The Caliban Institute

Rating: 10/10 (3 April 2002)

If you look to the side, you will see that the vampire's lair is called the Caliban Institute. Caliban as in the freak trying to kill his master in Shakespeare's the tempest, and Caliban as in anagram for Canibal--cannibal, or vampire eating vampire. Blade is the little boy's fantasy come true, and it scratched the itch I got from watching pretentious-PG-13-for-little-Goths-wannabes-posing-as-dark-movie-Queen-of-th e-Damned by mutilating the bodies of Satanicly twist-minded vampires, and turning them into BME poster children. In the end, as Satanic as Anne Rice wants them to be, her vampires are no more menacing than a pair of white fags--I mean fangs. As menacing as these pansies pretend to be, they would probably faint at the sight Robbie Williams' "Rock DJ", which is the stuff you see in the clubs Blade hangs out at. It also turned away from the wow,-mom-I-know-kung-fu-too,-look-at-me! action genre in moments of sheerly brilliant comic relief. Bor lei jun and Seunlau ngaklau both showed that jump kicks are the stupidest moves to throw against wrestlers, and Blade knows it and takes it to the next level by bringing the prowrestling in the kung-fu. Finally, the tragedy of the vampires is played much more dramatically here than in either of Anne Rice's movies, and the end is a pure beauty.