Blade I (Movie)

Stars:
Wesley Snipes
Kris Kristofferson
Stephen Dorff
Tracy Lords

Runtime : 120 minutes

Budget: 45 Million (Est)
Gross Revenue: 131 Million

Released: 1998

IMDB Rating: 6.9 / 10
MetaCritic: 45 / 100

80% Film.com Tom Keogh (Highest Rating)
A pulsing, wooshing, visceral experience that amounts to great fun and an entirely disposable movie.

20% LA Weekly Paul Malcolm (Lowest Rating)
Working from a script by David S. Goyer ("Dark City") that lacks any sense of humor or character, Snipes seems unsure if he should vamp it up or play it straight, while Dorff just plain sucks.

Plot Summary (Provided by Wiki)
In 1967, a pregnant woman is hospitalized after being bitten by, as one of the doctors says, some kind of wild animal. In the process of trying to revive her, she goes into labor, requiring a c-section. She gives birth to a baby boy and dies. Approximately 30 years later, a seductive woman (played by Traci Lords) brings an unsuspecting man to a strange nightclub. After a brief time, the man realizes something is amiss in the club yet cannot quite discern why. However, his fears are soon confirmed when blood begins to pour down from the sprinkler system, revealing that most, if not all of the club's patrons are vampires. Unable to escape from the hideous creatures which have now surrounded him, the young man seems doomed until one of the vampires notices an individual who has just entered, whom he calls "the daywalker".

Blade (Wesley Snipes) coolly enters the main dance floor, taking pleasure in the vampires' fear of him. After a brief standoff, one vampire finds the nerve to attack, Blade shoots him, and most of the vampires flee, while several stay to fight. Eventually, after battling his way through numerous guards, Blade singles out one vampire named Quinn (played by Donal Logue), whom he has encountered before, but always seems to survive. After nailing him to the wall with stakes, Blade tells Quinn to "Give my regards to Frost" and sets him on fire, leaving a burnt Quinn along with the confused human as the only surviving inhabitants of his attack. The police arrive, take Quinn's crisp remains and send them for identification.

At the hospital, Dr. Curtis Webb conducts the post-mortem examination on Quinn, along with his ex-girlfriend Dr. Karen Jenson (N'Bushe Wright). During the examination, Quinn shockingly returns to life and feeds on both Webb and Jenson. Although Webb appears to die instantly, Jenson manages to escape into the hall before she is attacked, where Blade, having pre-supposed that Quinn would come back, turns up. He attacks the rejuvenated vampire, who jumps out a window and escapes. As Blade makes to leave, he sees a bleeding Doctor Jensen lying on the floor, beckoning for him to help her. Seeing a similarity to Blade's mother, he rescues Jensen and they head back to his base of operations.

At the same time, there is a meeting of The House of Erebus, a vampire Shadow Council. The Elder Dragonetti (played by Udo Kier) discusses Blade's recent intensified attacks, and berates a young Deacon Frost (Stephen Dorff) for his recklessness in running nightclubs. Most vampires believe that they should more or less co-exist with the humans (maintaining a secret, Mafia-like power cabal), whilst renegades such as Frost believe they should rule them outright. There is some sense of superiority from "pure-blood" vampires (i.e. those who are born vampires) against those who are "turned" (born human and later turned into vampires.)

Back at Blade's lair, after patching her up, Jenson meets Abraham Whistler (Kris Kristofferson), Blade's mentor and weapons technician in their fight against vampire-kind. Whistler outlines their current mission and the nature of vampires, along with the power they hold in the outside world. Jenson decides to head home, although Blade reminds her it is is a possibility that, due to Quinn's bite, she too may become a vampire. Blade also receives an injection of some kind of serum that he apparently needs.

Upon arriving in her apartment, Jenson is assaulted by a policeman who is revealed to be a familiar - a human being who serves vampires (a collaborator, essentially, that after years of service might get rewarded by being turned into a vampire). Blade rescues Jenson, having used her as bait to lure the enemy in. On the street, Blade tortures the familiar to find out where his base is, but Jenson becomes disgusted and intervenes, accidentally allowing the familiar to escape. After Blade berates her for not understanding how the "real world" works, they stake out the car until the familiar returns and follow him back to another club of Frost's, there discovering a morbidly obese vampire named Pearl. Blade and Karen attack Pearl with a UV-Lamp, searing the vampire's flesh, and making him spill some details of Frost's plans, including mention of the blood god La Magra. Blade and Karen enter the vampire library but are ambushed by Frost's henchmen, led by Quinn and Mercury (Played by Arly Jover ), Deacon's girlfriend. Although Blade and Jenson are assaulted by Frost's private army, they escape due to the timely arrival of Whistler, though they are unable to fully understand Frost's intentions for La Magra. Jenson also realizes Blade is "one of them" but he corrects her because he is actually "something else."

Back at Blade's lair, Whistler tells Karen how Blade became a hybrid. Blade's mother was bitten by a vampire while pregnant, causing Blade to undergo genetic changes. Jenson begins to work on a permanent cure for the vampire condition, using Whistler's research as her starting ground. During this time, Frost kills Elder Dragonetti by subjecting him to a sunrise, and forcibly gathers the other members of the Shadow Council as "volunteers". Shortly after this, Frost makes a second strike. Whilst Blade heads out to fetch the ingredients for his serum, Frost abducts Dr. Jenson from the lair and badly beats Whistler, leaving Quinn and the rest of his crew to finish him off. Upon Blade's return, he finds a taunting video left from Frost. In a poignant scene, Blade aids a bleeding Whistler in suicide so he doesn't 'turn'. Unable to kill him himself, Blade gives Whistler his gun and walks away, hearing a gunshot behind him. Stricken with grief, Blade vows to find and kill Frost.



Blade arms himself for a raid on Frost's base, taking along with him specially-designed pneumatic syringes loaded with EDTA, which has a highly volatile reaction to vampire blood. During his attack on the base, Blade fights his way through a horde of vampires, yet discovers a horrible truth once he reaches the top floor of the building. He learns that his mother (the pregnant woman from the flashback scene) did not in fact die, and is now Frost's vampire mistress, as it was Frost himself who had bitten his mother during her pregnancy. Overcome with shock, Blade is easily subdued by the guards, who knock him out and take him to the Temple of Eternal Night, where Frost reveals the final stages of his plan.

Using his resources and vast wealth, Frost has managed to rebuild the temple and intends to use it for La Magra's resurrection, a key ingredient of which is Blade's sunlight-resistant vampiric blood, along with the sacrifice of the other twelve "pure-blood" council members (Ashe, Cianteto, Dragonetti, Faustinas who held two seats, Ligaroo, Lemure, Kobejitsu, Lobishomen, Von Esper, Upier, and Pallintine.) Through the ritual, Frost becomes an eminently more powerful vampire, far surpassing any other vampire's strength or speed, and gains the powers and attributes of each sacrificed member, including immunity to silver, instant regeneration of lost limbs, superior strength and speed, red bulging eyes (from the Kobejitsu tribe), and the ability to withstand sunlight (from Blade's blood.)

Prior to the ritual, Dr. Jenson is dropped into a pit with a 'zombie' Curtis Webb (not quite a vampire, as he can only function on basic instinct). Defeating Webb and climbing out of the pit, Jenson makes her way to the sacrifice room, breaking Blade free from his sacrificial housing. After allowing Blade to feed on her, he regains his strength just as his mother attacks. Killing her, with his rage driven to even greater heights, Blade heads to the main chamber seeking Frost. Starting with Quinn, Blade kills all of Frost's minions and Mercury is killed by Jenson. Finally, Blade and Frost meet for one final climactic battle at the base of the temple. Blade quickly discovers that Frost cannot be killed by any conventional means, though his transformation is incomplete as Mercury had killed one of the pure bloods in a rage prior to the ritual. This leaves his blood vulnerable and Blade empties every single EDTA syringe he has on Frost (who is now constituted entirely of vampire blood), causing his body to swell and explode.

Climbing out from the underground temple, Jenson offers Blade her cure. Blade refuses, because "curing" him of his need for blood would also remove his Daywalker powers and he would be unable to hunt vampires, and requests for her to make him a better serum, reminding her that "there's still a war going on". Finally, Blade ends up in Moscow, hunting down and presumably killing a Russian vampire who persuaded a human to follow him to a vampire club, in an echo of the beginning of the film.