Saw Perfect Creature. It was a vampire film that has way too much going on (much like the last vampire movie I saw, Priest.) At first this film seemed like it had a lot going on just beneath the surface. The back-story is that plagues have decimated the human population and thrust us back into a steam-dependent society (because of course it has.) Due to genetic experimentation arising from an effort to combat the plagues, vampires are created who are immune to the plagues, immortal, but also sterile, reliant on blood, and all male. They form some kind of theocratic elite, officiating over ceremonies involving their own blood and also researching microbiology. They periodically release flu vaccines derived from their blood or something to the populace.
The plot is that one of the vampires has gone crazy and started killing humans. The police-woman investigating these killings is contacted by a head vampire who begs her to keep the identity of the murderer quiet because he fears the backlash of racism (species-ism?) and prejudice against vampire-kind. Okay, I thought at this point, we've got a lot going on here right now. There's victim-hood used as a weapon by an ostensibly in-power group, there's an organized religion angle, there's vaccination-paranoia. Where's this all going? Well, nowhere it turns out. The film is clumsy but it really seems to want to portray the vamps as a kind of super-cool lower-class. The evil vampire has angry monologues about being subservient to human trash and the vamps wind up pretty much being the heroes.
The cop and the vamp team up to hunt the evil vampire (and do they fall in love? What a silly question. Of course they do.) The evil vampire tries to spread a plague around the city which results in a lengthy reenactment of the cholera outbreak in London. Progeneration and infection become major themes and plot points. It's all very accessible and very goofy. My initial interest gave way to vague amusement as I realized that this film was just mind-soothing eye-candy. It's just a collection of cool-seeming images and ideas held together by an overly detailed plot. It's the sort of film that stops the action for a moment so that one vampire can talk about his feelings for a certain lady-cop for a while, before dashing up a wall in a stunning display of vamparkour. It's complete nonsense, but then it was entertaining nonsense and I guess that's all I can really ask for from any film.
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