Just what the world needs. Another freaking vampire movie. I dig vampires, but get so sick of seeing them run around in their goth leather, looking tragic and being decadent. The DVD cover of Perfect Creature looks like more of the same, which is unfortunate because it’s one of the most innovative vampire movies I’ve ever seen.
Perfect Creature is set in a steampunkish New Zealand where vampires – The Brothers – are benevolent keepers of the church and sciences, dedicated to preserving human life. In return, humans go to church and donate blood to the Brothers. The Brothers are born to human mothers, sunlight, garlic and holy water have no effect, and they do not hunt humans.
Until Edgar. Edgar’s lost it and has started acting like your stereotypical vampire, hunting people in back alleys, taunting the Brothers and the police.
It started lagging a little over an hour in, but Perfect Creature is so short at 88 minutes, and the premise and visuals were so interesting that I didn’t care. Also, Doughray Scott, who I don’t find particularly attractive was so compelling as the lead vampire, Silas. He played the role with this intensely controlled calm, as if Silas wanted nothing more than to go on a rampage and indulge himself in human blood or in Saffron Burrows’ character, Lily.
With that unexpected boost from Perfect Creature, I started expecting things from Natural City and looking forward to watching it.
Natural City was called the Korean answer to The Matrix and the Korean Blade Runner. It is both of those things on the surface without capturing the soul of either of them. Bullet time? Check. Cyborgs going rogue shortly before their expiration? Check. A cop in love with a doomed cyborg? Check.
However, this cyborg chick is no where near as intriguing as Rachel – Ria acts like a subservient child and seems incapable of doing anything on her own. And her cop, R, is certainly no Harrison Ford circa 1982.
Natural City is really cool for about forty-five minutes, then it slows down dramatically, like me slamming sleeping pills after a hard day of battling rogue quotation marks, but without the stripey jimjam pants or the cat on my ass. There comes a point when the movie has to stop showing me cool visuals and give me a story. Natural City gave a convoluted sham of a story – if it had been half an hour shorter, the awesome visuals might have held my interest. Instead, I wound up focusing on the subtitles and when you’re a dork who thinks diagramming sentences is a fun alternative to Sudoku, you’re likely to be driven mad by bad subtitling.
Mad! Mad, I say!
I remember picking up an ancient copy of Madame Bovary at my university’s library one afternoon – one of the earliest translations – and I remember the first sentence so clearly because it was so bizarre: “We were engaged in courses when the Big Head floated in.”
What?
Parts of Natural City suffer from that same translation weirdness in the subtitles. One guy is constantly referred to as “Head Top”, which I guess is like a police chief because that looked like his job. Someone else was “Purple Head”. There were incorrect verb tenses, misspelled words and some problems with subject-verb agreement.
That may not matter to you, but it bugs the hell out of me. Yesterday on CNN.com, I saw a glaring apostrophe error. Excuse me, CNN. The possessive form gets an apostrophe; if you just slap an “s” on the end of a word without it, all you’ve done is pluralize the word. Now, I’m on a punctuation rampage. That’s just great. Where’s my Sharpee of Punctuation Righteousness?
Oh, right. The movies.
Natural City had a lot of visual interest; I need more than that. I need to be engaged by the story and the characters, too. It doesn’t help Natural City that The Matrix and Blade Runner did it so much better the first time around. Despite its flaws, Perfect Creature had such an original concept that it has to win this match.
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Lisa Fary's earliest influences are Princess Leia, Rainbow Bright, Astronaut Barbie, and her 6th grade teacher, Ms. Palmer. She's angry that it's 2011 and she still doesn't have a hovercraft, but will accept a jetpack as consolation. That jetpack had better be pink with a rhinestone monogram. 
Was looking for Perfect Creature fanfiction when I came across this blog entry. Your comment about the cover rings true, I wasn’t too happy with the American release cover but it looks like the NZ release won’t be so, cliched?
Its not great but…
http://www.black-magic.co.nz/home/wp-content/uploads/2007/04/perfect-creature.jpg
The NZ cover looks like it does a better job of capturing the spirit of the movie. The American cover looks like someone paid their neighbor’s kid $50 to throw something together with photoshop.