While Ronny Yu was promoting FEARLESS, he talked up his next movie: a live action adaptation of the 2000 anime BLOOD: THE LAST VAMPIRE. So, a Hong Kong director in Hollywood remaking a Japanese movie originally made mostly in English because many of the characters were American. When Yu mentioned it while talking to Martial Arts Entertainment the interviewer asked if it was “sort of a wuxia movie.”
“Maybe. Sort of. You’re right!” Yu said. “It’s sort of cross-cultural, because the whole thing takes place in a U.S. Army base in Japan. Yeah. It’s like a cross-cultural wuxia.”
Alas, it was not to be… exactly. Instead of Yu it was made by French director Chris Nahon, known for helming one of Jet Li’s English language films, KISS OF THE DRAGON (2001). Yu was credited as a producer, but I’ve found no evidence of him staying on during filming in, say, a George Lucas or Steven Spielberg capacity. I suspect he left but got the credit because he’d done so much of the pre-production that Nahon built off of. Yu is not mentioned or shown in a 20 minute making-of featurette on the DVD and blu-ray, but I think it’s reasonable to assume Nahon kept a decent amount of what he put into place, since the sole credited writer Chris Chow and the cinematographer Hang-Sang Poon are both holdovers from FEARLESS. Yu was also still reported as director when Korean actress Jun Ji-hyun, credited as Gianna, was cast as the main character, Saya. (read the rest of this shit…)
BLOOD: THE LAST VAMPIRE (2000) is a 48-minute anime film, telling the straight forward tale of a being who looks like a Japanese school girl slaying vampires on an American military base in Japan. Though it became very successful and inspired many spin-offs, it was really kind of a practice film. It was conceived by “Team Oshii,” Mamoru (GHOST IN THE SHELL) Oshii’s production study group, which writer Kenji Kamiyama says in a making-of featurette “was designed to give us young directors the practical know-how to implement a project plan.” Kamiyama pitched a story about vampire hunters, Junichi Fujisaki had one about a young female warrior named Saya, and Oshii suggested they combine them. Hiroyuki Kitakubo was chosen as director, and he commissioned cartoonist/illustrator Katsuya Terada to design the characters.
From 2005-2007, Showtime aired 26 episodes of the anthology Masters of Horror, created by 
“First level is the physical contact. Use your physical skill against your enemy. That’s most action films doing this kind of genre. The second level is use your knowledge, languages, strategy, everything you could before physical contact to stop your enemy. Third, use your honor, belief, your love, show to your enemy. Turn your enemy into your friend. I tried to share those three levels in the movie.” —Jet Li on FEARLESS
EVIL DEAD RISE is a new installment in the EVIL DEAD saga. We weren’t necessarily expecting there ever to be another one, but here it is. I’ve seen it called EVIL DEAD 5, meaning 
Now we come not to the end of this Ronny Yu series, or to its peak, but at least to a watershed moment. If you read this whole series, or at least the BRIDE OF CHUCKY review, you don’t need to ask the question “how the hell does the guy who made 
“THE 51ST STATE is very dear to me, because it was the first time in Hollywood that I didn’t have to deal with dolls.” –Ronny Yu, 2004
Now, at last, we come to perhaps the key moment in this entire Ronny Yu retrospective. After years in the trenches of the Hong Kong film industry, having gained acclaim worldwide for painterly, operatic martial arts fantasies, and having made his American debut earnestly combining that style with a goofy children’s movie, Yu got a high profile Hollywood gig that seemed to many at the time like it was completely random. How the fuck does the director of THE BRIDE WITH WHITE HAIR end up helming part 4 in an American slasher series, reviving it after seven dormant years, and taking it on an intentionally eyebrow-raising tonal swerve into oddball comedy? Did they just think of him because the word “Bride” was in the title?
Somehow I, a person fascinated with both Ronny Yu’s kangaroo kung fu movie 
I guess this is a weird reason to revisit a family fantasy classic that’s treasured around the world, but I felt like after spending so much time on 
