The first thing that needs to be said, and quite possibly the most confusing aspect, is that the movie isn't exactly in proper chronological order. The film opens up with a scene that belongs somewhere towards the end when Sadie Blake (Lucy Lui) is getting her revenge. It then rewinds to a rather bloodied and beaten Blake waking up in a morgue and then going back even further to find out how Blake ended up on the stainless steel table in the first place.
From there, the movie does a bit of jumping around, nowhere near as much as Pulp Fiction, mind you, but enough to leave you a bit confused if you don't realize what's going on.
Anyway, what is Rise: Blood Hunter about? Sadie Blake is a rising star at the L.A. Weekly magazine. We come into her life as she wraps up a story involving a group of teen Goths and their unusual social patterns. Well, it turns out she has stumbled onto something a bit deeper than teenage angst.
Blake is taken into this huge mansion and murdered and raped. The only problem is that she doesn't stay dead. When we get back to the aforementioned morgue scene, we realize that Lui's character has joined the ranks of the undead, and she isn't happy about it. After a little direction from another vampire, Blake decides to work her way up the chain of command until she has eliminated Bishop, the vampire that caused her troubles.
Along the way, Blake encounters Clyde Rawlins (Michael Chiklis, The Shield, Fantastic Four), a cop who is obviously going through some major personal problems. As it turns out, Rawlins happens to be the same cop that helped pull Sadie's body out of a dumpster; funnily enough, that's one of the reasons he believes her crazy story.
Like I said, Rise: Blood Hunter is an okay movie once you get into the groove of things. There are some brief nudity scenes and a lot of gore, so this isn't anything close to a family-friendly film. The special features on the disc are okay, but nothing really exciting. All-in-all, Rise is worth a rental, and maybe a second watching just to get the final pieces of the puzzle to fit because of the mis-ordered scenes.
