With sets apparently consistingly mainly of disused multi-storey car parks and old abattoirs this was Blade on the cheap. The trademark vampire corpses exploding in fatal pyrotechnics were kept to a minimum (an expensive effect to reproduce, presumably), the fight scenes’ choreography was clunky and the overall feel of the show a little claustrophobic, but the hardware looked good, the performances were believable and, for fans at least, the whole thing held up pretty well in an Adam West’s Batman kind of way, only without the Kapows and the Oofs.

After the success of the movies it’s easy to forget this is basically a comic strip show, so like Sin City, on one level it works best when it looks surreal and two-dimensional. All the signs of the series’ failure to capture American audiences’ imagination were there in the first episode (when shown on Spike TV viewing figures went almost immediately into decline, although the producer claimed the reason for cancellation was that the small network could not afford to keep making it) but for this viewer at least there were enough plot hooks in the first hour to keep me watching. My biggest criticism would be the show-to-advertisement ratio. Even on Virgin 1 there were two occasions where there was only five minutes air time between ad breaks.

Krista Starr (Jill Wagner) returns from a tour of duty in Iraq as an army sergeant to find her twin brother Zack has died in mysterious circumstances. The police believe he was involved in drug dealing and gang warfare and when identifying his body Krista notices a tattoo on his neck which the police pass off as a gang membership symbol. Unknown to Krista the detective in charge of the case, Briane Boone, is a vampire familiar who is keen to close the case as soon as possible to avoid implicating his master.

Krista’s investigation of the glyph on Zack’s neck leads her to Professor Melvin Caylo (Randy Quaid), who tries to tell her about vampires, familiars, and her brother’s involvement. She doesn’t believe him and later is followed and lured into an abandoned warehouse by vampires from the House of Chthon. At the last moment she is rescued from the vampires by Blade who tries to warn her off the hunt for her brother’s killers.

Undeterred Krista returns to Professor Caylo for the rest of his story and then seeks Blade out and insists he help her. Blade arranges for her to attend a charity function being held by Marcus Van Sciver, head of the House of Chthon.