But it sure was a fun ride to get to this point and that's what it's about. It's a perfect, brutal match up, that is until the final anti-climatic battle where the truly laughable CGI takes pace and travels to some nonsense place where the film is sucked dry of all anything coherent. Luckily, Stephen Dorff plays Deacon Frost completely opposite as an insanely angry, over-the-top villain who steals every scene he's in.

For every scary vampiric moment with Blade that had him showcase his kung-fu skills in an amazing way, it was meant with him slowly putting on his sunglasses and spouting a ridiculous one-liner that is horrifically cringe-worthy and laugh-out-loud funny, as Snipes delivers these lines in the most stoic of ways, similar to how the teacher says 'Bueller' repeatedly in Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Goyer ( The Dark Knight Trilogy) penned the screenplay and added equal amounts of serious dramatic horror and cheesy one-liners and actions. Unfortunately, Norrington went on to make The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which led Sean Connery to leave the acting business whereas Norrington was never heard from again.ĭavid S. Instead of the camera standing back from the action, sitting and watching carefully every move, Blade's camera got knee-deep into the chaos itself, which at the time was a more immersive experience for fans and some two decades later still plays out at a quick pace. Only Blade can stop this maniacal man through the use of some excellent martial arts and swordplay.ĭirector Stephen Norrington used a highly-stylized camera movement for most of the film with fast, quick cuts in and around the action and tons of blood in certain sequences that were caked in red. Deacon is ousted from his vampire community for trying to start a global vampire vs human war, but in retaliation, he kills the elder vampires and takes control in order to bring back an ancient vampire blood god to murder the planet. The baby survives, but the mother dies, and the film cuts to thirty years later where that baby has become Blade, (Wesley Snipes), who is half-vampire, half-human, and retains all of the vampire strengths, but none of their weaknesses, besides the thirst for blood.īlade in his pitch-black gear, guns, and duo swords spend the day killing vampires and protecting the human race with the help of his mentor Abraham Whistler (Kris Kristofferson), who has helped create a serum that will keep Blade's vampire thirst at bay. This is where Deacon Frost (Stephen Dorff) enters the picture as the poster boy for the ultimate 1990's villain of all time. Blade starts out in the 1960s where a pregnant woman is attacked by a vampire, causing her to give birth. Some twenty-two years later, the original Blade film still has that power and kick that it had when it flew onto the big screen in the late 1990s, sans some of the cheesy dialogue and the extremely outdated CGI effects. From here, Hollywood invested heavily into X-Men, Spider-Man, and then into a strange idea for the MCU that became the biggest most beloved film franchise in history, while putting the comic book culture into the mainstream - but it all started with a little vampire hunter named Blade. The result was a huge financial success, more than tripling its budget in ticket sales along with some fairly glowing reviews from top critics, including a good review from Roger Ebert. It's argued that the first X-Men film paved the way for superhero movies that eventually led to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but X-Men wouldn't have happened if it weren't for Blade in 1998, which was the first time a major studio put a ton of money and talent into a comic book universe that more or less took itself seriously. Marvel and DC soon followed suit, where Marvel ditched the spandex and put over vampires, bullets, and swords in Blade, which was later made into a feature film in 1998 starring Wesley Snipes.

But then a couple of independent comic book companies burst onto the scene and started making gritty, violent, adult only graphic novels that resulted in major popularity in the comic culture.

In fact, most of Marvel and DC's product was campy, family-friendly, and usually involved a formulaic storyline where a pleasant superhero would always save the day.

Besides those five films, the comic book universe was looked down upon and only reserved for the true die-hard comic fans. Of course, there are exceptions to this with the original Superman film, Tim Burton's Batman, and of course Sam Raimi's Spider-Man Trilogy. It was only some ten years ago when the cult of superheroes became the biggest money-making phenomenon in Hollywood with the start of the MCU in Iron Man.

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