Hollywood's Blood Vampire Gets a Fresh Korean Face

With Buffy, we had a vampire slayer inextricably linked to humanity. With Blade, we had an angry half-man, half-vampire tough-guy who protected humans from the vampiric scourge. Together, they're a yin and yang, the small, bright girl and the large, dark man. If you merge the two, getting rid of the humanity while keeping the gender and darkness, you get Saya, a vampire/vampire slayer from the Japanese animated film, Blood: The Last Vampire. The premise: It is right before the Vietnam War, a base is dealing with blood-hungry vampires, and Saya is their defense against them.

In May and September, Mark Beall reported on the live action remake of the film. With Freddy vs. Jason and Bride of Chucky also under Fearless director, Ronny Yu's belt, a bloody, vampiric action movie is just up his alley. However, fresh to the genre is the newly-cast star, Korean actress Jun Ji-hyun. Her experience lies in much softer themes -- one of her most notable roles is in Il Mare, the Korean original of Sandra Bullock's The Lake House.

Ji-hyun will have a lot on her plate with this role, which is set to start filming in March. First, she must genre-jump from dramatic actress to ass-kicking antihero, which presumably means a good deal of martial arts training. Then, while working her muscles, she also has to learn English. I don't work out as much as I'd like, and re-learning French is on my eternal to-do list, so if she pulls this off in a few months, she'll be my new hero (pun intended).