Vampire Warriors 殭屍新戰士

HK action + Leading Actress + Female Supporting Actor + Yuri + Vampires + GOOD END = ?

Is there even a need to state the answer to that equation? They don’t come simpler than that! You are more likely to have a challenge in 1 + 1 than in this!

 

 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 

Let me just begin by saying that I treasure this movie so much! Really, so should everyone! It is very rare to get female led movies from the far East and even rarer to have her supporting actor be another woman! Stranger still is getting any version of ending where,in the case that we have two female leads, one of them or even both of them are alive by the end! This is very rare and to add a slice of gold to that there is yuri as well! Hell, apparently the western title for this movie is ‘Lesbian Vampires’!

Yeah, I have no idea where they came up with that title from because giving a movie that title it would have to be explicitly yuri, which this movie isn’t! By that I mean there is no yuri in your face, in fact the movie cracks jokes about lesbians itself which rarely happens in real lesbian movies. Then again, those usually take themselves too seriously and HK movies, especially from Director Andy Law, usually have that sense of comedy to them.

Usually when you see a movie, especially an action fantasy one from the East like this one, the female is usually the villain and those rarely survive! And if she is good then she is only a supporting actor and a male actor is the lead and they are mostly love interests with said lead. Here actually the tables were turned! The big name male actor was the villain (Wah Yuen) while the other big male name (Siu-Hou Chin) was just a side character playing Max’s father.

The story this time was all our girls Ar – the badass vampire hunter (played by actress Jiang Luxia) on the quest to find her lost sister turned vampire, and Max – a daughter of a vampire decades old. The two have a close friendship going and Ar is close with Max’s family and Max and her brother’s two female friends. This family doesn’t feed on humans though and they are a weird bunch. But make no mistake, these are no Cullens! For starters they don’t sparkle in the sun-light, well, they do but the sparkles are their skins turning to ash! Yes, these are the real vampires that can’t stand the sunlight, don’t feel and are crazy strong.

But where this family of vampires is weird at is the fact that they show us the other side of being a vampire. the side that is not all grand and fun and powers! They are tired of their un-dead lives! They would rather die that keep on living they are. Like Max says to Ar, they wake up, eat, sleep, repeat! They can’t feel anything when they find someone they fancy. No pain, no nothing! They really bring out the miserable side of being an immortal vampire.

And so it is fun to see Max, living through Ar. She watches her eat, watches her smile, watches her go through stages of emotions, she see all these things she herself cannot feel through Ar. This innocence of hers is really fun to watch! She is like a grown baby who doesn’t know anything! This fact makes watching these two o much fun when Ar teases Max especially when it comes to drinking human blood. Meanwhile Max surprises Ar when she does these innocent things as she tries to understand emotions which is really fun to watch.

 
 
 
 
 
 

So what is the story? Well, it is rather simple. Ar hunts down vampires as she searches for a female vampire in a red coat. That vampire is her sister. She is close with Max and her family of vampires, I assume, because they don’t feed on humans but by the time we meet them in their lives, I don’t think that matters any more as, later on when we meet Max’s father, he is pimping on a woman who evidently feeds on humans but Ar doesn’t attempt to kill her.

This is a change of pace truthfully. She is not some revenge-driven vampire hunter that will kill any vampire than crosses her path. But of course if that vampire were or was about to feed on a human then sarabada!

The movie does a good job to portray simple life of a vampire and a vampire hunter. it is not all fun and games. Days drag on like an eternity. They try to commit suicide but since they don’t feel pain and are much stronger, the acts are useless. They think of jumping off building as bungy-jumping. Kar, one l=of Max’s friends and the eldest of the gang next to Max’s father, tries to stake herself but she gets stopped by Ar. Their lives are at that state in their existence where nothing means much anymore. They can’t even fall in love because contact means nothing to them! Kar tries to kiss Max’s brother but she feels nothing at all despite seeing their lips meet, like she says.

But soon their boring lives take a curved turn for hell when a centuries old vampire comes to town! A vampire that is in possession of what Ar is actually looking for – her sister! This is no ordinary vampire though! Where other vampires feed on living warm-blooded things, he doesn’t! Rather he feed of other vampires! Feeding on other vampires as we learn from Max’s father, gives the vampire great strength but it comes at a cost. Add in the simple fact that the older they are the stronger the vampire is, not only is he already strong by default having lived centuries but now he has that witch-like strength from eating other vampires!

Talk about a true boss! Being that old too his fighting skills are the core of all fighting skills! How could one even compete? he trashed Max’s father like he was nothing! And he even had help from his son but they were no match! The only chance that Ar had was to also turn into a vampire and since she was already very skilled all she needed was the boost in strength and agility that is only granted to the un-dead and so she gets Max to give her her virginity (hey, I did not make this up!) and gain the power needed to take down the most boss of Vampire bosses! Seriously, no other vampire boss comes even close! That man was seriously crazy scary! He was cold to the point that you can’t even call him a bastard! he di not even know he was one! He was that scary!

The story though might seem like it had gaps to others but to those who were looking for something else. The sister thread for example was lost in the winds! Seemingly what the plot was revolving around, she showed up only for a few moments and the only interactions they had with Ar was her saving her the first time she met the villain and helped her escape wit her life. We never hear why Ar was desperately searching for her. Was it for revenge? Was she just looking for her sister? She did not say anything to her when they met which is really weird!

 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 


 
 

 
 
 

 
 
 

 
 
 
 

 
 

But for me I was in it for Ar and Max and we got plenty of that. This movie was like a moment in the lives of Ar and Max! We see them go out, on kind of dates. We see them talking of each other’s day when they were separate for the day. We see them give each other presents, well, Ar gives Max a present (in the form of rats) probably making for their previous dinner date where Max accompanied her when she wanted to eat but she went to a vegetarian restaurant which meant that Max would not find any blood there to drink.

Talk about air-headed lovers! Ar couldn’t even think that Max would have wanted to eat too! the look she gave Ar when Ar was like ‘Did you say you were hungry?’ and Max is like, seriously gal? I am a un-feeling vampire and even I know when you have to think outside the box! She was pretty mad at Ar for a while after that actually, so seeing Ar getting her a bunch or rats, is quite a nice gesture! Actually when you look at the scene Ar looked very cutely nervous! Almost like a boy giving a girl they like a present, which was cute!

Cuter still was the fact that Max despite having zero interest in rats, in that she doesn’t eat them according to her brother, a brother who was as thick-headed as the other vampires when it comes to matters of the heart as he was spilling this news right in front of Ar which prompted Max to kick him trying to make him shut up, the fact that Max gratefully accepted this gift from Ar despite that was also quite an Aww moment!

But was Max really that un-feeling like the others? I really doubt it. She did say she wanted to feel and all other humans things during the night out with her brother and their friends but then she would have these moments with Ar, like getting mad at Ar for that food thing, always watching Ar with this look, I thought there was something about Max but it did not really surface until after her family died! She actually cried, water tears too not those blood tears!

Actually another strange thing is that just before that, after Ar had ran away from her confrontation with the villain, she was crying blood tears but that was from the amount of damage dealt her during that fight! So seeing that from a human and then seeing true water tears from a vampire was really something note-worthy. I wonder if it was intentional!

Anyway Max felt in that moment! She did not even know she was crying which means that she might have actually felt all this time but just didn’t have the comprehension of those feelings. And again just before Ar turned into a vampire she also gave Max another gift. She made her feel the effects of the sun without needing to give up her life for it! That is the hand scene of course, where Ar asks Max for her hand and shielding her fingers from the direct sun rays with her own hand, she lets Max feel the heat of the sun. Like, what better a gift can a vampire get? Especially for a vampire born like Max!? Nothing that’s what!

And then getting to the final fight where totally made me think of Saber’s fight with Berserk and Gilgamesh! She wanted Iris to leave because it was dangerous but Iris refused to leave because she wanted to be there for Saber, even if it was just to give her support through her mere presence! With Max, she too refused to run away and instead said that she would rather stay and die than leave Ar behind! So Ar was not fighting just for herself anymore which I believe is why she won because without the need to fight for Max she would have lost I think.

What of the other girl friends though? Sure they mentioned how they had had a crush on Max’s brother when he was accusing them of being lesbians after they joked about Ar and Max being lesbians when they went out to eat together, but there is this scene with Kar that was totally funny and want to see in all Vampire movies, that made my eyebrows rise. While on their night out, they run into two human girls and one of them was having her period! Kar totally got hooked on that which raised flags for her for me! I mean the others were not that keen on the smell, hell, even Max’s brother wasn’t but Kar had this look on her face that said she was so ready to jump the girl’s body! She even tried some pick-up lines on them and I with they had gone through with it a bit longer but alas.

Really, all characters were so very likeable and I was sad to see them all die when that villain came to town and killed them all, except our girls of course! But in the end Max got to grow old with someone she loved instead of watching them grow old and die and not only that but she grew to feel emotions which means that she can now do everything she had always wanted, to fall in love, to feel love and pain and all that. As for Ar, she now had the complete means to fight vampires! Where before her fights left her battered and her cause half-assed with hidden intent to find her sister, now she does it because she wants to. And judging from the ending where she feels hungry she too still retains some emotions which means the two can do whatever humans can but with much more!

A GOOD END, can you like believe it? Actually it is BEST END! GOOD END would be The Twins Effect ending. yet another female led vampire movie, that had our two ladies live only just themselves but one was still human while the other was vampire so one of them would have to eventually die, unless of course she decides to turn as well. Oh yeah, that is the movie that starred the TWINS as in Gillian Chung and Charlene Choi! Will I be writing about that/ Perhaps but there was too much man in that despite the ending where the men all died. Actually I might just as well seeing as it was noticeable enough for Passion Perfection to write a post ending fic about those two.

Anyway, the trailer for Vampire Warriors…

The movie is on YoutTube if you want to watch it.

Bye