First of all, who decided that this blue/gray color was cool? Second, what is a diehard vampire fan supposed to enjoy about this, let alone a casual viewer? So priests are actually vampire killers now, and they do the exact same moves all the other vampire slayers did and kill the same wrinkly, toothy CGI monsters.

The characters are only superficially priests anyway. Priest (Paul Bettany) checks in with his boss at a confessional, he prays to God and has a cross tattooed on his nose, but there’s no religious mythology about it. He defies your standard hooded counsel in a dirty future. Sheriff Hicks (Cam Gigandet) says he heard Priest was the best vampire killer, in case the fact that he’s the star of the movie doesn’t tell us that already.

New ‘Priest’ Trailer A Work Of Vampire Alarmism

They’re hunting for Lucy (Lily Collins), a farm girl kidnapped by Black Hat (Karl Urban), a former priest who Priest (Bettany) lost in the war. Priest and Hicks question suspects and fight vampires along the way. They keep talking about the old days as if that’s atmosphere. Priestess (Maggie Q) hooks up with them midway and tells us more about PTSD to be sure we all understand the priests’ struggles.

Look, you can use the formula if you’re celebrating it. Priest just feels stuck and the characters can’t get out. They even cut a decent trailer, so if they can make a trailer look cool, why not actually make a good movie? The point should be to create the coolest vampire action you can imagine, not just do the moves you saw other vampire killers do in other movies no one cared about. Priest may step on flying rocks in mid air and throw some crosses as ninja stars, but that’s still way behind the action of movies like Shoot ‘Em Up or Hobo with a Shotgun, let alone what the Thais are doing.

Priest tries to be Clint Eastwood so everything he says is a slogan about being numb to violence. Black Hat is all about “join me, join me…” Maybe if bad guys want friends so badly they should stop being evil. There’s only one good Maggie Q fight, in the desert by the train tracks. They even do the Cliffhanger “I won’t let you go” bit, although the audience for this movie wasn’t born yet in 1993 so it’s new to them.

The crew may have put a lot into the sets but they just look like generic rubble. See, it takes just as long to construct a dump as it does to make Blade Runner. Jericho actually ends up looking like a real post-apocalyptic town, for the two scenes we get to see it.

It just makes me sad to think director Scott Stewart and all the artists under him had high ambitions and substantial resources… for this. They think they’re making their ultimate vision, but I bet the studio knew the whole time. The executives probably figured out exactly what they needed to spend to make the bare minimum profit from an audience that already existed, so they didn’t strive for more.

“We did the casting thing and had a lot of young, very attractive, very well known young actresses,” Stewart said. “They’re coming in and they’re all wearing these cat suits and all these things. They would wear boots and stuff. Maggie came in wearing ratty jeans and a faded Beastie Boys t-shirt. She had an ice tea or diet coke, she walked in and was like, ‘I think I dressed wrong for this.’”

Nope, Maggie. You look awesome in anything. “First of all, you’re right, the heels and the hair, and there was all this smokey eye [make-up] happening and boobage, which I couldn’t do, even if I wanted to, so I was jealous,” she recalled with Stewart. “I came and thought I was at the wrong place because, last time I checked, the role was for a Priest. So why would you do the boobage and the hair and the heels? I was mortified. I was like, ‘What is happening right now?’”

Stewart thinks the other auditioners were copying Underworld, which is that other movie where hot women in tight spandex fight monsters. Q was just thinking of nailing the test scene.

Sweet 'Priest' Animated Prologue

“What matters is what you bring to the table,” she said. “It’s hard to find your inner truth in a little room with four people that you don’t know. I think all this [exterior], I don’t know what that’s about. I don’t know why they do it, I don’t know what it’s about. Obviously as well by the way, the point is if you’re in a room with a director who understands at a certain level what he wants to bring on screen, none of this matters. [The costumers] make you into whatever it is that they’re going to make you into.”

So without her homemade vamp suit, Q conveyed the reality of being a vampire hunting priestess in a Hollywood boardroom. “We did two scenes,” Stewart said. “One was the scene where she hands the cross back to Priest and she just took us there. You’re just immediately there. You’re just there. You’re like oh, okay, this feels like a movie and it feels like a movie that takes place in this kind of alternate heightened reality or alternate reality. You’re there.”

Priest opens Friday.

Director: Scott Charles Stewart

Cast:Paul Bettany, Cam Gigandet, Maggie Q

Synopsis: A priest disobeys church law to track down the vampires who kidnapped his niece.

Release Date: May 13, 2011

Anyway, this trailer is more of that, including the amusing assertion that “there is no vampire threat.” I wonder if that’s an intentional reference to Michael Moore‘s famous line that “there is no terrorist threat”? Probably not.

I don’t know what else to say about Priest, except that it’s coming out on May 13, making it one of those “summer is almost here” movies that I have such a fondness for. Can’t wait!

Lucy (Collins) is the target of Priest’s (Paul Bettany) quest in the movie. She’s kidnapped and he goes back on duty to find her. In the footage screened for WonderCon, she hangs from a speeding train.

Q: What an exciting day you must’ve had yesterday, seeing the Priest footage and landing the Snow White role.

Lily Collins: Yeah, first time in 3D, saw it yesterday, that was shocking. Put those glasses on and I thought that was incredible. I didn’t know what the 3D was going to turn into and it was just so amazing and exciting. Yes, and then found out that I was cast as Snow White so it’s quite the big day.

Q: And it was April 1st, but it’s all true, right?

LC: I know, actually that’s the first thing I said when my team called me and told me. I said, “If this is an April Fools joke, I don’t know what I’ll start to do.” Because I was so excited. I had literally read the day before and met the director the day before and then was cast yesterday, so it was less that 24 hours.

Q: What cool stuff do you get to do in Priest?

LC: I have knife fights, I set people on fire, I get thrown off a train and I’m flying through the air, grabbing ont Paul, being whipped by the air. I’m seduced, locked in a cage, starved. I’m kidnapped. I was dirty the entire time and it was really fun.

Q: That’s a lot. Is this a six hour movie?

LC: No, I know, exactly. The cool thing about it is it cuts so quickly and it’s so fast paced, you have a second to breathe but it’s constant action. Yet the story is told in a way that you still fully understand and you can immerse yourself in it. Scott’s vision with the visual effects of it all and creating this alternate post-apocalyptic world is so fantastic that when you see it in 3D you really do feel like you’re there and part of the story.

Q: Who seduces you? Is that vampire Stockholm syndrome?

LC: Karl Urban plays a human vampire which is a new breed of vampire because the other ones are more horrific creatures that were all CG and created by Scott. He wants to turn me and in order to do so it’s kind of that seducing character, tries to seduce me through food and tries to lure me to the other side.

Q: The train sequence looks amazing. How long were you working on that?

LC: I’m on the train pretty much the entire film. When I’m kidnapped I’m put onto the train.

Q: I guess when the motorcycles start chasing the train is what we saw.

LC: Oh, that, yes. That took weeks because the exterior shots and the interior shots were completely different places. The motorcycle training, obviously they had tons of stunts, tons of training, days where you had a certain amount of light time and then all of a sudden the sun was going down so you had to push to the next day, but it was a crazy process and it was all amazing. Crazy journey.

Q: What is the secret to a good movie scream?

LC: I don’t know. They said, “Scream” and that’s what came out. It was my first day of filming. They put me down in this wet dungeon and they just said, “All right, now you’re reacting to stuff going on upstairs.” I just was listening to sounds and they said, “And scream.” That’s what came out. The next day my voice was gone but I only had to do it twice.

Q: How do you plan to make Snow White a modern girl?

LC: I think with Tarsem his vision is so incredible and his imagery from The Fall and then Immortals coming out. We’re not modernizing it. It’s still going to be period but I think it’s more of the action comedy, maybe like The Princess Bride, Enchanted, trying to relate to all generations while maintaining the core values of the story, making people laugh at the same time. It’s not so much making it edgy or making it anything different because I think the fairy tale speaks for itself. It’s just taking the Tarsem twist on it.

Q: I meant modern girl in spirit, for today’s audiences.

LC: Oh, right. I think bringing her spirit and her spunk to life, she changes in this story. She’s very feminine but she also then goes to be with the dwarves and then she has to come back and fight, so she’s got kind of two personalities. She’s the girly princess but at the same time, she’s got this kick butt side. I think she shows a lot of different qualities that young girls have today with the confidence and the excitement. It’ll be really fun. It’s all new for me.

Q: There are other Snow Whites being made too, but yours is going to be the best, right?

LC: [Laughs] Kristen Stewart is the other Snow White and I really admire her as an actress. She’s so fun and so sweet and we’re both very different. We’ve both very, very different and I think we’re going to have two totally different takes on it. So it’ll be interesting to see what happens but I’m very excited to be involved with mine with Julia Roberts and Armie Hammer and Tarsem. I’m still completely amazed.

I’ve seen the movie Priest already. The 1994 Miramax drama really asked important questions about the church. I was the only one at WonderCon who got that joke. The version of Priest that previewed there looks way cooler. They showed a full sequence and a sizzle reel.

The money shot in the extended sequence is when Priest (Paul Bettany) cracks open a bible, crosses fly out and turn into ninja stars which he hurls at the vampires. Priest and Hicks (Cam Gigandet) have entered Night Shade, an underground reservation for surviving vampires.

There’s slime on the banister and Priest kicks in a door to find a Renfield-esque creature babbling in the dark. Some vampire goons throw axes at the vampire hunters, and Hicks just tosses one back at ‘em. Hicks is going to shoot the other three, but Priest tells him to save his bullets and takes them all out with broken bones and stabbing.

It’s only when the sun goes down that Priest advises Hicks to get his gun. That’s when the horde of vampires come out and Priest has to unleash the ninja crosses. The nighttime vampires look like CGI. They’ve got four fangs biting at the heroes and bald wrinkly heads covering any eyes they may have had but no longer do. It’s a generic monster. The way they’re dispatched is cool.

The sizzle reel kept coming back to a sequence with a train. In a Mad Max-ish desert, they ride motorcycles to catch the train. We see Priestess (Maggie Q) take out a lot of evil motorcyclists. She jump kicks one off his bike. She knee slides under a scythe blade. She lassos a bike and flips it over. She even lassos a vampire in mid-air and rips him in half. A lot of trainto fighting too.

The footage had a familiar gray-blue look although the production value looks higher than the usual blue-gray horror movie. The 3D looks fine but creates a good solid image for Bettany and Q to pose in after they take out the bad guys.

Cory Goodman, who effectively pitched the kung fu holy man actioner Priest somehow, sold the story to Summit Entertainment with Timur Bekmambetov attached. However, Bekmambetov is too busy slaying vampires dressed in powdered wigs to rise to the task. Enter Eisner, who is not afraid of alienating the witch and warlock portion of his fan base.

Story centers around one of the last remaining witch hunters who must stop witches and warlocks from getting freaky deaky and repopulating. I don’t envy that job. C-blocking a warlock has got to be one of the most dangerous jobs there is. Plus, 1099 work is a paperwork nightmare. (Deadline)

If you’re into blind vampires, Catholicism, and Paul Bettany’s abs, you’re really going to like this new trailer for Priest. If you could live without most of those things, you clearly haven’t looked hard enough at Paul Bettany‘s abs. A man of the cloth with a six pack like that. It’s almost not fair, am I right, ladies?

The film stars Paul Bettany’s abs, Karl Urban, Lily Collins, Maggie Q, Christopher Plummer, Cam Gigandet, and Stephen Moyer. The story revolves around a legendary Warrior Priest (Bettany’s abs) who lives in obscurity among other downtrodden human inhabitants in walled-in dystopian cities ruled by the Church. When his niece (Collins) is abducted by a murderous pack of vampires, Priest breaks his sacred vows to venture out on a quest to find her before they turn her into one of them. Maggie Q and Cam Gigandet also help kick some blind vampire ass. Seems unfair going up against handicapped vampires, but if they’re anything like my neighbor, they don’t let you steal their valuables without leaving some teeth marks first.

I can’t embed or download the trailer, so check it out at Crackle here.

Director: Scott Charles Stewart

Cast:Paul Bettany, Maggie Q., Karl Urban, Christopher Plummer, Brad Dourif

Synopsis: A priest disobeys church law to track down the vampires who kidnapped his niece.

Release: May 13, 2011

Oh good, another friggen vampire movie. But in all fairness, at least Priest takes place in the future, and to be honest, looks kind of awesome.

"In a world wrecked by centuries of violent warfare between man and vampire, a warrior priest turns against the church in order to save his kidnapped niece from a homicidal gang of vampires."

Between this character and the priest in Machete, I’m beginning to think the Vatican has launched some sort of PR campaign to make priests seem more like bad asses and less like effeminate child-molesters. Good luck with that. (Coming Soon)

Watch the Priest trailer after the jump…

Priest Trailer – Watch more Movie Trailers

Director: Chan-wook Park

Cast: Kang-ho Song, Ok-vin Kim

Synopsis: A failed medical experiment turns a man of faith into a vampire.