Anyway, Blade rescues a hapless rager caught in a vampire's nightclub.  Most or all of the dancers are bloodsuckers, as one nice young man discovers.  Fortunately Blade is there to render assistance.  Loaded up the wazoo with weapons, he makes short work of most of the vampires there, except Quinn, who turns out to be working for Deacon Frost.

The movie makes a distinction between those vampires born, and those created by other vampires.  This flies in the face of the more common conception of vampires being unable to recreate except through assimiliation.  They're unnatural creatures, after all.  Blade seems to be setting them up as natural, then, if "pureblood" vampires can exist.  Blade himself was made what he is when his mother was bitten just prior to giving birth.  It made him a half-breed of sorts:  able to withstand daylight and other vampire weaknesses, as strong and agile as they are, but still possessing that craving for blood.  Real vamps call him the Daywalker.

Blade is assisted by Kris Kristofferson as Whistler, who makes his weapons and concocts an extremely painful serum that sort of keeps the craving in check.  Whistler used to hunt vampires on his own before finding Blade and "realizing what he was" (albeit how this was done was never explained).

Blade rescues a hematologist who'd been examining the charred remains of Quinn, whose remains turn out not to be inanimate.  She's been bitten and will "turn" soon, but Whistler and Blade try to help her, anyway.  And she returns the favor, being a hematologist and all.  She even finds a cure for herself.  It's all symbolic about disease, you see.  Created vampires like Deacon Frost are explained as victims of a blood disease, with only the purebloods being incurable.  She also comes up with a nasty chemical weapon against vampires:  some kind of serum that reacts violently with vampire blood.  Very violently.

Oh, right, the plot.  Well, Deacon has been deciphering an ancient scroll in the vampire archives.  He's only allowed to do this because the Purebloods think he's wasting his time.  Deacon succeeds anyway, and finds a spell that will merge him with some vampire bloodgod and make him invincible.  Ingredients include 12 Purebloods and the blood of the Daywalker.

Long story short, Whistler is killed, the hematologist is captured, so is Blade, he meets his mother again (odd how she hasn't aged a bit), Deacon does summon the bloodgod, but Blade triumphs in the end.  Verdict:  loved the swordplay between him and Deacon.

I have to give points to Wesley Snipes for not making Blade a particularly sympathetic character.  He's almost the quintessential anti-hero, except that he's not a loner.  He's been with Whistler for some time, and doesn't rebuff to strong effect Karen's attempts to help.  He's the harsh, cold warrior with occasional fits of humor ("You've met Mr. Crispy").  Quite different from the histrionic psychopath he'd been in Demolition Man.