"Sooner or later, the thirst always wins."

Rating: 7/10 (30 May 2019)

Lots of new vampire lore for followers to consider - vampires brand their half human surrogates with a tattoo on the back of the neck called a glyph, the scientific name for a vampire is 'hominus nocturna', and the Book of Erebus is the Vampire Bible. I didn't know any of these things going in, and it's the kind of stuff I look for whenever I take in another vampire flick. This one's two decades old now as I write this, so I'm a little late to the party, but I like to take in a vampire flick every now and then, as this one also checks off a box on a list of comic book inspired movie characters. This one's quite a bit on the gory side, probably more so than most, and it gets off to a bloody start with a vampire disco rave in which the fire sprinklers shower blood on the dance crowd in a maze of brilliant red. If this is what gets your juices flowing, the picture is probably made for you. The story itself features Wesley Snipes as a 'turned' vampire, i.e., not a pure blood, on a mission to rid the world of vampire evil. Aided and abetted by grizzled blood chemist Abraham Whistler (Kris Kristofferson), Blade (Snipes) is accompanied by once bitten, twice shy Karen Jenson (N'Bushe Wright) in a quest to put a fellow turned vampire Deacon Frost (Stephen Dorff) out of the world domination business. It pretty much boils down to blood-soaked spectacle cloaked in martial arts mayhem on Blade's part, with a curious cameo by a Jabba the Hutt inspired sack of flesh called Pearl (Eric Edwards). Definitely not for the faint hearted.