I don’t care what you think of her movies (including this one), but Lucy Liu is smokin’ hot in my opinion. Thus is the reason I even bothered to watch this “new” vampire flick when it hit the DVD rental shelves. Actually, I generally really enjoy Liu’s performances … aside from her attractiveness. Liu has the fascinating way of portraying some really sick and twisted characters that benefit from the element of surprise due to her outwardly cute and harmless appearance. She was great as O-Ren Ishii in Kill Bill and while the movie was atrocious, I thoroughly enjoyed watching her in Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever.

I suppose now I actually need to talk about Rise: Blood Hunter. Lucy Liu plays Sadie Blake, a young newspaper reporter who digs a little too deep into the Gothic underground culture. She is abducted by a group of vampires and when she reveals she has no knowledge of them, they proceed to kill her … and then have sex with her. Yeah, OK … so, turns out she’s not dead and after she turns while lying on the cold steel gurney in the morgue for three days, she vows to hunt down all five of the vampires responsible for destroying her life. One by one, she tracks them down and kills them. She’s not alone however, because Detective Clyde Rawlins (Michael Chiklis) is also trying to find the evil bastard(s) that brutally killed his daughter. Rawlins is an aggressive, drunk cop that’s suspended from duty … sounds like familiar territory for Chiklis.

Rise: Blood Hunter is written and directed by Sebastian Gutierrez. He’s probably best known for writing Snakes on a Plane. Aha … got your attention now, huh? The film actually is pretty well shot, technically speaking. The story isn’t really all that original, often suffering from a bad case of ultra-predictability. Again, I like Lucy Liu and in some scenes she’s not bad … but, I just simply could not suspend my disbelief far enough to accept her as the bad-ass Blade-inspired vampire out to avenge herself. She’s just too damn cute, and her voice is just not suited for that type of role. Not to mention whatever Fisher-Price toy miniature crossbow thing that is she’s using doesn’t do the character any justice either. Give the girl something mean and nasty looking to slaughter a clan a vampires. I will give the approach one small bit of kudos for not assuming they had to stick with the genre cliche of vampires having fangs. Then again, this may have just been a result of budget cutbacks … who knows?

Tags | blood hunter, lucy liu, mako, michael chiklis, rise