Tags: David S. Goyer | Jessica Biel | Kris Kristofferson | Parker Posey | Ryan Reynolds | Wesley Snipes

A really funny story about Blade II, which was shot in Prague, home of the original Think Magazine.

While filming the underground rave dance scene, they had hundreds of Prague extras under really harsh ultraviolet lighting... shooting took most of the day, and by the end of the night, dozens had to go to hospital from the effects of such harsh lighting.

And did you know that Wesley Snipes was stopped by customs at the Prague airport, because he had such an excess number of expensive socks? The authorities there thought he was just another African clothing trafficker... true story!

I've always thought the Blade movies as being the halfway point between years of Marvel's low budget movie efforts and their current big box office successes of doing A-quality films on their heroes. When Blade came out in 1998, it was a moderate box office hit but it was not really the best movie.

Done mostly by Wesley's production company Ahmen Ra Films, and written and co-produced by David Goyer, it was shot overseas to save on production costs and had about the same amount of gore and weak plot-lines as the Alien movies.

Blade II was not that much better, and while the two movies developed something of a cult following with movie-goers, neither New Line nor Marvel were really satisfied with the scripts or the finished movies. New Line didn't make as much profit as they wanted, and Marvel was not at all pleased about the changes done to the characters. These movies have only been done as part of a three picture deal that was signed in 1996 and that's about the whole story.

Blade: Trinity is the final movie of the series, and Marvel seems glad of that. There is not much to say about this sequel except that it showcases Goyer's inability to write or direct, Blade himself seems reduced to playing second banana to the Nightstalkers as played by Ryan Reynolds and the yummy Jessica Biel (whose screen time in the movie is given a larger presence as part of an attempt to get a NightStalkers movie made, however Marvel seems little interested in doing that).

It's also strange that Marvel's now familiar movie logo does not appear at the start of this picture, which shows that they did not like nor approve of this series to begin with.