Throughout my viewing of the new Blade movie, Blade II, one question kept returning to me: why? It's not that I minded the first installment in what now looks to unfortunately be "the Blade franchise." I simply wasn't aware there was sufficient interest for another one.

The reasoning, I'm told, is that the original Blade became a "cult classic"— an argument I'm not buying for a second. Misunderstood, challenging non-mainstream films become cult classics; films like Rocky Horror Picture Show, Blood Simple or Blade Runner. B-grade action films starring Wesley Snipes are not "cult classics," they're "VHS filler in the action movie rack at your neighborhood Blockbuster Video."

Clearly someone disagrees with me, though, because the theater that showed Blade II was a packed house. A good portion of the audience was composed of pale goth kids, which I found a little surprising, since the entire premise of these movies, as far as I can tell, is Wesley Snipes kicking the absolute stuffing out of people dressed just like them. I personally don't see the connection. The only explanation I came up with was that the bulky leather coats they were wearing got them so dehydrated that they became delirious, and wandered in by accident looking for water and Bauhaus albums.

It's admittedly a little silly reviewing films about beefy guys named Wesley kicking vampires in the face, since movies with such a weird little niche no doubt have the sort of loyal following who don't waste time debating the issue beyond "Where's the theater playing it, so we can go?"

Which is probably for the best, as it turns out, because Blade II is bottomlessly awful. In fact, if Blade II is ultimately judged by history as only half the movie the first Blade was, I wouldn't actually be able to tell, so I'd be no help to you at all. I barely remember what the first Blade was about, other than it had some pretty horrible CGI in the end and starred Stephen Dorff as the palest thing in the universe.

Where Blade (presumably) succeeded — and where Blade II (most definitely) fails — is that Blade II is physically sickening to watch. Not a second of screen time goes by where something isn't getting sliced in two, having its face open up into a bloody maw, or shooting geysers of blood out of a freshly made orifice. As a horror movie fan, I didn't find it unnecessarily frightening; just unnecessarily gory, like watching a two-hour triple bypass operation and having to pay $12 for it.

As the titular character, Wesley Snipes betrays his sharp-sounding name by spending the majority of his time wandering around with his greasy co-stars getting into random fights and baring enormous fake teeth, until suddenly the credits are rolling and apparently the movie's over. No action has a requisite reaction, and enough random things happen that eventually the internal "logic" (I'll be charitable here) of the film begins to topple in on itself.

Case in point: early in Blade II, it is revealed that Blade's hated enemies, the vampires, have invented some sort of ridiculous ninja suit that allows them to walk around without being affected by sunlight. Having planted these sorts of ideas in place, Blade II tromps through the rest of the film forgetting them entirely. This becomes especially aggravating later on, when Blade teams up with the vampires to fight a new breed of monster, called a Reaper. Blade and his buddy Whistler (Kris Kristofferson, cast as what looks to be a six foot tall Slim Jim) develop a bomb that explodes in ultra-violet light, effectively killing the Reapers.

The only catch? It will kill the vampires too. "If only we had some means of protecting ourselves against ultra-violet light," the vampires say, as they hang up their ultra-violet-light-proof ninja suits in their vampire lockers. No one puts two and two together, and the vampires all die because they get in the way of the bombs. With a species this staggeringly dense, one wonders why Blade even has to fight vampires, when leaving them alone to their own devices for five minutes should seemingly do the trick. It bothers me when I can spot holes in a film within five minutes where the makers seemingly couldn't, having spent six months making it. Surely it must have come up at least once?

In another "action-packed" and "awful" scene, vampire bad guy Ron Perlman kicks the tar out of a weakened Blade. Blade is a half-vampire himself, of course, so both are able to do spin kicks and slow down time and a whole bunch of other Matrix-y silliness that Bram Stoker neglected to list among vampire character traits. Perlman eventually gets the upper hand and has Blade at his mercy. Taking advantage of this, he finishes Blade off — Blade, the vampire — by shooting him into an enormous vat of blood.

Perlman then turns on his heels and confidently brushes his hands, as if to say: "well, that's that." I don't have to tell you how immensely surprised he is ten seconds later, when the blood both heals Blade and cues up a techno dance track on the stereo that Blade dances to while beating Perlman senseless. At the end of this scene, I was pressing at my temples in pain. One can only imagine what other bold finishing moves Ron had up his sleeve, like drowning a werewolf in sirloin steaks or forcing Popeye to eat plates full of spinach.

Will Blade II be as successful as its predecessor? I don't care. No one should care. Did the first Blade even do well? If it did, shouldn't we as a people devote funding to research and find out how something like that could have happened? Can anybody honestly say they want to see more movies with Wesley Snipes in them, and not less, as would more likely be the case? I leave you with the suggestion that we should make this stance clear to Hollywood, to avoid further confusion.