The action horror continues with another adventure for the hero born on the pages of Marvel Comics. Blade – half man and half vampire – joins his companions in a struggle against a new breed of vampire which is dangerous both to ordinary mortals and their own kind.
A loose continuation of the action horror (1998) by director Stephen Norrington which again draws on the comic strip by Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan “Blade & Frost” from Marvel Comics; in 1973 it introduced the first ever Afro-American action hero. The film is set two years after the first story and the hero of the title – half man and half vampire – is urged by vampire king Damaskin to wage a war against a new breed of vampire which is dangerous both to ordinary mortals and their own kind. The insatiable Reapers are terrorising the human and vampire community with similar nerve: they are resistant to garlic and silver bullets but not – like all children of the night – to light. Blade, together with his new companion Scud, a weapons specialist, and his old teacher Whistler who managed to survive his own death, gets a commando together capable of defying their implacable and almost invincible opponents. This action horror spectacle was partly filmed in Prague.
116 min / Black & white, 35 mm
Director Guillermo Del Toro
/ Screenplay David S. Groyer
/ Dir. of Photography Gabriel Beristain
/ Music Marco Beltrani, Danny Suber, Buck Sanders
/ Editor Peter Amundsen
/ Producer Peter Frankfurt, Patrick J. Palmer, Wesley Snipes
/ Production New Line Cinema
/ Cast Wesley Snipes, Kris Kristofferson, Norman Reedus, Ron Perlman
Guillermo del Toro (b. 1964, Guadalajara, Mexico) graduated in screenwriting and is a founding member of the Film Studies Center and the Muestra del Cine Mexicano (Mexican Film Festival) in his home town. He has made numerous shorts, some of which have been selected by a dozen international festivals. He studied special effects with the legendary Dick Smith (The Godfather, The Exorcist, Amadeus), then worked in this field for ten years with his own company, Necropia. He has directed for Mexican television, and at age 21 he produced Dona Herlinda and Her Son (dir. Jaime Humberto Hermosillo). Del Toro has also published a book on Alfred Hitchcock. The script of his first feature, Chronos, came out in book form, and the film won the Critics’ Prize at the 1992 Cannes festival; the British film mag Shiver listed it among the 100 best horror films ever. His interest in the horror genre led to Mimic in 1997, and projects with Francis Ford Coppola and James Cameron, among others, are in the works: Mephisto’s Bridge, The Left Hand of Darkness, The Coffin, and Aura. This year´s KV IFF is also screening his allegorical drama The Devil´s Backbone (El Espinazo del Diablo).
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