When I think of Blade II, I don’t think of Guillermo Del Toro or Ron Perlman or Kris Kristofferson or Norman Reedus (!!!), and all the gooey mayhem which circulates around their talents - I think of Wesley Snipes emerging, in a triumphant, unassumingly badass pose, out of a fountain of blood, ready for battle. Even beyond the context of its pulp-trash trappings and the lucid design choices of the scene in mind, the image is remarkable, and it chills right down to the stream of your blood. While not even the climax of the famed sequel to 1998’s Blade, it stands out as a powerful, evocative portrait of black triumph and representation – a superhero risen out of rage and moral righteousness. It only helps that the scene continues with a smooth, crunchy beat-down of countless foes: helmets cracking in musical unison, wide camera set-ups, open blocking arrangements, and a pummeling needle-drop.

It is one cherry-blood-picked moment out of many in Del Toro’s fourth feature, making the jump back to Hollywood after recovering via the process of filming The Devil’s Backbone in Spain. And what a jump it is – a leap of slashing and dicing and punching and kicking. Blade II is a true “I’m back!” in action-sci-fi-horror film, and it’s gleefully preposterous. Akin to Del Toro’s ongoing filmography, it slams high and low influences of genre into one pastiche, mixing design details right out of a Mario Bava sci-fi or The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover with James Cameron and John Woo action-poetry elements. Its distinction, then, is found in never elevating its collage past its purpose, which was the case in misfires such as Hellboy II and his new Oscar front-runner The Shape of Water. Blade II seems birthed in the back rows of a midnight movie house, albeit one which was newly renovated to remove the squeaky seats and the perpetually sticky floors. Fully engaged in its world and the outlandish sincerity of the events unfolding, Del Toro runs wild, as he did in Pacific Rim and Pan’s Labyrinth, in a sandbox malleable to his concentrations of shifting myth and ornate silliness.