Stubs - Blade

Blade (1998) starring Wesley Snipes, Stephen Dorff, Kris Kristofferson. Directed by Stephen Norrington. Screenplay by David S. Goyer. Based on characters created by Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan. Produced by Peter Frankfurt, Wesley Snipes, Robert Engelman. Run time: 120 minutes. Color. USA. Horror

Before there was the MCU and before the X-Men franchise got off the ground, there was Blade. Not the first Marvel adventure into films, there was a Captain America serial in 1944, and, of course, the misfortunate Howard the Duck (1978), but unlike that film, Blade showed there was money to be made from adapting comic books for the big screen.

There are other firsts for Blade that often attributed to other films. As an example, it was the first comic book film adaptation to feature a Black superhero, not Black Panther. And the first comic book adaptation to receive an R rating, not Deadpool.

The character Blade dates to a 1973 comic book, The Tomb of Dracula, by the writer Marv Wolfman and artist Gene Colan, as a supporting character. Originally not a "day walker", but a human being immune to being turned into a vampire, Blade used teakwood knives and relied solely on his wits and skill in his war on vampires. That is until he was bitten by the character Morbius in Peter Parker: Spider-Man #8 (1999). Following the updates to the character for this film, the comic books were modified to match, including having a more samurai-like aesthetic and using swords.

The New Line film was also not the first attempt at adapting this character to the silver screen. New World Pictures, who had the rights, considered making a Western set in Mexico with actor Richard Roundtree playing the vampire hunter. When that failed to materialize, Marvel Studios developed the project as a vehicle for rapper LL Cool J.

The film ended up at New Line with writer David Goyer attached. Originally, the studio was interested in making it into a spoof, and even considered a White Blade until Goyer convinced them to take the character seriously. Snipes, who had tried to get a Black Panther film off the ground, signed on to play Blade in 1996.

Production took place in Los Angeles and in Death Valley. All sets were constructed and all on-set filming occurred in what was formerly the Redken Shampoo factory in Canoga Park. The film, which had a budget of $45 million, was released on August 21, 1998 with a box office of $131.2 million across 2,322 screens.

It should be noted that Marv Wolfman, on the day the film was released, unsuccessfully sued studio parent Time Warner and comic book publisher Marvel Entertainment Group for at least $35 million. He also sought to establish his ownership of the copyright and trademark of the character.

The film opens in 1967. A pregnant woman, Vanessa Brooks (Sanaa Lathan), is wheeled into an emergency room after having been attacked by a vampire. The wound and the bleeding caused her to go into premature labor. While doctors save her baby, the woman dies.

A blood rave in the meat packing plant.

Fast forward 30 years. A horny and stoned man is being led by Racquel (Traci Lords) into an underground rave club, located behind a meat packing house. Following sprinklers filled with blood, the man is beaten and about to be killed when Blade (Wesley Snipes) arrives.

Blade (Wesley Snipes) crashes the party.

While Blade manages to kill many of the vampires, not all of them are killed. One of them, the manager of the club, Quinn (Donal Logue), has one of his arms cut off and is set on fire. Blade escapes before the police arrive. They unknowingly take what they think is a burnt corpse to the hospital. There, Dr. Curtis Webb (Tim Guinee) consults with hematologist Karen Jenson (N'Bushe Wright), who is also his ex-girlfriend, about something he thinks is odd about the corpse’s blood. She agrees and he takes her to see the body.

 Quinn (Donal Logue) attacks Karen Jenson (N'Bushe Wright).

At that point. Quinn wakes up, kills Dr. Webb and feeds on Karen. Blade arrives and manages to recover Karen and, staying one step ahead of the police, manages to take her to a safe house where she is treated by his old friend Abraham Whistler (Kris Kristofferson).

Abraham Whistler (Kris Kristofferson)

Whistler explains to Karen that he and Blade have been waging a secret war against vampires using weapons based on their elemental weaknesses, such as sunlight, silver, and garlic. Blade takes a serum to get in check his desire for human blood, but that’s losing its effectiveness due to overuse. As Karen is now "marked" by the bite of a vampire, they’re not sure if she’ll become a vampire or not, but both men tell her to leave the city.

Meanwhile, at a meeting of the council of pure-blood vampire elders, Frost (Stephen Dorff), a half-breed and leader of a faction of younger vampires, is rebuked for trying to incite war between vampires and humans. As Frost and his kind are not natural-born vampires, they are considered socially inferior.

Blade roughs up police officer Krieger (Kevin Patrick Walls), Frost's familiar.

Karen returns to her apartment to pack and notices there is a police officer, Krieger (Kevin Patrick Walls), who is a familiar, a human loyal to vampires, to Frost. He is about to take her when Blade arrives and subdues him. Krieger runs away but Karen and Blade stakeout his police car. When he returns, they follow him to an archive that contains pages from the "vampire bible".

Elder Gitano Dragonetti (Udo Kier), a pure-blood, represents the old school vampire.

When Krieger informs Frost of what happened, Frost kills him. Frost also has one of the elders, Gitano Dragonetti (Udo Kier), executed by the morning sun in response to the earlier disrespect shown him at the council of vampires. He then strips the others on the council of their authority.

Frost (Stephen Dorff), a half-blood represents, a new order.

Meanwhile, Blade comes upon Pearl (Eric Edwards), a morbidly obese vampire. Karen tortures him with a UV light into revealing that Deacon wants to command a ritual where he would use 12 pure-blood vampires to awaken the "blood god" La Magra, and Blade's blood is the key.

While she’s experimenting with the anticoagulant EDTA, Karen discovers that it explodes when combined with vampire blood. She manages to synthesize a vaccine that can cure the infected, but learns that it will not work on Blade. Karen is confident that she can cure Blade's bloodthirst, but it would take her years of treating it.

When Blade is away, Frost and his men attack the hideout, infect Whistler, and abduct Karen. When Blade returns, Whistler asks him to give him a gun and he commits suicide.

When Blade attempts to rescue Karen from Frost's penthouse, he is shocked to find his mother is still alive. She reveals that she came back the night she was attacked and was brought in by Frost, who appears and reveals himself as the vampire who bit her.

Blade is then subdued by cattle prods and taken to the Temple of Eternal Night, where Frost plans to perform the summoning ritual for La Magra. Karen is thrown into a pit to be devoured by Webb, who has transformed into a decomposing zombie-like creature. Karen manages to fight Webb off and escapes.

His mother helps Frost drain Blade’s blood and the ritual to bring back La Migra begins, with Frost obtaining the God’s powers. Karen finds Blade and allows him to drink from her, enabling him to recover.

After killing all of his minions, Blade finally fights Frost. Using syringes of EDTA, the overdose causes his body to inflate and explode, finally killing him.

Later, Karen offers to help Blade cure himself but, instead, he asks her to create an improved version of the serum so he can continue his crusade against vampires.

In a brief epilogue, Blade confronts a vampire in Moscow, who is about to bite an unsuspecting woman.

The movie earns its R-rating with a lot of blood and a lot of gore, not to mention characters who enjoy killing for fun and for food.

Blade would earn $131 million worldwide, making it a big enough hit to led to two sequels, Blade II in 2002, Blade Trinity in 2004, as well as a one season television series in 2006, starring Kirk "Sticky" Jones. Despite the success of the film, Marvel shared only a flat fee of $25,000.

Reviews at the time were mixed. Roger Ebert, writing for the Chicago Sun-Times, gave the film three stars out of four, writing: "Blade ... is a movie that relishes high visual style. It uses the extreme camera angles, the bizarre costumes and sets, the exaggerated shadows, the confident cutting between long shots and extreme closeups. It slams ahead in pure visceral imagery. " Meanwhile, Dennis Harvey of Variety wrote: "Though slick and diverting in some aspects, increasingly silly pic has trouble meshing disparate elements -- horror, superhero fantasy, straight-up action -- into a workable whole.”

Of those two, I am definitely more in Harvey’s camp that Ebert’s when it comes to Blade.

Wesley Snipes as Blade.

Wesley Snipes’ performance as Blade comes off as a very one-dimensional character for the protagonist of a film. I have to assume there was nothing in the script that would allow for any further development. He comes across as more machine-like than heroic. He is not someone you can easily identify with or like for that matter.

I’ve never been a big fan of Stephen Dorff, and he does little to change my opinion with his performance as Frost, even though the character is further developed than Blade’s.

A better-rounded character is Kris Kristofferson’s Whistler. Known as much for his acting as his music, Kristofferson comes off as an interesting, though somewhat cliché character. Hard-working, he smokes and drinks heavily, making the fact he has cancer not that much of a surprise. His character is also a fountain of exposition that the film desperately needs to explain the origin of the main character.

N'Bushe Wright gives a good performance as Karen. A character who gets pulled unwillingly into a fight that she didn’t even know existed. Rather than staying as a victim, she rises to the challenge, using her own talent with blood research, she comes up with the potion that saves Blade in his fight to death with Frost. A trained dancer, this is Wright’s best-known role.

While the action is in line with a comic book adaptation, meaning somewhat unbelievable in the real world, the results are often very hard to watch, unless you find entertainment in bursting blood blisters. The underlying myth, that we live in a fantasy and don’t see the real world, in which vampires are everywhere, comes off as something I’ve seen before and seen done better. And with one plot point, I’m not sure why the pureblood vampires, those born as vampires, are so powerless against Frost and his minions, those who have become vampires. Frost’s takeover seems pretty easy and quickly complete.

If you’re not happy with Blade winning, in 2021, Marvel published The Darkhold: Blade one-shot written by Daniel Kibblesmith, presenting an alternate ending to the film, where Deacon Frost succeeded in his plans at using his power attained as avatar of La Magra to turn billions of humans around the world into vampires.

I didn’t enjoy Blade enough to want to see the sequels. Once was more than enough with this film.