Rise: Blood Hunter

[Hunter Rider]

http://www.shocktillyoudrop.com/news/topnews.php?id=61

EXCL: Rise: Blood Hunter Clip
Source: Ryan Rotten
April 18, 2007


Ghost House Pictures' Rise: Blood Hunter has been forced into its own vampiric hibernation for far too long. In the can for some time and ready to go, clips of the film - some rather scrumptious bits, at that - have been resurrected mysteriously on YouTube as if in anticipation of Rise's debut at the Tribeca Film Festival later this month.

Today, Shock has been granted an official thirty-second clip showcasing its two femme fatales, Lucy Liu and Carla Gugino. We've also been informed Rise is being given a limited release come June 1st.

Writer-director Sebastian Gutierrez (The Eye remake) puts a film noir spin on the vampire genre with his tale of remorseless payback. Liu plays a reporter offed in the field by a cult of vampires. She later awakens in a morgue with vengeance being the only thing coursing through her veins. "It is a straightforward noir with vampires in place of gangsters and hoods," Gutierrez tells us in an exclusive interview. "It's Lucy Liu as Lee Marvin in [John] Boorman's Point Blank - left for dead and royally pissed." Michael Chiklis ("The Shield") co-stars as a cop also seeking retribution for the death of his daughter.

Rise: Blood Hunter bows at Tribeca on April 28th with subsequent screenings on the 30th, May 4th and 5th. Click the link above for showtime and ticketing information.

Enjoy the clip and be sure to check out our full interview with Gutierrez here!

Click the link to see the clip

 

[Hunter Rider]

Poster

 

[Hunter Rider]

Trailer

http://www.dreadcentral.com/index.php?name=Broadband&bcpid=464121041&bclid=431782853&bctid=769305533

 

[Darth Elektra]

trailer looks good.

 

[Red Mask]

I've been waiting for this.

Lucy rocks!t:

and Carla too.

 

[terry78]

Haven't seen Lucy in a starring role for a minute. Has she ever carried a movie on her own before? We'll see how it fares though...she's a pretty cool chick when she's interviewed and has no issue making fun of herself, so I give her the benefit of the doubt with this one.

 

[Red Mask]

I hate to mention it, but Lucy did co-star with Antonio Banderas in "Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever". I read that she'll play the granddaughter of Charlie Chan in "Charlie Chan", 2009.

 

[Darth Elektra]

New Rise pics
http://joblo.com/arrow/index.php?id=7670

 

[Red Mask]

The press can be such killjoys. We knew this part of the story was possible. Heck, we all must have seen it coming. But that doesn't mean they have to print it anyway.

Hollywood Reporter:

Thus begins a series of graphically violent encounters, with Sadie efficiently dispatching her nemeses with a crossbow and sending them off with such declarations as "See you in hell!" (Male viewers will enjoy the frequent opportunities for ogling because she is consistently forced to remove her bloody garments.) Eventually, she winds up in an uneasy partnership with the grief-stricken cop, whose reunion with his supposedly dead daughter goes less well than he might have hoped.

 

[Darth Elektra]

The biggest surprise in the midnight program was the tongue-and-cheek awareness and delivery of Sabastian Gutierrez's "Rise: Blood Hunter". Constructed as a schlocky, b-vampire flick starring Lucy Liu as a crossbow wielding reporter on a que st to kill the vampire that bit her and Michael Chiklis as the cop who aids her, the film teeters carefully on the line of being junk. However, Gutierrez's writing keeps it in check. Though not the poised mockery that is Eli Roth's "Cabin Fever", the script for "Rise" is peppered with self-conscious winks to the audience - the occasional dead-pan zinger just when you thought the action had fallen into simple, late-night TV programming. One gets the sense that Gutierrez consciously wanted to create that kind of guilty pleasure, but didn't want to be judged for the film's lack of cinematic integrity. It pays off, as does the decision to portray vampires as more of a cult than the traditional monster. There's no garlic or stakes and crosses are used to ward off evil, keeping the focus on the action; the story and camp that make "Rise" worth a look.

http://movies.yahoo.com/mv/news/iw/20070507/117852462900.html

 

[Wolfwood]

Wow I was wondering what happened to this movie, haven't heard anything about in a long time. I'm mostly looking forward to it just so I can see Chiklis.

 

[xwolverine2]

it has a stupid title... like some cheap scifi channel movie.

but the movie looks ok.

 

[Darth Elektra]

Tribeca 07: Rise: Blood Hunter
First Look Review: A vampire tale that doesn't rise to the occasion.
by Scott Collura

May 6, 2007 - The supporting cast list for Rise: Blood Hunter reads like a tour of B- and C-list Hollywood: Carla Gugino, James D'Arcy, Robert Forster, Marilyn Manson, Samaire Armstrong, Mako, Nick Lachey… the list goes on. It's as if writer-director Sebastian Gutierrez got all his pals together on a Saturday afternoon and said, "Let's put on a show, gang!" Call it Vampirism Finds Andy Hardy, but swap out the patchwork stage curtain with plenty of bloody set-pieces and add Lucy Liu in the place of Mickey Rooney.

But actually, the entire film appears to have been thrown together patchwork style, with little concern over whether the seams are showing or not. One senses this from the get-go, when the movie starts with a dramatically bloody scene and then flashes back quite a ways, for no apparent reason other than to give the audience a dramatically bloody scene to tide us over before the "boring" plot set-up stuff gets going.

Liu, barely eking out a B-list living herself these days apparently, stars as Sadie Blake, a Los Angeles newspaper reporter whose latest article on young Goths and the nipple-rings they wear makes it as the cover story of the paper. In a follow-up to that story, Sadie tracks a lead to an abandoned house where she finds a bloodstained room -- the location, apparently, where one of her interview subjects, Tricia (Margo Harshman), was recently murdered.

Sadie's nosiness arouses the notice of Eve and Bishop (Gugino and D'Arcy), a pair of older Goths -- and we're talking really older, if you take the meaning -- who summon the reporter to their mansion to question her about what she knows regarding Tricia's murder. They gain no info from Sadie (actually, they don't try very hard), so they go ahead and slit her throat and suck the blood out of her instead…

Michael Chiklis, as Tricia's dad, the troubled cop Clyde Rawlins, is one of the detectives on the scene when Sadie's abandoned body is found. He zips up the body bag, but then a strange thing happens when we next see the corpse: It wakes up. Naked and trapped in a morgue refrigerator (a scenario that will become a running joke as the film proceeds), Sadie has been reborn as a vampire herself, though she seems different than the vamps who took her life. She is repulsed by her bloodlust, and she has a single-minded mission to get revenge against those who killed her. After realizing that she can't die in her new state by conventional means, she is taken in by Arturo (Julio Oscar Mechoso), a seemingly kindly vampire himself who teaches her the ways of the undead world, fills her in on Eve and Bishop's story, and gives her a crossbow with (silver?) arrows for their slaying.

That Arturo never gets his own plot thread properly resolved, something about revenge against Bishop in a vampiric power struggle, is the sort of story pace one must adjust to with this film, just as Sadie must adjust to her new life of contradictory impulses. While she hates Bishop for what he did to her, she is willing to give in to her killer instincts from time to time to take out, say, a dimwitted hitchhiker if it so suits her needs. As for why Sadie is a different kind of vampire, why she wants vengeance whereas the other vamps are happy to live their undead lives as they do, well… maybe we'll get an answer to that in the sequel.

The film has a nice, dark, almost noirish look to it that emphasizes the shadows that have engulfed Sadie's heart. And the blood and gore will certainly satisfy grue hounds, particularly a death scene involving one ex-Mr. Jessica Simpson. But at the same time, it's those very many star cameos that often take away from the serious tone of Rise: Blood Hunter. The scares are often overridden by the "Hey, isn't that?" moments.

Speaking of cameos, though he's billed as the second lead of the picture, Chiklis is barely present, both in terms of screen time and character development. His tired, disenchanted cop is a tired, disenchanting cliché of a character, just as his sporadic appearances practically scream, "Today's my day off from The Shield to pursue other projects!" But that's the whole film in a nutshell, really. It's a blood-red affair thrown together in a dash, a little number that will ultimately get the same kind of treatment from audiences as it did from those who made it: something you might cue up in the DVD player on a whim and forget just as easily.


Rating Info, 2 out of 5 Stars

http://movies.ign.com/articles/785/785966p1.html

 

[Red Mask]

Funny how Scotty emphasizes the star power of the actors. Might as well have called them TV actors.

Here are some quotes from an old article, written after the film was completed years ago.

The new supernatural feature is described as being very close to classic film noir, according to Gutierrez. "The story itself is very simple, but it's told in a non-linear fashion," the director told Fango. "And hopefully, it has a very nightmarish and relentless quality. It's very bleak noir, like John Boorman's Point Blank", he added.

The filmmaker has also cited films like NEAR DARK and THE HUNGER, which have influenced his movie.

"There are some conventions that we keep. I’m not trying to reinvent the vampire movie. (…) I’m just taking out the elements that I find silly. Nobody says, ‘I’ve been around for 300 years’ in this movie", Gutierrez explained.

"We’re walking around a lot of potential landmines - we don’t want to go into an Anne Rice Gothic/romantic terrain, or an UNDERWORLD/Ridley Scott sort of thing," he added. "I’m not knocking those movies, because they’ve all been done very well, but we’re trying to do something that’s more like a modern-day noir. It’s very stylized, because it’s horror - all the colors are very saturated. We’re keeping away from the usual look you see in these movies, which is that steely-grey, industrial sort of thing", the director concluded.

 

[SolidSnakeMGS]

Wowsers.

And Vic Mackey is in it.

Hot chicks and bad dudes...might be a good movie. Who knows.

 

[Darth Elektra]

REVIEW

Having had the opportunity to attend the first ever screening of Jack Ketchum’s The Girl Next Door, I can confidently say that it seems an odd choice for an upper eschelon film festival such as Tribeca to have films like Unearthed, or Rise: Blood Hunter in the lineup. Its almost like throwing AVP or the Pulse remake in there. There are better films on the horizon. Rise is more of a spectacle - a bad dream of sorts, which, as you've probably experienced, sometimes can be a bit of a thrill. With this being said...

Let us sleep. Deeper... Now dream. Dream of vampires. And how about, for a template, lets just take your average screenplay from the "I didn't choose to be a vampire and now I'm pissed" section. As a victim and lead actress, who will do action and nude scenes, let’s have - yes - Lucy Liu! Now no matter where this goes, you know you'll at least have this mouthwatering factor, and it can only get so uninteresting. Take her life and wake her up in a morgue, neither living nor dead. Give her a thirst for blood and morals she can't leave behind, and now you've got a pretty good, saturday night, popcorn typa midnight horror thing goin on.

Since this is a dream, lets make it interesting. We need grit, and a violent figure of authority on the verge of exploding. How about that hot tempered guy from The Shield, Michael Chiklis. Murder his daughter in a bloodbath of a vampire feast and pair him with Liu as a detective and reporter duo bent on destroying the source that has destroyed their lives! And hell, might as well throw in Nick Lachey and Marilyn Manson - playing punks and dweebs respectively - just for oddity and irony. Like a jambalaya of faces from cable stations somehow all caught together in a pocket of short term memory as you drift off to sleep watching the late night movie of the week - its familiar and low budget yet full of polished effort and casting surprises.

Maybe its a little over verbose and dramatic to try to reflect the worth of this film in an abstract, metaphoric manner like this, but this review stands as an effigy to what Rise: Blood Hunter amounts to. It’s a low budget, average film, stylized by director Sebastian Gutierrez and cast with popular faces so as to appear and actually come off as a film with a slightly higher production value. Although the editing is choppy, like a patchwork of scenes pasted together to fit a storyline, and the gore slight – it’s an interest maintaining tale, chock full of flashing lights and shadows of the night, people thirsty for blood and even a lawn full of severed limbs, for fans of violence that need a drumstick or two to be satisfied.

Final analysis: So here’s the bottom line. It’s a buffed B-movie, and although it’s a run of the mill screenplay, the actors, cameos, and flashy direction will hold your attention. Oh – and white hot Lucy Liu? Naked! Full body shots! BUT – at angles that will tease your hungry eyes, as “vampires” don’t have reflections, and most of these fleshful moments are in front of a mirror. Aarg! It won’t win any awards, or pull in a large draw at the box office, and it wont wow anyone in any capacity. It probably should have sucked, but just doesn’t, no matter how much you want it to. James D’Arcy plays a weak villain boss, and Carla Gugino will grace audiences with a much too quick come-and-go part, while the rest all falls into place, like a finely tuned piece of mediocrity. Think of this baby like a brand new Nissan Sentra. You’ve seen them on the road probably 1000 times in your life, but drive one souped up, polished to shine, with a nice stereo system – and you’ll conveniently forget that you’ve seen it all before.

http://www.bloody-disgusting.com/review/642

 

[demitri_vampiro]

i wish they would make a decent vampire movie. i'm kinda sick of these modern vampires where they can't do anything. maybe something like vampire hunter d. an alternate world with monsters and demons and real vampires that actually have real power.

 

[enterthemadness]

The biggest surprise in the midnight program was the tongue-and-cheek awareness and delivery of Sabastian Gutierrez's "Rise: Blood Hunter". Constructed as a schlocky, b-vampire flick starring Lucy Liu as a crossbow wielding reporter on a que st to kill the vampire that bit her and Michael Chiklis as the cop who aids her, the film teeters carefully on the line of being junk. However, Gutierrez's writing keeps it in check. Though not the poised mockery that is Eli Roth's "Cabin Fever", the script for "Rise" is peppered with self-conscious winks to the audience - the occasional dead-pan zinger just when you thought the action had fallen into simple, late-night TV programming. One gets the sense that Gutierrez consciously wanted to create that kind of guilty pleasure, but didn't want to be judged for the film's lack of cinematic integrity. It pays off, as does the decision to portray vampires as more of a cult than the traditional monster. There's no garlic or stakes and crosses are used to ward off evil, keeping the focus on the action; the story and camp that make "Rise" worth a look.

http://movies.yahoo.com/mv/news/iw/20070507/117852462900.html

I like that movie! Granted, it's been a long time since I've seen it....but I'll watch it again when LG re-releases it onto dvd when Cabin Fever 2 hits theaters (or dvd)

 

[enterthemadness]

After seeing the trailer...I understand why it wasn't released last year (it was shot in mid 2005, should have came out sometime in 2006)


I'll catch it on dvd. And the release date for it's tiny theater release (it's being dumped)

http://boxofficemojo.com/schedule/

June 1st. No theater count yet, but seeing how far it's down...I say 1 to 500 theaters opening weekend.

 

[KenK]

A vampire movie with Lucy Liu and Carla Gugino?!?!?!? Why am I only now finding out about this?!?!?!

Trailer: http://www.sonypictures.com/movies/rise/

 

[Elisha Cuthbert]

A vampire movie with Lucy Liu and Carla Gugino?!?!?!? Why am I only now finding out about this?!?!?!

Trailer: http://www.sonypictures.com/movies/rise/

Shock til you drop boards, man, you're missing out.

 

[Darth Elektra]

Here ya go:
http://www.superherohype.com/forums/showthread.php?t=270843

 

[Rac]

Trailer didn't look that bad. We'll see.

 

[KenK]

I like the cast, as I think Chiklis has more than earned a shot at more theatrical film roles, and no matter how brief her role may be, a second with Carla Gugino is better than a second without her!

 

[Darth Elektra]

Review: Rise: Blood Hunter
http://movies.yahoo.com/summer-movies/Hostel-2/1809717133/trailers/27/400