"Blood-C - The Last Dark" is a film that acts as a sequel to the television series "Blood-C," which itself is loosely based around the well-known Blood anime franchise. Done at Production I.G., the studio behind "Eden of the East" and "Ghost in the Shell," this film was considered to be much better than the show, and even won an award at the 2012 Fantasia Film festival. And what do I say after having seen it? Meh.Maybe it's because I haven't seen the original show, and have little attachment to any of the characters and don't understand much of the references. The main character is Saya, a beautiful dark haired girl who happens to be a vampire... well, I think she is anyway, based on the franchise this comes from, but that's never made especially clear. She is special though, very good with a sword and with an intense instinct to kill monsters around her. Yes, there are monsters, and in this film Saya stumbles upon a group of hackers trying to find out why monsters are appearing in the city, and the reason behind the organization "seventh heaven" and their ties to "the tower." Saya doesn't mind helping them, since it means she'll get the chance to kill the man who made her the way she is.There are a lot of gaps here in the logic and story background, and parts of it you do learn later on in the film, but there's too much missing. This is partly because it really can't be enjoyed without watching the series first and understanding Saya's hatred towards the film's antagonist. Even with that aside, the film just isn't that good with storytelling. The characters are especially frustrating... other than Saya and the antagonists, all the characters are seem incredibly stereotypical and one-dimensional (although they get a little better later on). And there is one scene where we see the two main female characters nude, but the scene has no actual reason to be there, a perfect case of fanservice for the sake of fanservice. Overall, it feels like a generic popcorn action movie, and doesn't seem to strive to be much more than that.Thankfully, the action scenes are really good. Most of the dialogue moments are no better than your average shonen show, but the action scenes were clearly paid attention to, and feel smooth and fluid, with a wide array of camera and character movement. The few monsters we do see are varied and well-designed in their gruesome-ness. Overall, the production values of the film can't be ignored, both visually and with music and sound effects. Even still, not everything is perfect on this view of things... notably, Production I.G. uses a lot of computer animation here, with all of the background characters, among other things. Sometimes the computer animation is used well and looks great, but more often it looks cheap. The English dub is surprisingly bad, but that might be because of the characters instead of the talent of the actors.
It's hard to recommend "Blood-C - The Last Dark." I guess the action scenes are almost worth the price of admission... and if you saw the original show, of course this'll be worth seeing at least once. If you have any attachment to the original film "Blood - The Last Vampire," you might find this worthy to watch for its subtle references to that 2000 movie. Otherwise, if you wanted to see a movie that actually carries weight and significance on its own, there are better options out there.