The opening re-cap -- how we got to where we are -- plays like the weekly opening of a vintage TV series (think of The Fugitive, for instance, or The Incredible Hulk), and the first dramatic sequence brings Kris Kristofferson back from the dead as the comic-book hero's sidekick and personal Vulcan (no, not a Mr. Spock, but the god of metalworking and weapons-making). The main plotline thereafter, about a new strain of bald-headed blue-veined vampires immune to garlic and silver, and about an unnatural alliance between our half-human half-vampire hero (Wesley Snipes, alias Wesley Smirks) and a commando team of ordinary old vampires known as the Blood Pack, is pretty much incomprehensible, and is in any event only a pretext to conscript all vampires whatsoever -- old, new, and half-breed alike -- into the martial arts. Director Guillermo del Toro's earlier vampire film in his native Mexico, Cronos, was a genuinely original and thoughtful contribution to the genre. Here the only newness is in the sense that a late model automobile is new: new gadgets and gizmos, new special effects, a new two-way mouth opening -- vertical in addition to horizontal, for lustier bloodsucking -- and new Cronenbergian degrees of ickiness. Granted, the film is handsomely shot in the anonymous cityscape of Prague, and some of the effects -- principally the way a slain vampire turns instantaneously into a glowing ember and a shower of ash -- might be termed "cool" by people who are free with that term. (The occasional use of fast-motion in the action scenes -- not, of course, to the exclusion of slow-motion -- might almost be termed "retro," taking us back to the days of Clyde Beatty and Buster Crabbe.) But del Toro, who made something quite special and personal in his first American effort, Mimic, can make no such thing of this. A hired hand, he can only hope, as if with some sort of patchwork parachute, to slow its descent into Low Camp, and not enough, even then, to prevent a splat. (2002) — Duncan Shepherd