In this, the first DVD Tray of Horror for the VV blog, which will cover numerous scary Halloween holiday films over the next few weeks, we start with Rise: Blood Hunter, a vampire hunter tale that hits the street today.

You sometimes wonder why prominent stars agree to appear in certain types of films. For example, what did Lucy Liu, Michael Chiklis, Mako, and Carla Gugino see in this project? What compelled their interest? An abiding interest in horror? A quick pay date for little expenditure of effort? The satiation of certain covert fetishistic interests? A few days free between TV seasons? A fear of idle hands? The answer is not found in the film itself.

The first thing you learn from Rise is that vampires are very sloppy eaters. This seems inefficient. If blood is their, er, lifeblood, then why do vampires flail it around like angry one-year-olds with colic? If the prized corpuscles are so precious, then why don’t they scoop them up carefully and not waste a carmine drop? It’s not very cinematic, I guess. Much more movie-like is a chick in a skimpy dress stumbling about with a dam-burst of bloody drool pouring down her chin and onto her chest.

The second thing you learn is that the modern vampire movie is a hybrid with its own rules and regulations. This isn’t the Dracula films of yore; these are hip, sleek horror engines that purr on an ethanol blend of Anne Rice and Japanese vampire hunter comics (among other cultural influences). As in Hostel 2, nude bodies are hung from the ankles for easy drainage. As in many a recent horror film, there is a dream-within-a-dream awakening. As in The Omen, there is a last minute murder as the police barge in. And as in virtually every horror film, it ends, in defiance of its own internal logic, with the option of a sequel.

And, like numerous other thrillers, the film can’t seem to get started. It has about four false starts. What transpires (when the film stops clearing its throat) is that Sadie Blake (Lucy Liu), an L. A. Weekly reporter who has just written a cover story on goth kids in a vampire cult, stumbles upon something she shouldn’t and is turned into a vampire herself. Supposed to be a really dead person, she finds herself waking up in the morgue (in a nod to Kill Bill), a member of the living dead. Instead of embracing vampire culture, though, she becomes a vampire hunter, briefed in the task by some Latin gurus, and begins tracking the decadent duo who trapped her in this world.

The story is told in the present tense, with parallel time flashbacks that give us Sadie’s back story, a sort of faux Tarantino affect, except that the chronology gets confusing at times. Occasionally you don’t know if you are in the present or in the recent past. It may not matter. Eventually helping Sadie in her quest is disgraced and drunken cop Clyde Rawlins (Chiklis), whose daughter, we eventually learn, has also been seduced into the vampire world.

Rise is a strange movie. Lucy Liu is a petite Asian who likes roles in which she has men at her feet or is crushing them under her boot for some contrived reason. In addition to this, here she also spends about 15 minutes of the movie in handcuffs. A whole essay could be written about the role of handcuffs in recent films, from the weird Dennis Hopper road film Catchfire (aka Backtrack), in which Jodie Foster is a often-nude handcuffed kidnap victim), to the recent Silent Hill. Chiklis is in a hit TV show (The Shield), and Gugino is a cult TV star. But the main villain is a vampire leader named Bishop (James D’Arcy, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World). Being a male vampire, he has, of course, a British accent, another cliché of the recent manifestation of the vampire genre.

The film is directed by Sebastian Gutierrez, the author of Snakes on a Plane, The Big Bounce, and Gothika, among other films, and the short-lived TV show, Karen Sisco (which may be why Carla Gugino shows up in this low-budget effort). It’s partially produced by Ghost House Pictures, which also backed The Grudge 2 and the forthcoming 30 Days of Night. In being so genre specific, it’s an unusual movie making company.

In the patented Joe Bob list of cult film features, Rise highlights a blood orgy, a knife plunged into booted foot, various crossbow arrows to various chests, gross arm chewing, bloody beds, a handcuffed Lucy Liu, and disgusting bullet removal.

Rise (Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 94 minutes, $ 24.95, 1.85:1, DD 5.1, English and Spanish subtitles, street date Tuesday 9 October, 2007) comes with four small promotional featurettes, “Blood,” “Sex and Murder,” “Location, Location,” and “Stunts” (which come to about six minutes), four storyboard-to-screen comparisons, the trailer, and trailers for 12 other genre movies from Sony and its subsidiaries.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 9th, 2007 at 3:47 pm and is filed under Reel Politique - Film columnist DK Holm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.