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This week, we ‘take a look’ at three horrific movies: Blade Trinity, Resident Evil: Apocalypse, and Underworld Evolution.
Runtime: [52:01]
This podcast contains no spoilers, but there is some disparaging of movies like World War Z, Underworld Evolution, Resident Evil Apocalypse, and… Blade Trinity. All three, I guess. Also disparaging remarks about zombies and vampires.
This episode is about:
Exercise (I’m not linking that goddamn video)
The Battle Beyond Planet X 
Damn man, you were on one!
Going back to making Blade movies, I.E. making movies about a lead black vampire and whether the handling was arbitrary or not, or the concept of doing so, the first movie really strikes me as the truest. Blade has personality, he’s cool as hell, he has a black female character to bounce off of and educate about the vampire world and he’s shown to keep in touch with the black community in a throw-away scene at a shop (I forget exactly when and where, it’s been a while). There’s even slight commentary from Deacon Frost about him being an Uncle Tom to vampires. I honestly really liked all that because it didn’t feel intrusive. There was no concern from producers that it was coming off too much like a “black movie” as opposed to their concerns with Spawn, and it escapes the “genre” of black movies in the age it was made. It could easily have been done back in the day with the likes of Blacula, Three the Hard Way and other Blaxploitation films, but you come away from the first Blade thinking it’s just really damn awesome. It was the best case scenario, and IDK if the evaporation of more black characters in the franchise was deliberate like Snipes proclaims, but it’s certainly an unexpected highlight for me personally in the first one.
I should’ve rewatched the first Blade. I saw pieces on TV one day and was surprised by that black woman character, because she definitely did not persist into the sequels. Imagine — a proxy character could be someone like that. And I did catch that scene in the shop. I feel like Blade spends a lot of time in the intricacies of the city, and in Blade II he’s hanging out in temples and sewers…
I always forget that Spawn is black. I actually thought the Spawn movie pretty entertaining but I saw it way before I could pick up on race relations issues. I wonder if the Animated Series does it better? I’ve been meaning to check that out to see what an R-rated American cartoon looked like, and because of Admiral Keith David
PS: What does ‘being on one’ mean?
LOL basically meaning you were really super-energetic and hyped.
I myself haven’t seen much of the animated series but from all accounts it’s truer to the tone of the original comic, which itself is surprisingly not awful as many of the first Image comics were back then (damning with faint praise tho). The fact that Spawn was played by both Keith David AND Michael Jai White implies that the character has been given more than he deserves or there’s more to him than the bombastic nature of the decade and his creator lends him.
Yeah, those two playing Spawn always seemed like, I don’t know, those creators got real lucky. This is afterall Todd McF, manchild extraordinaire. He manufactures some impressive-looking toys, but here’s a hint for PR: don’t make an enemy of Neil Gaiman
I was white hot in this episode, for unknown reasons. I think zombies just make me so mad