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Rise aka Rise: Blood Hunter is based on a script by director Sebastian Gutierrez.

The characters share the last name, this is true, and they are both vampire hunters, but most viewers who are familiar with the movie as well as with LKH's books claim that that's where the similarity ends. In the Anita Blake series, Anita isn't bitten for quite some time into the series. She lives in a society where vampirism is legal and can be attained legally at the age of 18. She doesn't go hunting the vampires unless she has a court order to do so, and the vampires that she does kill without a court order have usually attacked her first. Unlike Anita Blake, Sadie Blake doesn't bring corpses back to life by using her necromancy powers nor does she work with any special police task force designed to handle supernatural problems. Anita is strong-willed and defiant since page one while Sadie didn't seem to get aggressive until she realized what she has become. It's possible that writer/director Sebastian Gutierrez could have been inspired by the books of Laurell K. Hamilton and tried to pay homage by giving his character the same last name, but any similarity ends there.

No reason was given in the movie, and director Sebastian Gutierrez has not explained why he hired an Asian actress (Lucy Liu) to play the role of Sadie Blake. Viewers who have pondered this question have offered several possibilities, including: (1) Sadie's mother (who is depicted as Asian in the movie) married a non-Asian or part-Asian man surnamed Blake, (2) Sadie was adopted, (3) Sadie's parents changed their surname when they came to America, and (4) it was Sadie's pen name at the L.A. Weekly office, where she worked as a reporter.

Yes it is. In authentic vampire lore, i.e., from ancient and medieval times, vampires could be up during the daylight hours. In some gypsy vampire lore, in fact, the vampire (or "mulo") was thought to be most active at noon. Even in fiction, Dracula didn't need to sleep during the day and could actively walk outside in the sunlight. So could Carmilla. The whole vampires-burn-up-in-the-sun thing started in Nosferatu (1922). It is not part of real vampire lore.

Yes, he is. He plays a nameless bartender who aids Sadie Blake when she goes looking for the vampires who murdered and turned her.

This is actually his second last film. Prior to his death in 2006, Mako provided his voice for Master Splinter in TMNT (2007) (2007). He also did the voice for Uncle Iroh in the Avatar - La leggenda di Aang (2005) TV series.

The movie was rated R for theaters. On DVD, not only the R-rated version (97 minutes) but also the unrated version (122 minutes) was released. The huge difference implies bigger differences and watching it more closely, it's not just that. There are much more differences than only the running time. Basically one can say that the movie has been entirely new edited. There are many tiny differences like alternate shots, scene extensions etc. It's quite interesting to see how many really short scenes have been removed for the R-rated version to reduce its length. Shots have been shortened and parts of the dialogs have been removed as well, only the bare necessities are still in. Furthermore the order of the scenes has been changed. Where the R-rated version was almost chronological, the unrated version has become less chronological, due to the narration via flashbacks. Moreover each of the versions contains footage which isn't in the other version. The term "unrated" is better for advertising, but for this movie, it could also be considered as Director's Cut.