Product Description

Studio: Starz/sphe Release Date: 08/23/2005 Run time: 83 minutes Rating: Nr

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #120691 in DVD
• Released on: 2005-08-23
• Rating: Unrated
• Formats: Animated, Color, Dolby, Subtitled, Widescreen
• Original language: English, Japanese
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 50 minutes

Customer Reviews

Some good news, some bad news.
I bought Blood: The Last Vampire because I'm not a huge Anime fan, but really appreciate this movie's beauty and story. Seeing it on DVD, I knew the video would look great on the PSP screen, and for that most part, that's true. Also, the movie is about 45 minutes long, so the PSP is a great outlet for it as opposed to a painfully long feature film (I prefer to watch TV shows and shorter films on the PSP because I rarely have long spans of time to devote to PSP-filmwatching).

The bad news is related to the video quality itself. The studio converted the video to UMD as a matted-widescreen version (not sure of the technical term), so when you first play it, you get a small widescreen picture with "black bars" on ALL FOUR SIDES. You must use the "Zoom" option under the PSP display menu for the picture to fit right. A minor annoyance, but worth mentioning.

Also, the black-level is washed out. I've found that watching the UMD at the lowest brightness setting on the PSP screen is most accurate color-wise, but with such beautiful animation, it's sad to see the contrast couldn't be nudged up some. I don't know if this represents studio laziness, but I understand this is common on UMDs.

Ultimately, entertaining and a great flick for the UMD format, but not perfect.

She's the last original
Your basic vampire is perfectly suited to anime -- beautiful, seductive, and opulant.

Well, most of them, anyway. Things are a bit different in "Blood: The Last Vampire," an anime movie that bravely throws out most of the vampire preconceptions, as well as plot exposition. It's not a total success storywise, but it's an effectively dark, moody piece of bloody action.

As the movie opens, we see a mysterious young girl, Saya, on a train. When the lights go out, she savagely attacks a man at the other end of the train with a sword.

It turns out the man was a Chiropteran -- a sort of bat-vampire. When her coworkers arrive to clean up the mess, Saya learns that the Chiropterans have infiltrated the general public -- and she has to go undercover at a girls' high school near an American military base. She isn't happy about it, but goes anyway.

Saya begins snooping around for evidence of Chiropterans, and finds it -- a pair are disguised as ordinary high school girls. But when she corners them, a timid nurse accidentally gets involved in the bloodbath that ensues -- and a deadly cat-and-mouse game between the mysterious Saya and her monstrous prey.

"Blood: The Last Vampire" is one of those movies where the plot isn't the overwhelming force. In fact, the actual story isn't much -- it feels like tuning into an episode of a weekly TV show, without much explanation for who Saya is and what is going on. And after the first third, the movie is pretty much entirely devoted to "Saya hacks and slashes her way through the school while the nurse screams a lot."

But the visual presentation is stunning -- every scenes is saturated with shadows and vague, pale light. And while many scenes are quiet and almost motionless, the action scenes explode with kinetic energy, splashes of gore, and occasionally a raging fire. And when Saya jumps into action, the entire world seems to speed up into a blur of violence and splattered blood.

One thing you have to say -- there are no stereotypically pretty, European vampires here. There's only Saya -- a cold-eyed girl who looks like Angelina Jolie's gothy baby sister -- and a lot of grotesque bat creatures, with huge muzzles and big claws. The most "human" person here is probably the timid nurse, but we never really get to know her until the end.

"Blood: The Last Vampire" isn't too worried about having a plot, but for splattery action and fast-moving vampire battles, it's a dark diversion.