Rise: Blood Hunter

Plot

Reporter Sadie Blake has just published a notable article featuring a secret Gothic party scene. The night following the publication, one of Sadie's sources, Tricia Rawlins, is invited by her friend Kaitlyn to an isolated house in which such a party is to take place. Tricia is reluctant to enter with the curfew set by her strict father, so Kaitlyn goes in alone. When she does not return, Tricia becomes worried and enters the house as well. To her horror, she finds Kaitlyn in the basement with two vampires hanging onto her and drinking her blood. She tries to hide, but the vampires find her quickly.

The next day, Sadie learns of the girls' deaths and decides to investigate the matter. She soon attracts the interest of the vampire cult, and she is eventually kidnapped, raped and murdered by them. To her surprise, Sadie abruptly awakes inside the cold box of a morgue. She escapes, but in the course of the following hours she finds to her horror that she has turned into a vampire herself. After wandering the streets, she ends up in a homeless shelter, where she soon gives in to temptation, killing an old sick man and drinking his blood. She then runs out of the shelter when a young girl notices her, causing her to break down. She attempts suicide by throwing herself off a bridge, but is found and taken in by fellow vampire Arturo, who is less bloodthirsty and more benevolent than his brethren. Though his true motives are unclear — a power struggle between Arturo and the leader of Sadie's killers, Bishop, is mentioned — he helps Sadie to cope with her new condition and trains her to fight when she announces her intent to get revenge on her murderers.

Sadie tracks the vampires across the state, killing them one by one, while at the same time fighting the urge to consume blood from human victims. She soon crosses paths with Detective Clyde Rawlins, Tricia's father, who has taken it upon himself to avenge his daughter's death despite the objections of his superiors and colleagues. At first he takes Sadie for an enemy, but in time he recognizes that she is not of the same breed as Tricia's killers, and they team up in their pursuit of Bishop, the last survivor of the band. They track him to an abandoned stable complex, where they find not only Bishop but also Tricia, now a vampire, who openly voices her resentment and anger for her father. A hard fight ensues in which the evil vampires temporarily gain the upper hand. Along with two other women, Sadie is stripped naked and suspended by her ankles, with her wrists bound behind her back, to slowly drip blood. She is saved by Rawlins, and the two of them turn the tables against their enemies.

After Tricia and Bishop are killed, Sadie asks Rawlins to kill her too. She cannot bear the thought of having to give in to her bloodthirst and that she, since she is already dead, can never see her mother and sister again. Reluctantly, Rawlins grants her request and stabs her with a silver crossbow bolt. Once again, Sadie's body ends up in the morgue, but we see her come back to "life" again once more as the end credits begin to roll.

Production

"This movie came to me because I like vampire movies; I just couldn't remember the last vampire movie that I really liked," offered Gutierrez.

"I love the myth of the vampires which exists in every culture, but for me, the moment that there are fangs or garlic, it becomes really campy and no longer scary," he continued. "So the idea was really to do something sort of film noir-like with a female protagonist and introduce the concept of vampires into that. As a result, we have a movie that is basically a thriller about a cult—it happens to be a cult of vampires," Writer/Director Sebastian Gutierrez explained.

Lucy Liu immediately agreed to play the lead character of Sadie. She admitted: "I first read the script at 3:00am in the morning and so I understood the project from that perspective, what it needed and what the character was about. It wasn't strictly horror—it has an incredible emotional undercurrent, that and it had a thriller, noir quality about it."

She continued, "I met Sebastian a couple of days later and we hit it off. It's hard to explain, but sometimes you just connect with things; this script and Sebastian were things that I connected with." Gutierrez stated it was not a film just about revenge, "Rise is a serial killer movie in which our protagonist is the serial killer, and we, the audience, want her to commit the killings. If it was just a straight revenge tale, it becomes more of an action movie—I am interested in the emotional moments." He added, "At the heart of the story there is this emotional core. It's very sad—Sadie's been killed. It's the worst thing that could possibly happen to you. She is trying to understand it, put an end to those that wronged her, and die again. There is this sense of dread, of the wrong that has already happened and you can't correct it—you just learn to understand it—or not." "Sadie has become something that she doesn't want to be and she struggles with that for the entire film and tries to do the right thing under those circumstances which you know is a pretty tough thing for her to go through." Liu continued, "Sadie wants to be alive again, but she can't have that. What is her option? What is her choice? She tries to kill herself — but no, that's not going to work, so she chooses this path. It's a story where people die for a reason." As 'Sadie,' a reporter who transforms herself into a killer once she realizes it's the only way she can avenge her murderers, Liu revealed, "She's a normal person that's caught up in this insane situation. She comes on really strong, and then as we watch the movie, we see that she's completely unraveled and must become a soldier and warrior."

Reception

Rise: Blood Hunter premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival on April 28, 2007, and had limited theatrical release beginning on June 1, 2007.

The film was poorly received by critics. The film holds a 33% approval rating Rotten Tomatoes, based on 15 reviews with an average rating of 4.5 out of 10.