`BLADE' CAN BE BLOODY INCOHERENT IN TERMS OF PLOT, CAMERA WORK.

Byline: Bob Strauss Daily News Film Critic

Blade, the title hero of Wesley Snipes' gory new action movie, is a more living than dead member of the living dead. His mother was bitten and infected by a vampire shortly before giving him birth, and he's devoted his superpowered existence to ridding the Earth of the bloodsucking scum.

Appropriately, then, ``Blade'' is suspended between horror film and martial-arts blowout. Less appropriately, it straddles the line between good and bad moviemaking to an ultimately frustrating degree.

Directed by makeup effects specialist Stephen Norrington and based on the Marvel comic book, ``Blade'' boasts the steel-cold, night-shrouded urban look that's become de rigueur for '90s superhero movies.

But that's not all the film borrows from ``Batman,'' ``Spawn'' and ``The Crow.'' There's the conflicted, alienated and obsessive hero bit; the story structure that hurtles from one overproduced action set piece to another with deadening, pointlessly hard-to-follow plot information slathered in between; and, of course, a villain who is Evil Personified and a beautiful, innocent woman who turns out to possess pretty good bad-guy kicking chops when she has to.

The lady in question is Karen Jenson (the talented, underutilized N'bushe Wright), a hospital doctor who gets nipped by a biker vampire (Donal Logue) Blade recently barbecued. Our hero, decked out in a Kevlar muscle suit, saves her from certain doom, but uncertain doom still looms - it'll be a couple of nights before the fang virus takes, if it's going to.

Anyway, Karen devotes what may be her last hours of humanity to curing Blade - he takes an increasingly ineffective elixir to suppress his blood thirst - and helping him and his aging weapons-maker Whistler (Kris Kristofferson, who is unaccountably getting a lot of work these days) fight the vampire conspiracy. And what a conspiracy it is: Evidently, the nightstalkers have been in cahoots with powerful humans for centuries, own the police and lots of stocks, and tend to run their demonic netherworld with corporate efficiency.

Except that some rift has developed between traditional vampires (whatever they are) and the new breed of unhinged undead exemplified by Deacon Frost (Stephen Dorff), a post-grunge power-seeker who not only wants to take over Bite Inc. but bring some kind of super blood demon back to life. Or something like that; by the time we get to the climactic ceremony, there's been so much incoherent kung fu, arcane mythology and gratuitous kinkiness scattered about that it's impossible to decipher what's going on.

Remember when ``comic book'' meant ``easy to understand''? Those days are gone.

``Blade'' certainly has its grotesque pleasures, if you're into that sort of thing. An opening sequence in a vampire disco brings the whole alt/rock/lifestyle idea to strobingly vivid afterlife. A disgustingly obese creepazoid, courtesy of Oscar-winning makeup effects artist Greg Cannom, fries up real icky when exposed to UV rays. And if you don't think he just looks silly, Snipes models Blade's fetishy fightsuit and deploys his silver-dipped arsenal with swaggering dash. Snipes' impressive martial-arts abilities have never had a better showcase, either.

But in the end, ``Blade'' is too derivative and too mannered (Norrington changes camera speeds and jump cuts for that very hip, 1980s MTV effect) to provide the potent fantasy fix blood-and-guts film fans hunger for.

The facts

The film: ``Blade'' (R; violence, sex, nudity, language, drug use).

The stars: Wesley Snipes, Stephen Dorff, N'bushe Wright, Kris Kristofferson.

Behind the scenes: Directed by Stephen Norrington. Written by David S. Goyer, based on the comic books created by Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan. Produced by Peter Frankfurt, Wesley Snipes and Robert Engelman. Released by New Line Cinema.

Running time: Two hours.

Playing: Citywide.

Our rating: two and a half stars

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Photo

PHOTO Wesley Snipes is a karate-kicking human/vampire hybrid who fights blood-lusting, dark-loving evil in ``Blade.''