Blade 2 (2002)

Image credit: Blade 2: Bruce Talamon

FANG CLUB ''Blade'''s Snipes turns on his high beams

There are two ways to kill people in Blade II. You can be elaborately technical in your combat, which is how Blade (Wesley Snipes) -- half human, half vampire, and all sulky -- tends to go about it; at various points, he wields a samurai sword, phosphorous bombs, and his own acrobatic, kicking-off-the-walls body. (In a nice touch, the camera sometimes twirls right along with him.) Or you can be elaborately slurpy in your flesh-eating, which is the mode preferred by the villains. They're a crew of deluxe vampires who look like Nosferatu with skin made entirely of blue cheese. These supersuckers have mouths that split open into...much bigger mouths, the cavities adorned with a gelatinous thrusting thingy that unfurls like calamari with genitals. (Hey, I just report this stuff.)

Directed by Guillermo del Toro, ''Blade II'' is less obsessed with its hero as a fashion statement of new-millennium demon chic than the first ''Blade'' was. The new film seems equally influenced by videogames and open-heart surgery. Del Toro lays on the operatic head-trip gore, but his heavy-handed embrace of the ''Blade'' mythology allows Wesley Snipes to give more of a performance than he did in the first film. He taps a note of stylized pathos in his portrayal of a hero caught between worlds. Could it be that Snipes, a good actor who became an action star, got caught between worlds himself?