Guillermo del Toro has realized a long-standing dream project in Frankenstein—one that may extend beyond the confines of Mary Shelley’s book. Between his own Frankenstein and The Shape of Water (a not-so-subtle riff on Creature From the Black Lagoon), it seems del Toro is working his way through interpreting the full line-up of Universal monsters; perhaps at some point he’ll complete his own set of the Big Six. If he does, Blade II could count as his version of a Dracula movie. And even if he doesn’t, Blade II still makes a surprisingly decent companion piece to his Frankenstein.
Dracula himself does not appear in Blade II. He’s actually the villain of Blade: Trinity, the weakest of the trilogy (though not without its charms). Blade II, on the other hand, is the best of the trilogy, in part because it’s informed by del Toro’s sympathy for monsters. The terrific first film, directed by Stephen Norrington, focuses on establishing cinema’s original Blade (Wesley Snipes) as the half-vampire “daywalker,” with all of the creatures’ strengths and a weakness — a thirst for blood — he keeps at bay with a special serum. It’s a hybridized version of humanity and monstrousness that happens to be compatible with del Toro’s vision of the Creature in Frankenstein as a tragic superhero of sorts.
For the Blade sequel, del Toro expands this humanity to include a team of proper vampires, who are no longer seen as a mass of human-preying goons (even if that is how most of them get their food). The film is about a group of bloodsuckers proposing a temporary truce with their archnemesis, Blade, to fight a greater common enemy: Reapers, eternally ravenous vampires that feed on vampires and humans alike, threatening to overtake the planet. Is it a tribute to cinematic vampire lineage that the Reapers, with their pale skin and bald heads, look more like the vampire from the old Nosferatu than the other vamps in this universe? Or at least, they do until a seam on their chin splits open and reveals an impossibly gaping mega-maw lined with mandible-like extra fangs — a very del Toro touch to go with the movie’s greenish-yellow tones and gushier spurts of redder blood. He seems to be saying, if we’re going to be taking on an army of nasty monsters, let’s see something truly memorable, not just some guys with fangs. At the same time, this version of vampirism is still more traditional than what del Toro did in Cronos a decade earlier.
The fairly routine plotting of Blade II prevents detailed development of most of the vampire characters. But the “Blood Pack” team that joins Blade is more colorful than any of the vamps in the previous film, with more human charm than their Reaper cousins. Even the one who more or less hates Blade from the jump, played by Ron Perlman (Hellboy himself!), shows some personality while doing so. On the other side of the affection spectrum, the movie depicts a bittersweet bond between Blade and the vampire Nyssa (Leonor Varela), who feels conflict and shame when she learns more about the Reapers’ origins. Those origins are revealed to have a mad-scientist component that feels like something out of one of the later Universal monster sequels. The Reapers are like something a descendant of Dr. Frankenstein would inexplicably create with blood samples from Dracula, only with a complexity of del Toro design work not available in the mid-1940s.
This material doesn’t have the same tragic dimension as a Mary Shelley adaptation — but that’s a feature, not a bug. Beyond its various monster-movie parallels, Blade II is just a great time at the movies. It features all of the established Blade activities (killing vampires, going to the club, killing vampires at the club), depicted with an aggressively outlandish action-movie sensibility that del Toro never fully recaptured. More likely, he was avoiding it by design; his later movies, even the action-based ones like Pacific Rim, are more sensitive than the foulmouthed likes of a New Line Cinema sequel from the pre-MCU days of superhero pictures. Though Frankenstein has some aforementioned superhero-like action sequences, Del Toro hasn’t really gone full horror-action mode since Hellboy II: The Golden Army, and Blade II hits harder with its R rating.
That makes it an outlier in his filmography — and frankly, the kind of outlier that he might do well to revisit, just to mix it up from all of these prestige projects. His later movies focus on the tragically monstrous impulses of humans, as well as the sympathies we might generate for outcast monsters. Blade II rides that same line, but does it almost entirely for fun. A lot of filmmakers take a sequel or a superhero movie to prove their big-studio mettle (or cash a big-studio paycheck). Del Toro makes a kickass sequel look like a passion project.
Blade II is streaming on Disney+.
