SHIRA THE VAMPIRE SAMURAI (2005)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical*

And now, because no one at all asked for it, here's yet another micro-budgeted straight-to-video production with lousy locations (warehouses, forests) and about three actors with some name-value (James Lew, Adrian "T.J. Hooker" Zmed, and star Chona Jason).

The title is the only thing that provides some amusement value. It allows one to ask the metaphysical question, "Is it more absurd to imagine a young 16th-century Japanese woman being transformed into an immortal vampire, or to imagine that the same female somehow got special dispensation, in masculinist feudal Japan, to receive some sort of samurai training?" I'd say the latter, all the more so since the murky script could have dumped the whole samurai angle without losing much.

We begin with a few scenes explaining how young Shira became a half-vampire. Shamed by being vampire-bitten, she tried to commit seppuku, which somehow interrupted the normal vampire transformation. Unlike Blade, from whom Shira has patently been copied, Shira doesn't have a mad-on for the bloodsucker who changed her. We just get a swift transition to the 21st century, during which Shira has somehow hooked up with a bunch of vampire slayers (one of whom is a Van Helsing descendant). The group's activities come to the attention of king-vampire Kristof (Zmed), who thinks he can conquer the world if he masters the process of creating half-vampires.

That's about it for plot. There are a lot of pedestrian dialogue scenes, particularly between Shira and her mortal boyfriend, interspersed with routine fight-scenes. I had no expectations of good dialogue, of course. But I had seen Chona Jason do some decent fight-scenes in a couple of low-budget (but not THIS low-budget) productions, one of which was 1995's DRAGON FURY. But it seems that Jason was at her best providing support-roles, since even the modest potential of her lead role is undermined by her leaden performance. IMDB only lists one more movie credit for the actress, so she may have moved on what one hopes were greener pastures.