Rise: Blood Hunter (2007)

Surprisingly incoherent and boring

Must See Movie...

Just what I expected

Good movie but grossly overrated

Just a mediocre vampire flick although the word vampire is never spoken throughout this flick. The story is very simple. Sadie Blake (Lucy Liu)is a journalist researching a bloody cult but is going too far with her research by visiting a house. Once in the basement she discovers blood and death and is captured to be transformed into a vampire. From there on she's out for revenge to kill those who turned her.Of course this flick is full of silly lines but do offer a few bloody and even messy shots and here and there we do have some nudity even from Lucia herself. You can guess it all what is happening and it doesn't offer anything new to the genre. Funny to see is the cameo of Marilyn Manson as a bartender but you have to watch closely because he doesn't have any lenses on. Ideal for a Saturday night enjoyment. Gore 1/5 Nudity 1,5/5 Effects 3/5 Story 2,5/5 Comedy 0/5

Without a doubt this is one of those Hollywood studio-influenced movies with lots of pathetic clichés and predictable beyond words.Probably the only thing that will attract you in this film is the appearance of Lucy Liu. She is hot at times in this picture, but the acting is obviously mediocre at best. And the rest of the cast gives out an even MORE uncompressing performance. When I saw them act out their roles, it was as if they did not put any effort within the whole process. The acting, the emotions, the dialogs, EVERYTHING seemed absolutely fake. I can not understand how the director did not try to re-shoot some of the most dull scenes in the movie. It is a vampire movie, and statistically speaking, there are few good vampire movies. Unfortunetelly this one is not one of them. The plot only gets sort of interesting, because it is put together not in a chronological order. At the beginning you immediately see the middle of the story, then they jump back to the start, explaining how it all happened, and so on back and forth. This part is only SORT OF entertaining, because it definitely does NOT stand out as something very original. I mean nobody would be impressed by this who has already seen movies like ''Memento'' by Christopher Nolan, which is based on this idea of this reverse chronological order. And apart from that there are literally hundreds of other movies using this element. Other than that, for me there was absolutely nothing else appealing in this film. The story is beyond predictable. I actually knew what was going to happen next now and then. And the very ending was just over the top PATHETIC! At the last minutes the story supposedly ends, but then ,just before the screen goes black, you get this stupid two-second scene showing that 'IT'S NOT OVER YET'. Pathetic! Why did they have to completely ruin everything with this stupid Hollywood cliché, giving a sort of an idea for a sequel, when it is obvious that there will be no sequel?!If you like unimportant, predictable, Hollywood studio influenced movies, full of clichés, maybe you'll even enjoy this movie. Otherwise... Do not watch this useless movie. A waste of time.

Well, I didn't know what I was getting into when I killed some time with this flick.Lucy Liu plays a clichéd vampire-turned-vampire huntress, spouting hokey lines, and unconvincingly struggling with vampiric feelings of guilt or anger or revenge - or whatever feelings those are that make the good vampires brood. It's a very weak script,with cardboard-cutout stereotypical characters, such as an alcoholic grieving cop that becomes an ally.It's bad, but not painfully bad. And it gets an extra star from me for that incredibly hot and sexy scene with Liu and Cameron Richardson. That scene comes very early in the film, so you don't have to waste your time watching the entire thing.

(In this comment I try to focus on the movie as a work. When you judge my comments please sent me a message to tell me what and why as I can then work to improve the comments)Rise is not an ordinary vampire movie. I expected it to be one as the text on the DVD hinted at this. But the word vampire is never used and the persons afflicted by the condition never show fangs or fall to pieces in the sunlight. Yet on the other hand some vampire signs are on evidence: the dependency on blood, the fact that they don't cast a reflection in the mirror and that the afflicted are uncommon strong and resilient. What is different is that the movie spends time on how Liu feels when she finds out that she has become a thing of the night, forever barred from normal live. At heart rise is a revenge movie. Lucy Liu is a reporter who is killed when her investigation set her on the trail of a weird sect. These people turn out to be a sort of vampires and Liu becomes one of their victims. Liu however rises from the dead(hence the title)as one of the creatures and hunts them down one by one.Woven into the revenge story is the story of Chiklis who plays a police cop whose daughter got the same treatment as Liu. He is hot on the trail of both Liu and the top bad guy, either in the hope to find his daughter or find out what happened to her.At the end both stories interconnect as Chiklis catches up with Liu and face each other and finally the top bad guy.The choice of having both stories into the movie makes the revenge story more intricate as Chiklis as 'normal' human can as well help Liu as sabotage her desires. In this way also him being a cop is at odds with him being a concerned father. The story itself plays at night, in dark and usually uncomfortable places(I use this word as this is what all these places are meant to be). This is also interesting as it illustrates how Liu's world has suddenly become estranged. The story is mostly made up out of one-on-one confrontations that exist mostly out of conversations. The camera is close to the person and shots are medium and close up mostly. The fight scenes are short and unspectacular: most are more like executions.The story itself is easy to follow, yet at some turns one wonders about the choices made. Liu comes in contact with someone called the alchemist who has been usurped by the leader of the weird vampiric sect. He gives her a small crossbow with which she kills all the others, yet seen doesn't turn on him. Also the choice of the crossbow feels odd as it's such an unhandy weapon to use in a fight. The killings of their victims by the vampiric sect are strangely bloody, with bodies and surrounding furniture covered by blood and blood splashing and spraying everywhere. It somehow doesn't fit in with the mood of the movie, certainly as compared to the subdued fighting scenes. It seems as if at regular intervals the movie needed to interrupted by a horror scene.It is a common thing that 'vampire' movies are associated with seduction. In Rise this is downplayed. Liu herself seduces one(well she actually more or less jumps her victim). In all the other cases seduction seems more or less a side story then a pivotal event.Acting is reasonable but it loses at the point where the script seems to bare the actors from playing out their role. Liu seems to be shocked at first time and there are some tears when she realizes what she has become. But you would expect someone to show more emotions after she has been brutally murdered and risen from the grave: just some sign of mental stress beyond the anger Liu displays. Also Liu is somewhat too certain she needs to kill herself. Liu lacks things like doubt, uncertainty and fear. She show mostly anger. Chiklis also does not a really great job when he moment of truth comes as he is confronted by his daughter turned-vampire. She pulls a gun out and shouts abuses at him and he is quite emotionless. Nor is he in doubt once Liu has shown him that she can't be seen in the mirror. This latter seems actually a plot device that is needed to convince Chiklis of Liu's condition. I found it so unfitting as everything else vampiric is merely hinted at and then suddenly this inescapable proof is offered.Rise makes me think of The Brave One. Both involve women who undergo a traumatic experience that changes their world forever and exact revenge on perpetrators that are the cause of the change. But where Jodie Foster convinces in the role of a woman that suffers a lot and who's action are in tune with her person and experiences, Liu fails to convince as she mostly displays anger. Her change from an reporter into a determined one-woman-murder-squad leaves enough to desire. The movie seems neither fish nor foul: for those people who expect another underworld there is not enough fighting, beauty and sensuality. For those who like movies like the brave one, there is just not enough reality in the movie. The gory bloody scenes are in either case misplaced.Rise is a reasonable movie that I think could have been better if the creators had decided either to infuse more of the fantastic or if they had introduce more of the realistic. They could probably have played out the break between her normal life and her undead life better. Nevertheless a interesting vampire movie.