I was looking at the New York Times yesterday, and there was this ad for "Microsun" light bulbs. They're full spectrum bulbs that are made to reproduce direct sunlight, or something along those lines. Given how things work in "Blade", a few of these around the house would make a vampire's life suck.
"Blade" is the latest comic book to big screen migration. While I understand the project has been kicking around for many years, it was probably the popularity of "Buffy The Vampire Slayer" that finally got it rolling. Actually, there was one or two other vampire movies being previewed before "Blade": a John Carpenter film and maybe something else (I wasn't paying that much attention). These differ from the, say, Anne Rice genre just before this by focusing on the "vampire slayer", a la Buffy, rather than on vampire sex lives. The John Carpenter preview looked more like "Aliens" than "Dracula", actually.
Anyway, "Blade" is this superhero who's half vampire, capable of walking in daylight, immune to garlic and such, but with a vampire's strength. He's pissed at all vampires for Freudian reasons, and "pissed" is expressed in terms of large caliber guns and swords. No dainty wooden stake here. There's, of course, a big bad-ass vampire he has to go against sometime in the film, said vampire wanting to take over the world and all. Blade stops him at the end, after getting in touch with his Inner Vampire. It's a cathartic moment, capable of making grown men cry.
Blade fares better than Spawn, the most recent comic book superhero to go to Hollywood, at least in terms of the suckiness of the big screen adaption. "Blade" is actually entertaining, the action sequences fast and well done, as opposed to the too-much-special-effects battering we receive in "Spawn". It's not a bad movie.
One interesting sideline they meander into with "Blade" is to have this hematologist get bitten by a vamp. The result is an X-Files worthy trip into technical sounding explanations: vampires seem to have a different blood chemistry, they drink blood because their own blood can't sustain hemaglobins for very long, etc. They go as far come up with a "gene therapy" cure for vampirism. Mystical explanations aren't necessary for the existence of vampires: it's just a blood-borne disease, the CDC bulletin being in the works.
Vampires also seem to be regular guys, except they have a deep thirst for human blood. Well, at least with the biochemical explanation, there's no obvious reason you'd turn from being Bob the lovable office clown one minute to Bob the homicidal maniac the next. At least with "Buffy", a vampire is a demon inhabiting a human body. Perhaps "Blade" says we're all evil at heart. Or maybe there's a lack of consistency.
The science bits go out the window at the end, when Demon Boy comes down to do some damage. I though it might have been more interesting if this "Blood God" turned out to be a biological-warfare inspired aerosol mist, filled with vampire cooties, turning all that come in contact with it into vampires, as was perhaps suggested somewhere in the film. It would have fit in with the virus thing a bit better and be more terrifyingly apocalyptic, but, alas, it was not the case.
Other bits of late 20th C. technology cause havoc with any sort of vampirical mysticism. SPF15 sunblock apparently does wonders for vampire skin, though the good guys do have a big flash light tuned to the UV end of the spectrum. In this world, vampires simply tan badly. (Interestingly, I think there might have been some UV lamps in the disco during the opening sequence. Care must be taken with interior decorations.)
A Mac Powerbook is also used during the film, by the Bad Guy to decipher such-and-such prophesy to unleash this bigger demon. Apple has thus far gone from being a slick tool of secret agents ("Mission Impossible", where a Mac laptop went head to head with a PC, which lost), to saving the world ("ID4"), and now to black arts. Truly a versatile little machine. Macintosh: The Power to Take Over The World. Think different, indeed.
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