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Blood: the Last Vampire is an aborted, misshapen, defective live action clone of an anime master.

The anime was a tale of monsters and secret societies, of an age old battle and a girl who was, in every sense of the term, an anti-hero. She’s hard to love, but easy to root for as she hacks her way through monster after monster in order to save the human race. It wasn’t as iconic an anime film as Akira or Ghost in the Shell, but Blood: The Last Vampire is a respected anime, well known among fans.

So naturally, something had to screw it up. As Hollywood turned its head in search of new material to rape and plunder, the giant, Sauron-like eye roved over anime. Leo DiCaprio snagged Akira and Ninja Scroll, Dragonball hit theaters earlier this year, and on July 10th, Blood: The Last Vampire crashes with a dizzying lack of cohesive style, smacks us with a brand new, all-American sidekick (for the culturally ignorant citizens, despite the fact that anime fans, who obsess over Japanese culture, are a part of the target audience) and blinds us with monster FX not seen since the days of Evil Dead - or My Name is Bruce, for that matter.

The film opens in a Tokyo subway circa 1970. We see a young Japanese girl giving the stinkeye to a man down the car. This is Saya, a monster hunter. In a few choppy, dizzying and badly edited moments, she splits the man - a monster in a human flesh suit - right down the middle. It is all very grind house, very pulpy.

Enter Saya’s handler, Michael. He explains to his charge that a group of gruesome slayings at a nearby American military base are the work of her prey - and, more importantly, their queen, Onigen. Saya is charged to go undercover as a student of the high school on base, root out the bad guys and cut them to ribbons.

So far, so good (except for the shooting style and editing massacre - the editing is worse than Bourne Supremacy, and I joked that Michael J. Fox was on the handcam for that one). We go to the base, and here is where anime and live action part ways. Enter Alice, the general’s daughter. She’s the stereotypical rebellious teenager, and she just happens to stumble right into the middle of Saya’s investigation. There is much fighting - on base, in town, within the organization that put Saya on the base. As the film progresses, so does the method of flexography - some of the shots become slow, elegant, while others remain a seizure-inducing mess. For every twenty bad shots, though, there is one beautiful view of Saya kicking major ass - my favorite being a particularly stunning shot of Saya cutting a monster cranium to crotch and bursting through the bloody, split body to move onto the next bad guy. Though the strangely chunky blood is polite enough to stay on the body of origin and not sully up anyone’s groovy 70’s garb and the rain falls in strange globs, making for bizarre texture, it is still a lovely image.

So the plot twists away from the anime, becoming more mythology than monster slaying, more Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon than Buffy the Vampire Slayer,  and less Blood: The Last Vampire (the original animated, that is). The end of the film is very pretty, but it makes no sense and despite the headache-spawning disaster that was the last hour and twenty minutes of my life, teases for a sequel. God have mercy.

The bad guys (the ones without monster faces) all but have neon signs over their heads proclaiming them as such; the monster (aka guy in a rubber suit) FX are repulsively bad. For every bad ass Saya moment (example: her Bend it Like Beckham move where she kicks her katana out of the holder and into her ready hand), there are countless cheesy and downright dumb moments (my personal fav? A katana sticking up out of leaf-covered forest floor, sneaking up on someone like Jaws’s dorsal fin).

I am a big fan of the original movie and the anime series it spawned, Blood+. I really wanted to like this live action version, and my disappointment was almost stupefying. Had the filmmakers been more loyal to the source material or even picked one style to shoot in (or had creature FX that weren’t outclassed by season one of Buffy) then it might have had a shot at being good. Sadly the whole mess is just… well, sad.

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