RISE: BLOOD HUNTER

Journalist Sadie Blake is conducting an investigation into a sect that seems to have become a real trend among the young people of Los Angeles. But when some aspiring sect members are found dead, drained of blood, Sadie begins to investigate and ends up becoming prey herself to this mysterious commune. The journalist is found dead and taken to the morgue, but in reality, Sadie has become a sort of vampire. Thirsty for revenge, but now craving blood, the woman begins to wander the streets of Los Angeles in search of vagrants and homeless people to feed on and, at the same time, conducts a personal hunt for the minds behind the sect that caused her non-death. Along her way, Sadie will join forces with Clyde Rawlins, a homicide detective whose daughter was taken by the sect leader. Vampires in cinema have been told in all sorts of ways: unsettling bald plague carriers, fascinating nobles, warriors engaged in interspecies feuds, enraged and monstrous Mexicans, hybrid hunters, toxic vagrants… in short, it's now difficult to find an original approach to tell the exploits of these monsters. To some extent, those at Ghost House succeeded with the beautiful "30 Days of Night" from Steve Niles' comic, but the same Ghost House was also responsible for the production of another vampire film, "Rise: Blood Hunter," made in the spring of 2007 and distributed in our country only now, on the eve of summer 2008, with the title "The Sect of Darkness." Let's start by saying that Sebastian Gutierrez, the director and screenwriter of this film, did not even try to invent something new and went ahead with a series of clichés ranging from the bad vampire shown as a dandy but extremely ruthless, to the heroine who turns into a hunter and is forced to fight between her human conscience and her current condition as a blood drinker. Ideas borrowed here and there, from classic horror to the more recent, mixed with action cinema (in small doses) and police thriller. The choice to make the Sect the protagonist of the story as a sort of deviant family could have been a winning key to insist on, but unfortunately this characteristic is immediately abandoned to make room almost exclusively for the protagonist and her revenge drama, and, moreover, the revenge has been narratively structured in a totally failed way. After Sadie Blake was turned into a vampire and received minimal education against her enemies, the action unfolds in a too hasty manner, to the point that four of the five "bad guys" are killed in succession without any concession to physical combat or the spectacularization of events: Sadie finds the bad guy, utters a more or less effective phrase, and then stabs him with an arrow in the heart. Stop. In practice, after forty minutes of the movie, the Sect of vampires has already been exterminated. From that moment on, the film drags itself wearily towards the confrontation against the Sect leader, one of the least charismatic villains ever to appear in a horror film. And the same confrontation takes place in a hasty and disappointing manner. "The Sect of Darkness" then has many other flaws that all reside in a script that is too little attentive. The character of Detective Rawlins, played by a Michael Chiklis (the Thing of "Fantastic 4") out of his role, could certainly have been interesting as a sidekick, providing the film with a dose of police thriller probably enjoyable, but this character enters the scene too late and he is dedicated very few scenes and all centered on a stereotypicality that is not interesting. Not to mention the character of Sadie's mentor, a sort of killbillian Hattori Hanzo ridiculous and out of place, to whom are entrusted some useless flashback scenes inserted only to justify the protagonist's ability to handle the crossbow. In the end, "The Sect of Darkness" is not, however, totally to be thrown away, there are some rather successful scenes. The long initial scene in which two girls are hunted and killed by the Sect's followers does not displease, but above all, Sadie's awakening is successful, when the girl finds herself locked in a morgue cell and gradually becomes aware of her condition, first realizing that mirrors do not reflect her image, then consuming her first blood feast at the expense of a homeless person and finally documenting her discovery of immortality with a suicide attempt. Here and there also appears some visually suggestive idea, like the victims of the vampires hung upside down and left to bleed in a tub, as well as the protagonist played by Lucy Liu ("Charlie's Angels"; "Kill Bill Vol.1") certainly looks well-chosen, in her almost androgynous charm. But overall, "The Sect of Darkness" is a work with many flaws, that wallows in absolute mediocrity and lends itself to being forgotten too quickly. In a cameo appear the singer Marilyn Manson (a bartender who provides information to the protagonist) and the old glory of exploitation cinema Robert Forster (the guy who picks up the beautiful blonde at the beginning of the film).