Photo Courtesy of New Line Wesley Snipes stars in the thriller "Blade 2," out on DVD.

Who cares what movie is featured on this DVD ÷ it's got fantastic special features. If filmmaking interests you at all, rent it.

But let's get one thing straight about the "Blade" movies. They are not cool. At least not in the usual "Wow, ĪBlade' is so cool" sense. Unless you are 10-years old and think it's cool when people put on sunglasses.

A brief rundown: Blade is this half-vampire-half-man guy who hates vampires and so he kills them, although he does have a vague moral imperative involving protecting someone. But anyway, he kills lots of vampires by shooting them and slicing through them with swords and then making serious faces.

All of this takes place at night. We don't know what he does during the day.

This is the second "Blade" movie, aptly named "Blade II," in which we see Wesley Snipes as Blade doing more of that stuff mentioned earlier. There's a plot but it's unimportant.

What matters is that some very interesting people made this movie and it's equally interesting to hear them talk about it and watch lots of cool documentaries about how they did it.

What is equally cool is that director Guillermo del Toro swears profusely within the first 30 seconds of his commentary on the film. He's this crude, funny, educated comic book geek with a deep appreciation for both fun and art. He also looks a lot like the comic book store owner on "The Simpsons," except he's from Spain.

Then there's the track with commentary from Wesley Snipes and the writer, David Goyer, for which they apparently got high.

Snipes does mouth sound effects during his fight scenes while Goyer giggles and encourages Snipes to guess what vampire sex would be like. That's interesting, too, in its own special way.

And that's just the first disc. Disc two has an hour-long "making-of" documentary, deleted scenes with director commentary, storyboard-to-scene comparisons and special effects featurettes. It even has little informative things nested inside those features.

All this makes the "Blade II" DVD practically a film teaching tool as well as entertainment.

You can spend hours listening to the filmmakers talk about their work, learning everything from which scenes the director hates to his philosophy on comic books and still hear them say things like, "If you're thirsty, have a fetus."

Mark Betancourt can be reached at catalyst@wildcat.arizona.edu.