ANI-MOVIES, *Blood: The Last Vampire

For anyone who is sick to the fangs of all the bishonen vampire crap that Twilight kept shoving down your pipe, then get a load of this is a teenage darkstalker who would have them all crying for their mamas, Blood-The Last Vampire. While there was a British live-action movie based on it not real long ago, the first one from 2000 is considered a genre-forging classic, which helped begin the new millenium's anime vampire craze.

Taking place in just before the Vietnam War, Saya is a pouty-lipped teenage hunter of chiropterans, a rare race of bat-like monsters that can assume human form. Whether or not the chiropterans are supposed to be genuine vampires is never fully explored. Saya works with a secret orginization with the mission of killing off these bloodsuckers, and disguises herself as a student at a school on a American air base in Japan to look for three chiropterans. Saya sniffs out two of them, and manages to take save a school doctor from them. However, a crossdressing chiropteran shows up for a showdown after Saya finally gets a working katana from her cheapass commander. Saya then stops the monster from escaping by cutting him as apparently the only real way to destroy them is by cutting all the blood out of them.

This story from this somewhat short feature-length movie continued into a one-shot manga, three light novels, and a Playstation game. There was of course a made-for-television anime remake called Blood+ which achieved some success on Adult Swim, plus the extended live-action film. The original movie though was groundbreaking for its time, mostly because of the graphic nature of it which up until that point was pretty gory for an anime. Another was because it was one of the first anime movies that implemented some serious 3D animation in it. Prior to that, digital effects weren't combined into the overall feature as much as traditional cel animation in most productions. It's still visually superb even by today's technical standards, and probably the best non-Vampire Hunter D anime horror movie ever done.