I Watch Films: Morbius

 

Morbius

Dr Michael Morbius has a rare blood disease, and at the start of the film he has invented an artificial blood and been offered the Nobel Prize For Medicine, which he rudely and arrogantly turns down in front of everyone at the awards ceremony. The artificial blood doesn’t actually cure his blood disease but has saved millions of lives.

He has unethically trapped some vampire bats, who have a natural coagulant and wants to do some unethical genetic experiments with them. He gets childhood friend Milo (a nickname given him by Dr Michael Morbius) who suffers from the same disease to fund an offshore floating laboratory and gets his colleague Dr Martine Bancroft to help him. When he injects himself with the bat-serum he turns into a vampire, drinks blood, and murders the inexplicably heavily-armed mercenaries who make up the crew of the ship.

Back in New York he finds that he can manage on the blue, artificial blood, but it’s slowly losing effectiveness. The red, regular blood, makes him feral and violent. This is bad and he gives himself a deadline to make a cure (to the cure?). Milo learns he’s found the original cure to the original disease and takes a dose of the bat serum. People start to be drained of blood and the FBI agents who investigated the ship track down Dr Michael Morbius and arrest him (locking him up in the Manhattan Detention Complex aka The Tombs).

This is all fine as a dark vampire superhero film, though the plotting is a bit loose and everybody acts like an idiot from time to time. But on the other hand what do we get out of this weird corner of the superhero universe? The two leads are pretty good but there’s nothing especially charming or weird, so in the end it’s two vampire dudes fighting.

Well okay then.

Watch This: Cool fights as two guys are injected with bat-serum to become – bat-me…[Trademark Infringement detected]
Don’t Watch This: You don’t care about vampire superheroes