Should I watch Blood: the Last Vampire?

The long and short of it: Only if you're familiar with the franchise
When was it made: 2000

Hiroyuki Kitakubo directed the surprisingly short Blood: the Last Vampire. The movie was ok, with some fun lines and some good action, however if this is your first taste of the Blood universe (as it was for me) it is a little confusing and not very complete. The movie is not overly complex by any means, with a simple plot and a bit of killing, but confusion still arises from a lack of exposition.

Blood's hype has come mostly in the anime community, however the recent upward trend in followers of the vampire fandom will make this movie more appealing to a wider audience; in fact the live action adaptation of this series was recently mentioned in a New York Times article about fascination with vampires (I would send you the link, but I read it in the actual paper. You know, that big obsolete thing people use to start fires?). That itself-the live action adaptation, not the article-has generated a bit of hype to see the "original" movie.

We are back to not-for-children-cartoons. Blood is violent and contains a fair amount of, well, blood. The movie is short, less than an hour in length, so it doesn't have the same time investment that other movies have. Unfortunately all that extra time in most movies is used for exposition and universe exploration, of which there is little. Though the movie claims to be about vampires, they aren't really involved: there is only one character who you assume is a vampire that hunts monsters that drink blood, but aren't really vampires.So if you want to see a short violent action anime, check out Blood. If you thrive for exposition or love the classical dark-master-burns-in-sunlight vampire, this isn't for you.

Now that was the major problem to me, that they didn't use conventional vampires yet they expect you to know the rules of the universe. None of the characters are more than a list of character traits and a bubble graph linking certain characters. All you know is that it takes place in an alternate real world, and that whenever it is set there are still American occupational forces in Japan. Everything else is just dumped in front of you. The main character fights things that feed on blood and hide among humans. How do you kill them? You have to deal enough damage with a single blow (I think). However, guns are worthless? Sidearms, maybe, but a man unloading an assault rifle into a monster can cause equivalent bodily harm to a monster as a few sword strokes. Also, apparently the main character (who is a vampire) is seen striding about with no fear of the sun. After seeing that, there was a scene where she's in a burning building, and I didn't know if I should be suspenseful: did fire hurt her or not? I didn't know, because nobody told me how it works. That's what it really comes down to: if you're familiar with the universe, you'll probably love the movie. But the movies short length doesn't allow the exposition required to understand how the world works: you spend the time you should be worried about the action wondering why it matters instead.