Rise: Blood Hunter (R, 2007)

Lucy Liu stars as Sadie Blake, an investigative reporter working on a story about a Los Angeles cult. She ventures too close to the vampires at the center of the evil gang and becomes one of their victims. But she's not dead -- instead, she rises from her drawer in the morgue to discover that she, too, has become a blood-sucker. Filled with self-loathing and disgust at what she must now do to survive, Sadie is determined to stay alive long enough to rid the world of the hideous creatures at work in her city.

It's difficult to find anything positive to say about RISE: BLOOD HUNTER, a gory vampire/revenge movie that never lets up on the blood and violence. How many times can the clueless heroine go into a dark, forbidding building? How much over-acting is just too much? How often will the age-old vampire legend be manipulated to meet the needs of the ridiculous plot?

Unfortunately, even if you can get past the vast amounts of blood spattered in nearly every frame; the gratuitous nudity; the graphic, violence-laced sexuality; and the over-the-top brutality, all you'll find a humorless, illogical story, unsympathetic characters, and amateurish production values. The movie is directed without any effective tension or suspense, the music is obvious and corny, and the special effects are far from special -- a supposedly decapitated head in a plastic bag is quite clearly set up at the edge of a table with the rest of the actor hidden in blackness off camera.