Revisionist vampire movie conventions meet Hong Kong action clichés in this hyperkinetic sequel to BLADE (1998). Forget your languid-but-lethal undead, slinking around charnal houses and corrupting their swooning victims with their razorblade kisses. These vampires, whose blood carries a symbiotic virus that confers the attributes associated with traditional vampires (here ends the pseudo-science lesson), are martial arts dynamos as driven to kick ass as drink blood. They answer to the overlord Damaskinos (Thomas Kretschmann) and fear only Blade (Wesley Snipes), a half-human, half-vampire hybrid who favors his mortal side and has sworn to cleanse the world of bloodsuckers. But there's a new plague on the streets of Prague, where production values are cheap. Rogue fiend Jared Nomak (Luke Goss) carries a mutated strain of the vampire virus, and his victims become near-indestructible ghouls who prey on vampires and humans alike. The true vampires are so afraid of this new breed, whom they've dubbed "reapers," that they appeal to Blade, who's just rescued his beloved mentor Whistler (Kris Kristofferson) from their evil clutches (though Whistler apparently died at the end of BLADE, it's the beauty of vampire stories that death never has to be the end). And so Blade finds himself commanding the Bloodpack, elite vampire warriors who were trained to hunt him but have shifted their attention to the reapers. Cue the fight sequences: Blade and the Bloodpack fight reapers at a vampire nightclub and in creepy underground tunnels. Blade goes mano a mano with not one, but two deadly foes. The sequences are handsomely designed, but frankly, you might as well be watching someone play a video game. Del Toro is a true horror-movie buff, and the film is speckled with grace notes: Damaskinos's corporate cover is called Caliban Industries and his look pays homage to NOSFERATU; the undead gather at a nightclub called the House of Pain, a tip of the hat to the classic ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU, and revel in ways that evoke HELLRAISER. There's even a potentially provocative hint of vampire racism (above and beyond the master-race implications of the contempt in which vampires who were born into undeath hold the mongrels who were once human) in Reinhart's barbed question about Blade's ability to blush. But the echo of white-supremicist blood-in-the-face test gets lost in the fists of fury and bloody Bushido blades. --Maitland McDonagh
