You've got to like a movie that gives us a nude Lucy Liu, shot high and from behind, and then moves her slowly over to a full-length mirror where all will be revealed ... but she's a vampire, so no reflection! Rise: Blood Hunter, from director Sebastian Gutierrez, is a cheap and dirty mash-up of the vampire and revenge genres, following L.A. reporter Sadie Blake (Liu) as her quest to find out who murdered a goth vampire wanna-be lands her on the menu of the real vampires behind the crime. Unfortunately for them, some potent blend of reporter moxie and girl power prevents her from staying dead like they planned -- she ends up kicking open and crawling out of the morgue drawer she was stuffed into, pissed off and shaking like a heroin addict for want of blood. Soon enough, she'll adjust to her new lifestyle and even acquire two must-have accessories: a girly little crossbow as a signature weapon and a vampire mentor who encourages her to "embrace your shadow side," whatever that means.

Sadie's shadow side is apparently the side that allows her to kill and dine on innocents, and not even particularly annoying innocents, as is sometimes the loophole. Picking up a reasonable young hitchhiker at one point, she quizzes him: "Do you have a wife? Have a girlfriend?" After giving all the wrong answers, he's lunch. Hey, she's a vampire -- vampires gotta eat. I have to say I wasn't expecting such a morally troublesome hero to emerge from those paragons of virtue at Sam Raimi's Ghosthouse Pictures, but I like it! Blood Hunter succeeds through edgy little moments like that one, along with an assortment of nude scenes, each one shot in such conspicuously low light that it smacks of actress protest, which somehow makes more enjoyable, in a perverted way. Sadly, there's no virtuoso special effects or cinematography -- there was more visual originality in a ten minute vampire short included in the anthology Paris Je T'Aime, released this weekend -- but there is enough here that works to make up a picture that's good for a Saturday night.

The bad vampires in the film are a lot like zombies, since they don't just surgically drain blood from the neck -- they attack, rip flesh apart and eventually tear the victim limb from limb. At a crime scene, early on, we see a group of freshly-murdered teenagers scattered around the front yard -- a leg here, a torso there, and so on. Michael Chiklis is one of the cops who turns up at the scene and whose daughter was a victim of the bad vampires, and it's his bad luck as an actor that he has to come through with some high-octane emotions in crying scenes for this silly film, but there are worse fates that can befall a guy, I suppose. I also spotted Carla Gugino in there as a stylish, high-society vampire but her part is so short and uneventful that it makes you wonder what kind of guidance she is getting from her agent these days. I was one of those who saw Brian De Palma's Snake Eyes a hundred years ago and thought she would have a career as a leading lady.

As I mentioned before, the film isn't going to win any awards for its effects, which are sometimes non-existent. There are plenty of opportunities for them though, including one scene where a vampire tries to commit suicide by jumping off a bridge but finds it impossible -- the film just seems very much constrained by its budget in that department. Given that it had its world premiere only a few days ago at the Tribeca film festival, it's possible that the angle being played is to gauge the interest level now and possibly kick in some more effects money somewhere down the road before a general release. I think that would be a good idea, although I'm more than happy with the down and dirty and cheap approach, if that's what the filmmakers want. However, if major changes are still on the horizon, the one area they might want to focus on is the film's villains, which aren't exactly up to par -- I'm thinking in particular of James D'Arcy, who plays Bishop, the main bad vampire, a thankless role that doesn't go anywhere.

I'm struggling to remember what the 'big idea' of the bad vampires was -- what they hoped to accomplish in the movie, aside from leaving dismembered body parts on front lawns and hoping it wouldn't attract attention, but I'm blanking on that one. I'm sure it was mentioned at some point, but in fairness to me, I saw this film very late at night (film festivals think it makes the horror movies more horrifying if they are shown in the dead of night, and in a way it does, but not the way they are thinking.) Maybe it's a bonus for us in the audience that the film doesn't really waste time on such things -- it sort of skips straight to the blood and the nakedness. Liu gets killed and wakes up a few hours later in the morgue as a vampire, and someone's gonna pay -- that's pretty much the plot in a nutshell. Also at one point, we see her toting what I would call a blood moonshine jug, which is apropos of nothing, but I felt it was worth mentioning.