About midway through Sebastian Gutierrez’ entertaining vampire flick Rise: Blood Hunter, the lead bloodsucker asserts something to the effect of “Sex and murder are the only real pleasures man has left.”

But in the world writer/director Gutierrez creates, those are actually the only pleasures left to vampires, much to their cost. They can’t eat food, hold no love for their fellow creatures, are cut off from their families (due to their being, you know, dead) and must hide their true natures from unsuspecting humanity. And, of course, there’s the little matter of an irresistible craving for human blood.

So when the film’s protagonist, reporter Sadie Blake (Lucy Liu, Kill Bill), is turned into a vampire against her will, she embarks on a Lady Snowblood-esque campaign of revenge against the bloodsuckers who killed her and turned her into one of them. The result is a pleasing, stylish and well-crafted blend of the horror and revenge genres that rises above its B-movie heritage. The 2007 flick even saw a well-deserved limited release before being released on DVD.

The film begins with a grabber of an opening sequence in which Liu picks up a call girl, literally stealing her from another potential customer (played in a cameo by the great Robert Forster!). She brings the girl to an ornate mansion, watches her as she strips, then overpowers her and strings her up as a meal for a vampire who’s confined to a wheelchair. She demands the crippled vampire provide the leader’s location before he begins his meal, and when he does, she shoots him with a hand crossbow and then releases the girl.

The film then flashes back to the events that set Blake on her quest for revenge. In an interesting little plot device, the vampire cult hides among Goth poseurs. But when Bishop (James D’Arcy), the leader of the vampire coven, talks about sex and murder, it isn’t just a pretense of amoral decadence; it’s the real thing.

Blake becomes involved when she writes a story on the Goth scene, and her photographer tracks down a secret Web site from a tip by a Goth girl who’s gone missing. Blake’s investigation leads her to an abandoned house containing a bathtub that looks like it was recently filled with blood. Outside, she’s confronted by a sinister old priest (the fine Japanese-American actor Mako, in his last film appearance).

All this snooping brings Blake to the attention of the vampire coven, who don’t want attention at all. Bishop kidnaps Blake, shows her he means business by displaying the photographer’s severed head, and then asks her how much she knows. When the interrogation is over, Bishop and his lover Eve (Carla Gugino, of Sin City and Spy Kids) tie Blake to a bed and slit her throat – and then make out with the dying woman as they drink her blood. (Blake later accuses Bishop of raping and murdering her, but the sequence is not that explicit.)

To her shock and horror, Blake wakes up in a morgue with vague memories of being discovered by gruff, alcoholic cop Clyde Rawlins (Michael Chiklis, who played Ben Grimm in the recent Fantastic Four movie and provided the voice of Chihiro’s father in the US release of Spirited Away) and having her corpse identified by her weeping mother and sister. She stumbles out into the daylight, which makes her sick. Holing up in a homeless shelter, she first experiences the hunger that forces her to feed on a homeless man’s blood. (In this flick, vampires don’t have fangs, and Liu powerfully conveys the revulsion she feels before biting through the flesh of the unconscious wino’s arm.)

Like Kathryn Bigelow’s superb revisionist vampire flick Near Dark, no one ever uses the word “vampire” in this movie (and unlike Near Dark, Rise doesn’t hold out the hope of a cure for Sadie’s condition). Instead, vampires and humans alike use the significant phrasing “one of us” and “one of them.”

The rest of the film depicts Blake’s quest for revenge as she hunts down the vampires, eventually teaming up with Rawlins, whose daughter was also a victim of Bishop. The film unfolds at an unhurried pace over its two-hour runtime, but it’s studded with memorable visuals, tense action scenes and impressive performances by a terrific cast.

Liu in particular turns in an all-out performance, conveying everything from the reporter’s initial innocence to the self-loathing inspired by her condition to her eventual hard-bitten drive for revenge. At one point she’s even hung upside down, naked, from a ceiling beam. Since she’s onscreen for most of the show, her performance holds the picture together.

Kudos also go to Chiklis, who provides life to what could be a one-dimensional alcoholic cop character, as well as D’Arcy, who brings a genuine sense of power and menace to Bishop despite his youthful appearance, and Gugino, who proves to be less thoroughly evil than she initially seems. There’s also an amusing cameo by a nearly unrecognizable Marylin Manson as a mild-mannered but heavily tattooed bartender.

Writer/director Gutierrez, who wrote the screenplay for Gothika and has a co-writing credit on Snakes on a Plane, also brings an obvious sense of style and personal commitment to the film. It can’t be easy to make a vampire movie that has any sense of freshness about it at all, but the revenge angle and Gutierrez’ style pull the trick off.

It’s also refreshing to see a vampire flick that doesn’t portray vampirism as romantic or appealing. With the exception of Blake, the vampires are in general unalloyed villains. One young Goth chick who does embrace the life is clearly portrayed as being sadly deluded into losing her soul. Even Blake clearly regards her hunger for human blood as a curse, and yet can’t control her hunger despite her resolve not to take innocent life.

The DVD from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment presents an unrated cut of the film in widescreen format and English and Spanish subtitles. DVD extras include behind-the-scenes featurettes – including a neat discussion of the artificial blood used in the film, and a nice conversation with a couple of the stunt performers – a storyboard-to-film comparison, and trailers for Rise, Hostel 2 and other flicks.

Rise: Blood Hunter is clear proof that Bishop’s assertion, quoted above, is wrong. There’s also a lot of pleasure to be derived from a well-crafted B-movie like this one. Kudos go to Gutierrez, Liu and the superb cast and crew for making such an unexpectedly fresh vampire flick.

Rise: Blood Hunter

Directed by: Sebastian Gutierrez

Starring: Lucy Liu, Michael Chiklis, James D’Arcy, Carla Gugino

Released by: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment

Related links:

Rise: Blood Hunter IMDb entry

Rise: Blood Hunter DVD at Amazon.com

Second opinion at Fangoria.com