| about
trismugistus.com
and digital-bondage.net
are my web sites.
trismugistus.com
is where I upload my anime, manga and tv&film reviews,
and also where I occasionally post short stories and longer
works I've written.
digital-bondage.net
is my wallpaper site and provides anime, manga and other
desktop wallpapers in a variety of resolutions. I also
have a few tutorials and some resources, such as psds
for you to download.
I also run a site called scan-city.org,
which provides scans from the latest japanese anime magazines
for you to download and use in your wallpapers.
You can also read my blog here
or check out my anime list here. |
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| details |
| The Genre: Action/Horror |
| The Format: DVD |
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| The plot: A ramped-up techno soundtrack bleats
out adrenaline-pumping action tunes while leather-clad
vampire slayers smash through walls and floors and
ceilings, break windows with their bodies, and occasionally
defy gravity. Cascades of flying glass sparkle in
the air and crimson pools of blood shine on the
floors of warehouse dens where the hungry creatures
hide. This is BLADE: TRINITY, the third instalment
of the film series adapted from Marvel comics. Here,
a new challenge faces the preternaturally sharp
hunter, Blade, when a group of vamps resurrect the
long-slumbering 'Drake' - the ancient and all-powerful
Count Dracula - and Blade meets the ultimate opponent. |
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| opinion |
| The hell?
I must admit to being a bit of a sneaky big-time
fan of the first two Blade films. The first, especially,
oozed style and panache and I think rates right
up there as being one of the best comic-book related
films ever made.
The central Blade character is where it’s
mainly at for me. I never quite got the whistler
thing, and it seemed to obey too many comic book
related clichés and was the source of much
in the way of cheese. But these parts were easily
ignored in favour of the Wesley Snipes looking all
cool and stuff and putting some serious smack down
on some vampiric arse bits.
Speaking of the vampires, they have also been a
key element of the preceding Blade films. Admittedly
they maybe headed on over into a gothy vibe a smidge
too often, but to me this just adds charm. Vampires
need to have gothicy stuff to them, just as they
need to have heavy sexuality.
Because that’s what vampires are all about
- Sex and Death.
And the first two Blade films delivered on these.
They also had appropriate use of bad guys. In the
first it was a conspiracy kinda thing with a main
bad guy who was just a plain old vamp, but had more
than a smidge of ambition.
The second went down the more traditional comic
book route of having a super-vamp as its bad guy.
But that was all right - his origins were fully
explained and they made sense; there was also an
element of conspiracy and betrayal and he looked
fairly human for the most part as well.
But this is supposed to be a review of the third
film, right? So why am I blathering on about the
first two? |
The reason is that the first two tell you
just exactly what’s wrong with this
third one.
First off, Blade is almost not in the film.
Maybe Wesley was getting a bit tired of doing
them. Maybe the writer had run out of ideas.
Whatever the reason, this feels less like
the third Blade film and more like a film
that happens to have him in it.
Next up is that the Whistler character forms
a big focus of the story. I don’t care
about him. I don’t give a crap that
he has a daughter, or that Blade clearly has
some sort of father-figure thing going on
with him. Neither am I particularly fussed
if he dies or not - hell he’s already
died, like, a dozen times in the previous
films and here he is, popping up in the next
one.
Last on the list are the vamps. The vamps
are the basic-grade bad guys. We need them
to be super-cool and we need them to be super-sexy.
It also helps if there are plenty of them
for Blade to kill and that they keep the mundane
henchmaning to a bare minimum. |
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They fail to really make many of these. They’re
not particularly bad in Blade Trinity, we’ve
seen them do most of the things they do here before,
and they really aren’t all that sexy. Ah yes,
and the henchman thing.
Guess what happens in Blade Trinity? They revive
the big lad himself, good old Dracula.
Oh dear.
It breaks my heart when they try and re-invent
the classic characters like Dracula. I think to
myself, “Oh no, please don’t do that.”
But they do. Cos he’s a name. You know who
he is.
But then they proceed to fuck with him. They make
him not Vlad the Impaler or they make him able to
walk in the daylight, or they make him immune to
garlic, or some other shit. It’s just not
on in my book, and here we see all of these classic
mistakes played out in big style. |
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But also since we’ve got Dracula in the
film we can’t have the other vamps being the
focus can we? Even though they’re the more
interesting characters.
So we’re onto a downer here from the off,
and things don’t get much better when you
realise what it is they’ve replaced Blade
with. They’ve replaced him with some sort
of super team. In traditional team-based comic book
style we have things like a character who’s
a weapons making nerd to give them all cool gadgets
(think Q from Bond) but we also have a nerdy biologist
character for plot-advancement type activity.
Then we have two brawler characters - one male
with a wisecracking past that hides a damaged past
and the other female. She’s the aforementioned
Whistlers daughter. Well done that guy, you certainly
managed to raise a daughter who knows how to put
a whole in people.
And speaking of daughters we have a peril-ready
young daughter type person kicking about. Yes, that’s
right, in other words we have a portion of super-cheese
to add to our portion of Dracula cheese. And for
me that’s just too much cheese to handle.
Now what else is there? |
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Oh yeah, there’s the almost total
lack of any real plot. Things just sort of
happen for no apparent reason and this Dracula
bloke seems quite content to ponce around
in some big office building without any real
kind of plan of action to deal with Blade.
As masters of all things evil go he’s
pretty damn weak.
He also seems to run away a lot. In fact,
he spends the entire film running away from
someone. What the hell is that all about?
Dracula running away from people. Yeah, that
makes sense.
Lastly a special mention has to go out to
the direction. It’s poor. Very poor.
The action is often times difficult to follow,
poor use is made of the camera and the whole
thing feels wooden and slow moving. It also
somehow manages to make the film kinda boring
and predictable. Now considering the writer
-who was the same writer that did the first
two films - directed it this is somewhat surprising.
Clearly sticking to the day job is the order
of the day here. |
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I could go on, but I’m getting almost as
sick writing this as a I did watching it.
Oh no, wait; I forgot to mention the films one
saving grace.
The humour. It’s rather unexpected I admit,
but the jokes the blokey cracks are actually really
quite funny in places. Indeed, his relationship
with Blade is the almost singular diamond in the
otherwise sandpaper-grade toilet paper roughness
that is this poor excuse for a movie.
There are plenty of extras on the disc too, if
you can stomach watching them after your intelligence,
common sense and fandom have been so roundly butt-fucked. |
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| summary |
| The Summary: Not so good. |
| The Score: 1/5 |
| The Pictures:
(click for larger versions) |
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