Tribeca 2007: Rise: Blood Hunter

Rise: Blood Hunter is the latest project from writer/director Sebastian Gutierrez (screenwriter for Gothika), and screening as part of the Midnight section of the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival. The story centers on Sadie Blake (Lucy Lui), a young investigative reporter who has been working on a series of articles about underground goth cults that, at first glance appear to be “‘Dungeons and Dragons’ with nipple rings,” but are in fact, connected to something much more sinister.

The film begins in a bar where a svelte young blonde is attempting to go home with a much older man, if he’s willing to pay. Enter Sadie Blake, who puts five hundred dollars down on the bar and tell the blonde she wants to take her home. Anyone who has read a one sentence description of the film knows Sadie is a vampire, or ends up a vampire, and at this point is probably expecting some light girl-on-girl followed by some inevitable bloodshed. Gutierrez strings the audience along, then springs the first (of many) plot twists, then rewinds six months, to some of the earliest events that brought Sadie to this point in the story – her story draws the attention of a cult-like vampire club, they rape and kill her, she wakes up a vampire and seeks revenge.

It sounds like the set up for a horror/sci-fi/action flick, similar to Blade or Underworld, but in actuality, stylistically and thematically, it is much more akin to La Femme Nikita or Sympathy for Lady Vengeance. The use of light and shadow, as well as the plot and characters, are reminiscent of film noir. Sadie is the typical plucky reporter whose story draws her into a world of violence and criminality, much like a detective that is forced to become more of a criminal, operating outside lines of the law in service of a higher moral obligation. Sadie is not only operating outside of the judicial system, but also the basic laws of human life, as she has become a member of the living dead. There are also tinges of the martial arts genre mixed in, not in the action, but in the plot. After escaping from the morgue, Sadie learns about her new condition, and undergoes training, from a kind of vampire mentor who wants to help Sadie seek revenge. Gutierrez wisely skips the training segment of the film (we’ve seen it before in Kill Bill, Batman Begins, along with the aforementioned La Femme Nikita). In fact, since we’ve seen and heard a lot of this before in other films, Gutierrez can skip over a lot without leaving the audience scratching their heads, and take full advantage of this. The film moves forward quickly, looking good and being entertaining, seeming to know what’s original about it and what’s not.

The action scenes are pretty straightforward stuff, well done but brief and without elaborate choreography. Most of it is basic gunplay and simple editing, techniques anyone who has staged a gun battle in a student film project will recognize. The gore effects are pretty horrific-looking. The vampires in this film do not have fangs, and must tear flesh with the teeth they’ve got, or use a sharp object, which makes for an even more gruesome result (see also George Romero’s Martin). And the film takes a gutsy, and surprisingly unsympathetic approach to Sadie’s need for blood. Also, vampire films and literature have a long standing tradition of using a vampire’s attack as a metaphor for rape, combining the bloodsucking with heavy sexual overtones. But here, it is much more blunt than a metaphor, and Gutierrez does not handle it lightly, nor exploits it. The sexual violence is by far the most disturbing aspect about Sadie’s murder.

The filming process could not have been easy on Lucy Lui, who spends half the film naked and covered in blood. But her performance is really the lynch pin that holds this film together. She is more than believable in every scene, whether it is shaking from withdrawl-like symptoms from lack of blood, crying hysterically on the verge of a mental breakdown, or executing one of her killers without mercy, she hits the emotional note perfectly, and grounds a film that could have easily looked and sounded ridiculous onscreen if a less talented actress had been cast.

Another performance worth noting is Michael Chiklis, moonlighting from his police work on “The Shield,” in a supporting role as a police detective searching for those responsible for the death of his teenage daughter, who had fallen in with the same goth cult that Sadie was investigating. This is familiar ground for Chiklis, but he fits into the tough guy role as good as Bruce Willis ever has, and here shows that, given the right script, he could easily take on a leading action role.

All in all, the film does not deliver anything an audience hasn’t seen before, but it’s well done, entertaining, and is worth the time of any vampire horror fan.