RATING: 3 out of 10.
VERDICT: A toothless and anaemic addition to a seemingly never-ending list of crap vampire movies.

It is absolutely astounding that Del Toro could have gone from directing one of last year’s finest movies ("The Devil’s Backbone") to what will undoubtedly be hailed as one of this year’s worst. It is even more astounding that "Blade II" somehow manages to be worse than its shallow predecessor.

The ever-dreadful Snipes returns as the half man/half vampire, this time taking the side of the "ordinary" vampires to fight a new strain of bloodsuckers, the Reapers, headed by Nomak (former Bros member Luke Goss). So much for the "plot". Kris Kristofferson (Hey, nice tits, dude!) also returns as Blade’s sidekick Abraham Whistler, despite having been killed off in the first movie (ain’t exposition a wonderful thing?). Watching "Blade II" is like watching a chopsocky video game stuck on demo mode. Countless flashbacks are included for the dumbasses in the audience who can’t remember what happened the first time around. Hollywood law dictates that one of the symptoms of vampirism is an immediate mastery of every martial art known to man. The laws of physics are changed so that light can travel around bends whenever it suits the flimsy plot. A heavily-armed Whistler knocks one particulary threatening vampire unconscious but, to the audience’s disbelief, walks away without finishing him off, thereby allowing him to return (quel surprise) for the tiresome finale. Oh, and the entire thing appears to have been shot entirely on location in the sewers of Prague. As Stephen King once wrote, sometimes dead is better.