Scene Selection — Geoff Carter: Del Toro true star on’Blade II’ DVD

Friday, Sept. 6, 2002 | 9:11 a.m.

Geoff Carter is a Seattle based free-lance film critic and entertainment writer. Reach him at carter@pre2k.com.

"What you will see is mostly (excrement)," says Guillermo Del Toro proudly of the scenes deleted from "Blade II" "But for some reason, we geeks love to buy DVDs and watch this stuff."

True, but we don't enjoy it as much as Del Toro seems to have enjoyed making it. The DVD of "Blade II" does little to redeem the film's weaknesses. In my original review, I called it "violent, gory, and ultimately, a little enjoyable." But it does everything to redeem Del Toro, who made the lyrically terrifying "Devil's Backbone," and who deserves better than to shore up David S. Goyer's plodding screenplay.

Del Toro is a hoot and a holler. He laughs and cusses his way through the commentary track, through the excremental deleted scenes and through a too-long documentary on the making of the film (83 minutes). He groans at bad dialogue ("Switch over to the other commentary track and see how Goyer defends this line"), cheerfully points out bad visual effects and freely admits he only took the project for kicks.

" 'Blade II' is a very Catholic exercise in modesty," he says, "in that I was not there to make Guillermo Del Toro's 'Blade II,' but 'Blade II,' the kick-butt movie."

When you look at it that way, "Blade II" does indeed kick butt. This second screen adaptation of a popular Marvel Comics character finds Wesley Snipes' eponymous vampire killer pairing with the enemy -- a pack of commando vampires called the Bloodpack -- to combat a new and deadly foe that preys on vampire and human alike.

That's about all you need to know at this point; Goyer's script, fat with unnecessary exposition, will tell you everything else as you go. He bleeds much of the fun from original film -- the "Godfather"-like intrigue of the Vampire Nation versus the "Bright Lights Big City" brashness of the young vampires -- and replaces it with the hoariest monster hunt you've seen in decades.

Where are Abbott and Costello when Goyer needs them?

Fortunately, everyone else knows what to do and how to do it. Producer Peter Frankfurt proves a great match for Del Toro; he's every bit the overgrown adolescent with a wicked command of movie lore, invoking everyone from Stanley Donen to David Croenenberg. Snipes is loose enough to mock his cinematic fighting style, which he calls "Imagonna" -- "I'm a-gonna hit you with this, I'm a-gonna stab you with that ... I'm a-gonna pick up this bottle over here, and I'm a-gonna bottle you to death."

But Del Toro remains the true star of "Blade II." The 37-year-old has some great work ahead of him, because he knows when to stay in the lines and when to scribble out of them. In his commentary, he freely admits that he's a servant to "Blade II's" method of storytelling.

"This style is all about compression," he says. "I don't know how many times I watched the Eminem videos, which I really like ... This is a fusion of what I do, and what was required."

And with that, he shrugs. A geek will only go so far in defense of his tastes, and Del Toro's honesty in that regard makes "Blade II" worth renting, even if the movie itself is kind of, well, anemic.