Rise: Blood Hunter

This is just a fun quick B movie view!!!

Boring vampires without any kind of powers, painfully poor acting, and a script so formulaic and awkward you'd think a teenager wrote it.

The movie suffers from pacing problems but otherwise it was a fun "watch once" flick.

The writer/director started with a nice kernel of a potential franchise combining two winning ideas, vampires + revenge, but the execution was way off often feeling clunky as set-ups and shifts from scene to scene frequently feel like a rough draft. Despite that I enjoyed the result even as the flaws kept drawing my attention. The dialogue sometimes makes some proven excellent actors sound amateurish. Needs a reboot because always room for one more in these genre.

It started to suck within the first 2 minutes, and went down hill after that. Un-original, uninspired, and cringy. If you want to abuse yourself, give it a look.

I didn't think it was that bad if one can watch non-traditional vampire movies.

Lucy Liu is out for revenge in the vampire horror film Rise: Blood Hunter. When investigative reporter Sadie Blake stumbles upon a clan of vampires they brutally kill her, but she comes back as a vampire and is intent on destroying them; meanwhile a cop desperately searches for the fiend that murdered his daughter, unaware that it's the same vampire clan that Sadie's hunting. Liu gives a fairly good performance and is backed by a solid supporting cast that includes Michael Chiklis and Carla Gugino. Additionally, the film doesn't hold back on the gore and violence of the vampire attacks. But the storytelling is rather weak and doesn't do a lot of character and plot development. Yet while it's a little thin, Rise: Blood Hunter is a frightening and gritty revenge tale.

A reporter (Lucy Liu) pursues the peculiar death of a teenage girl that both her publisher and the police refuse to investigate further. This is a pretty good vampire movie with sufficient doses of skin and blood, but I was most arrested by Liu in her best movie performance - it's true! She convincingly conveys the horrifying self-realization of what it would be like to join the ranks of the undead, which is an interesting angle you rarely find in vamp flicks. After coming to grips with her accursed fate, she sets out to destroy the nest of vampires that turned her so they cannot take another soul, and along the way becomes aligned with a renegade vampire hunter who helps her adjust and the dead girl's father who happens to be a cop. The biggest drawback is the very choppy flow to the movie - too many scenes seem rushed and bump into each other without enough explanation. I would like to see the unrated DVD version which is 22 minutes longer (twenty-two!) which I feel would flesh out, so to speak, the overall story.

Lucy Liu plays a reporter who finds herself turned into a vampire (although the word vampire is never mentioned in the film) and then becomes a crossbow and sword wielding vampire hunting matching. Seeking revenge on the vampires who turned her into one of the undead, the film has her kind doing a "Point Blank" sort of think, starting at the bottom of the vampire food chain and working her way up. The film is clearly in the vein of the bloody first two "Blade" films (not the PG-13 third film or TV series) and is not all that original, but it's stylishly made and has an attractive cast that includes Michael Chiklis, Robert Forster, Mako, Marily Manson as a Bartender, and Carla Gugino (who I always want to see in more films and have a total crush on).

Even Liu's powerful performance can't seem to elevate this mostly average vampire outing. I give it props, however, for trying to class-up and even bring some style to the overtly erotic genre. Blade finally has a girlfriend, it's just a shame that her universe isn't as fun to play in.