire’s reproducing sexually
Action movies were dead by 1997. That year had Men In Black (which is closer to “blockbuster epic” than it is action), Drive, Con-Air, and Tomorrow Never Dies, and Blade easily stacks up with them. It was far ahead of tired material like Air Force One, Batman & Robin, and Starship Troopers, which only get raved over by post-ironic hipsters who like them because they are meme fodder.
This is what came out in the genre the year before. It was not pleasant: https://www.imdb.com/list/ls059338428/
I don’t even need to mention that 1998 had Ronin, Rush Hour, and the Replacement Killers . . . and that was it.
The audience was starved for action. Blade delivered. Having high octane action, Wesley Snipes at his best, a cool coat and sunglasses, then novel wire-fu, and plenty of one-liners, was enough for audiences back then starved for anything not overly plastic to dig this one. Even with the bad CG and overt comic book influence, there is enough grittiness to carry Blade out of mediocrity into quality territory despite its obvious faults that everyone could clearly see when it came out.
I maintain that the genre more or less ended its golden age with the prescient Demolition Man in 1993, and rolled to a stop with Speed and Die Hard With a Vengeance in 1995. After that, Hollywood became enamored with vapid big budget “epics” filled with flashing lights and awful CG like Independence Day and Armageddon. When you put a film like Blade out in the middle of that nonsense you can see why it stood out the way it did.
It’s no classic, but it definitely deserves the cult status it has now, warts and all.
It’s definitely style winning over substance. I remember Goyer building his career on cranking out comics-based scripts (remember the Nick Fury TV movie wrote, with Hasselhoff as Fury?) and I don’t think any of them are good because of his storytelling.
Never liked Dorff as the villain. His version of Frost ends up having X-Pac heat with me.
Everyone loves the opening with Blade invading the vampire dance club but all I remember is “Why aren’t the vampires mobbing him and ripping him apart?” Once you get beyond the thumping music and editing, it just looks goofy. And then the whole deal at the end is that once the Blood God happens it’s all over, but Blade just sort of kicks his ass anyway. It’s like a video game in which you just have to have boss’s patterns down.
I still kind of wish we just had a proper Tomb of Dracula movie…
I remember liking this movie, though I haven’t seen it since I was basically just a kid. What I remember about it most prominently is how different it portrays a black protagonist compared to modern media – the fact Blade is a black guy just seems to be incidental, the whole movie isn’t About How Black He Is. For this reason alone it’s refreshing, and really a much more positive portrayal of a black protagonist as a result.
I’ve long had this silly idea for a vampire fiction setting where you have glamorous fancy vampires at war with hideous, monster-like Nosferatu vampires. I’m sure somebody else has done something like this before, though.
Another movie I thought of from around the same time (maybe a little later) was the Lost In Space movie. I saw this when it came out and I was, what, ten years old? and automatically loved any CGI spectacle space movie, but I suspect it holds up pretty bad and smacks of all the worst trends of Cultural Ground Zero film making.
Catchy techno music, dual-wielding weapons, trench coats and sunglasses, and hackers hacking the hacked mainframes? Yup, we’re definitely in the late 90s.
I am a sucker for the way Blade is introduced. The hapless buffoon crawling on his knees until he sees a pair of boots.
That part still gives me goosebumps.