Cinecomic actioner...

Rating: 7/10 (30 October 2014)

BLADE II lays claim to being even more comic-bookish than the first film in this series; and better, to boot. While I'll always contend that Blade- the character- was "inspired by" the movie GRAVE OF THE VAMPIRE (in which William Smith plays the half human-half vampire son of vampire Michael Pataki, who rapes a human woman in an open grave), the filmmakers who opted to bring the character to the big screen committed a cardinal sin when they tricked him out with a variety of automatic and semi-automatic weapons. In the comics, he carried wooden stakes, which sufficed. In the movie(s), wooden stakes never enter into it. Go figure. BLADE II has several things going for it: a sometimes frenetic pace... and the director, Guillermo Del Toro. If nothing else, Del Toro's participation automatically means that the movie will look great: he incorporates the Mario Bava and Dario Argento influences that have given his movies a most distinctive look. The vampires, too, prefigure the creatures in THE STRAIN (the teleseries) and The House of Pain has to be seen to be believed (it's where vampires go "to feel something," which takes on a whole new meaning when you're a vampire and you have what amounts to super powers). The ending is identical to the ending of a script I submitted to the first season of TALES FROM THE DARKSIDE (titled VAMPYRE, about an undercover cop who goes all the way by allowing himself to be bitten by a vampire), another reason I really liked this one.