"Rise: Blood Hunter" | Don't play with vampires

Like a number of recent films, "Rise: Blood Hunter" begins without opening credits. Some movies use an abrupt beginning to launch their story with uninterrupted drive. This coarse vampire noir likely delayed listing the filmmakers in hopes that by the fadeout the audience would be long gone, sparing the guilty parties well-deserved embarrassment.

The story concerns Sadie (Lucy Liu), a reporter whose coverage of the Goth scene draws her into the clutches of genuine vampires. These fashionable bloodsuckers do their dirty work by slitting their victims' throats and sexually assaulting them as they bleed to death, a sloppy business that we see in graphic detail.

Sadie is converted to a bloodsucker herself — in this telling of the story, that's a rare occurrence — and hunts down her enemies with a chic little crossbow pistol. Michael Chiklis (of TV's "The Wire") pops up as a police detective on a parallel vendetta against the vampires who killed his daughter. His earnest line readings are inopportune, since this sort of thing should never take itself seriously.

The revenge motive is muddled by the fact that Sadie, too, must kill humans and drink their blood to survive, and feels disgusted about it. Our antiheroine tests the limits of our sympathy as she suffocates a homeless man and gnaws through his forearm while a child watches, and later seduces a drifter and slashes his jugular.

Underscoring her nausea explains Liu's three noisy puking scenes, though it's unclear why she has a dialog scene while relieving herself on a toilet. I don't recall Count Dracula sweeping up his cape on the way to the men's room.

Perhaps that kind of earthiness is there to bolster the movie's atmosphere of gritty realism. Many scenes are set in dark parking lots and dirty city streets, but you sense the locations were chosen because they were inexpensive.

There is some pleasure to be had counting continuity mistakes (Chiklis' goatee varies from shot to shot and he goes from wearing an undershirt to a dress shirt and shoulder holster in the space of a one-second cutaway). And the film could be the basis of a jolly drinking game. One shot for every shooting, mutilation, episode of unmotivated nudity or pointless cameo (Hey look, it's Marilyn Manson and Nick Lachey!) and viewers will be in the perfect state to appreciate the film's incoherence.

The absurd ending suggests that even when they're completely, thoroughly, absolutely dead, vamps can return to life. Here's hoping that's not setting the groundwork for a sequel. Some things are better off dead.