Spike TV, which no longer calls itself a "Network for Men" but still basically is, gets into the original drama business tonight with "Blade: The Series," based on the vampire-hunter movies starring Wesley Snipes (which are based in turn, as so much seems to be nowadays, on a character from Marvel Comics).
Rapper-actor Kirk "Sticky" (previously "Sticky Fingaz") Jones puts on Snipes' dark glasses here; he is wider and less lithe than his predecessor, and less famous, but quite as adept at deleting the undead.
Vampire films are nearly as old as the movies themselves, and they have never gone away for long. The bloodsucking undead are a staple of low-budget films of both the crassly commercial and arty independent varieties, and every now and then the subject of a major production.
Vampires have proved adaptable to comedy, metaphysical pretentiousness, soft-core pornography and all manner of mad monster mash-ups. There is probably a graduate thesis on a university library shelf somewhere reckoning why we love them so, much more than wolfmen or zombies or mummies -- really, they're the best of all possible monsters, certainly the best-spoken, undeniably the sexiest. And there are the capes, of course.
In "Blade" as elsewhere, movie vampires -- as opposed, you know, to the actual kind -- tend to be sophisticated, sensual aesthetes who have had hundreds of years to refine their tastes and/or kinky nut cases so jaded by having done everything six thousand times that they push the limits of acceptable behavior at every turn. (That neck-biting isn't the half of it.)
In more recent films, the focus on the solo vampire has switched to contemplating their social networks -- in "Blade" there is a kind of old-blood/new-blood dichotomy -- and they tend to hang around in nightclubs, because after all, what else is open when they're up, except for Kinko's and 7-Eleven? Like ordinary mortal hipsters, they tend to look down on the squares, which is to say, the merely living. Their hunters, meanwhile, are often monomaniacs with untrendy facial hair and an inferior fashion sense.
A little movie and big TV series called "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" changed all that. "Buffy" unmasked vampires as not only evil, but also as hopelessly uncool in their snobby pretension -- just like, you know, the popular kids in high school. The hunters got all the best lines, and the better clothes, and get to enjoy themselves a little.
