It's a mild crowd pleaser for people who are exhausted by blockbusters.

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

It is interesting even when nothing much happens, which is for most of its 3-hour running time. Read full review

"Bloodstone: Subspecies II" *does* assume you've seen the first in this Full Moon vampire series. It begins as evil blood sucker Radu (Anders Hove) is resurrected. Michelle (Denise Duff), our lead from the first movie, has been "vampirized" and is struggling with her drastically altered existence. Radu is now quite taken with her, but she's managed to steal the precious "Bloodstone", the ancient artifact that drips the blood of the saints. Radu becomes determined to get this object back and to win Michelles' favour. Meanwhile, Michelles' distraught sister Rebecca (Melanie Shatner) takes a flight to Romania to lend whatever help she can. Rebecca is soon joined by a kindly old professor, Popescu (Michael Denish), and Mel (Kevin Spirtas), a hunky young man from the American embassy."Bloodstone" bucks the odds and succeeds at being even better than "Subspecies" # 1. It's got absolutely beautiful atmosphere, having actually been filmed on location in Romania like several other Full Moon productions. The Old World flavour really helps a lot. The music and cinematography further assist in this regard. The makeup effects by Michael Deak and Wayne Toth are superb, but not that plentiful. The opening resurrection is particularly neat. The David Allen created title creatures appear only fleetingly. Although the material (director Ted Nicolaou also wrote the script) is treated with a great deal of seriousness, it leaves room open for some comedy relief, courtesy of a well meaning Romanian detective played appealingly by Ion Haiduc.The actors are all terrific. Both Duff and Shatner make their characters sympathetic, and Denish is a delight as the helpful old man who becomes quite eager to play vampire slayer. Pamela Gordon is vivid as Radus' extremely decrepit old "mummy", and their scenes together are effectively creepy. But the real star, once again, is Hove, who's as solid an antagonist as one could hope to see in a horror film.Overall, this is good entertainment, competently made and decently paced. It wraps up with a cliffhanger ending, setting up the next sequel, "Bloodlust: Subspecies III".Seven out of 10.

Radu (Anders Hove) won't let a simple thing like beheading keep him down. His minions reattach his body and he is risen before dawn, ready to kill his brother and his brother's freshly-vampired consort Michelle. But she escapes with the Bloodstone, and calls her sister to Bucharest. Also, the police get involved."Subspecies II" doesn't quite have the full power the original had. The lead actress has been replaced, which takes a bit out of the continuity (but at least the new chick -- Denise Duff -- is better looking). And the pace is somewhat slower. And the Bloodstone seems to have lost all its blood. But the film has some nice additions -- Kevin Blair, who has a bit of horror credentials under his belt. And Duff, unlike her predecessor, has little difficulty in being convinced into doing nude scenes, which really seemed a bigger aspect of the first.Radu seems less menacing, not able to kill as many people or turn them into vampires or create new minions. And that's too bad, because he's a very interesting vampire creature. He also seems very susceptible to sunlight, much less so than Michelle. Is it because he's older? Typically, vampires get more powerful with age. But who knows? There's a good scene where Michelle is falsely believed dead, but beyond that nothing stands out in my mind. It's a decent sequel, and I'm eager to see part three (and maybe even four). So it didn't turn me off by any means. Pretty much entirely the work of one man, this is a film worth seeing if you liked the original.

Having seen and enjoyed the original, I saw this on late night TV and was excited because I didn't realise there was a sequel to Subspecies. (I have now seen them all)Although I enjoyed this movie (and Anders Hove was great as Radu as usual), I have two major gripes with it that bother me too much to see it as an equal to the original.1) Stefan. Now I'm not debating that Radu was definitely the better character of the two (more conflicted, better actor etc) but I liked Stefan, the noble do gooder Vamp. And I liked the whole idea of the warring Vampire Brothers fighting over their birth right! And if I thought killing him off was a huge mistake, it wasn't nearly as bad as how they did it. It just seemed so.....bleh! Thats about all I can say really, just a total Anti-climax to the originals ending and a complete cop out (I know they could not get Michael Watson back for the sequel, but they could have recast him and let him day a little while into the movie, or even come up with ANYTHING but the death scene they eventually came up with. Bad bad writing.2) Michelle's Sister. She just bothered me throughout, I found myself wanting her to get killed by the end, just to get her off my screen, didn't like the actress or the character.In all though, the plot was pretty decent and even though the actress who played Michelle was changed (and grew her hair in record time) the film still maintained a level of enjoyability that kept me watching till the end. Like before the sets and locations were beautiful and the musical score was good. Anders Hove is a great actor in this role, it seems tailor made for him.A good film, let down by one bad plot line and one bad actress.5/10

This is a straight-to-video vampire movie. Were some of you expecting a masterpiece? I wonder why people take such a perverse joy out of bombing a film like this! It really is much better than its low rating would suggest.Moody directing, lush Romanian locations, and deliciously over-the-top villains like Radu and Mummy add up to a gruesomely wonderful viewing experience. Denise Duff gives a sympathetic performance, and it sure doesn't hurt that she's a "10" on the Brian scale. The folk music score is another highlight.I've shown this movie to a number of people - gals and guys of different professions, with varying levels of sanity - and all of them have liked it. If you want to rent a horror movie that's violent but not repulsive, and clever enough to hold your attention when there aren't killings on screen, then "Subspecies II" is the flick for you (sorry about the bad poetry there!).