Vampire by Day and Night

Just watched Blood: The Last Vampire. It's an anime dvd I was able to pick up for relatively cheap. Eh, why not?

Coolest thing about it is that it takes place on Yokota Air Force Base Ca. 1966. I landed at that base when I got to Japan (ca. 2005). How neat is that? Anyway...

It's really hardly a movie. It works more like a pilot episode, but it's not. It would even work if it was an Act I for some longer movie, but it's not. It might even work if the characters were fleshed out, but they're not. All there really is a serviceable/formulaic story, a lot of style, and even more blood.

The basic idea is that this young girl is the last original vampire in the world and so she (ala Buffy) is the only one able to kill certain demons. Knowing this, the CIA uses her in investigations of strange events (ala X-Files). So when a couple of corpses show up at Yokota AFB, they dress our heroine up in a traditional Japanese school uniform and the mayhem begins. This would actually work quite well as either a Buffy or an X-Files episode and I'd probably like it better if it was one of the above. As it is, it feels derivative, too short, and too shallow for me to recommend.

See, a bad review. This proves that I CAN actually write them.

*EDIT*

Okay, so I watched the making of featurette and I think I'll write a few redeeming features here.

1) This movie is basically a technical demonstration of new digital imaging/effects on traditional animation. This means you get a lot of really nice lighting/shadow effects, lighting plumes, shifting luminous sources/intensities, and other really cool things like that on 2-D images. This is actually much harder than applying the concepts to a fully 3-D film. The project was conceived as this and then they said, "okay, who has a story?" and Blood came to be by combining two concepts into 1 "script". The reason the story seems so weak and almost like an afterthought is because it was intended that way. It doesn't make it right, but at least this explains some things.

2) I love the way this movie is bilingual. There's no option of an english or japanese audio track because the script is almost 50/50. Having characters speak in distinct languages at appropriate times is a super cool idea that I've wanted to see happen for a long time. I so wish that Hunt for Red October never shifted the Russian sub away from speaking Russian (no matter how cool the transition was).