"You tell him it's open season on all suckheads."

I received Stan Lee this week. What a guy. Did you know he started writing professionally at age 16? Just obituaries at first, but still. Then at 19 he took over as interim editor of then Timely Comics, which later became Marvel. In a career that started in 1939, Lee saw times that weren't as comic-book friendly as the world we see today.

For example, in 1954, psychologist Frederic Wertham suggested comics contributed to juvenile delinquency in his book Seduction of the Innocent, which is ironic because few industries have done so much to help young men maintain their virginity.

Lee is credited with creating the Marvel Universe, and as a way of helping you mortals say goodbye, I'd like to talk about a movie I've plucked from there.

This week's Thursday Thriller is Blade.

This 1998 martial arts film by Stephen Norrington stars Wesley Snipes in the title role as a guy whose mom was bitten by a vampire when she was pregnant, so Blade is half-human, half-vampire. Sunlight and garlic don't bother him, but he still has a blood thirst, for which he has to take injections of a special serum. He has sworn to kill all vampires for what they did to his mother. He has the help of his mechanic/weapons maker Whistler (Kris Kristofferson).

Blade barely rescues a hematologist named Karen (N'Bushe Wright) from a vampire attack and she begins working on a cure for vampirism, if only to save herself.

Meanwhile, there's a schism in the vampire community between those who were born vampires, the old-money types, and those who were turned into vampires, the nouveau riche led by Deacon Frost (Stephen Dorff). Frost thinks it's ridiculous that vampires should hide. He thinks vampires should take over the world. He throws wild parties where he drains human slaves for laughs.

Frost's grand scheme of world conquest involves summoning a blood god, and he needs to sacrifice Blade to do it. Blade clearly has other ideas. Blade and the vampires often resolve their differences with kung fu, sword play, silver stakes, stuff blowing up, and hollow-point bullets with garlic in them that cause the vampires to dissolve.

It's a good action film. The opening sequence where Blade destroys a whole vampire rave is compelling stuff. I would highly recommend it, but I feel like that might be letting the movie off too easily.

I don't know what year it started, but at some point, vampire movies started playing fast and loose with the rules, and every time they do, a character has to say something like, "forget what you see in the movies, these are REAL vampires we're dealing with," and thus scores of writers get to throw away whatever vampire norms they find too inconvenient to write around. It seems kind of lazy after you see it a few times, and it happens in Blade.

Not that the write-arounds are much better. In a broad daylight scene when Blade and Frost exchange tough words, Frost doesn't explode because he's wearing sun block. Sun block? You've got millennia-old vampires running around and none of them ever thought to use sun block? It's so simple it's stupid.

An ambitious production, Blade features state-of-the-art computer generated effects. Frost pulls off a Matrix-style bullet dodge a year before The Matrix even came out.  The problem is the state of the art in 1998 was not very good at all. It looks kinda wonky.

Glad I could get that stuff off my chest. It didn't ruin the movie for me, just kept from being perfect. It's still kicks ass.

Blade streams on Netflix.

Excelsior!