Bloodrayne
Short review, for the impatient:
Bloody awful. Ha ha! Always wanted to use that one!
Longer review:
First things first. It's an Uwe Boll movie. If you're the blessedly innocent type that has never heard of the man, or, if you're like my wife, who exhibits a preternatural ability to forget about his existence, you won't get the significance of that statement. And that's okay. I'll educate you. Uwe Boll is a film director of such staggering incompetence that he can't do justice to the story lines adapted from video games.
Welcome to boobies. I mean Hell.
Let's think on that one for a minute. Actually, it's not right to say Boll is incompetent. It's more like he just doesn't give a damn. Whether it's the oh-fuck-it-I'm-outta-ideas way he cut clips of the actual video game into his adaption of The House of the Dead or how he tried to pawn off Tara Reid as a brilliant academic in Alone in the Dark, Boll's video-game films, aside from being thoroughly awful, all have a special something, an aspect of visceral contempt for the audience, that puts them into a class by themselves. Bloodrayne has several such aspects. I'll get to those in a minute. By way of illustrating my point of current concern I'll say this: Boll has created a movie so bad that Meat Loaf can be rightly accused of 'slumming' by appearing in it.
Yes folks, you heard right. Meat Loaf Aday (editors note: easy joke about how he looks like he eats a meat loaf a day removed) has a fabulous three-snaps-up cameo in which he portrays an effeminate and super-stupid vampire. How stupid? Well, our heroes are able to escape his nefarious grasp by busting open the windows to let sunlight in. The windows of his own castle. I mean, really: what kind of vampire even has windows? The super-stupid kind, of course. I bring this up here and now because the scene with Mr. Loaf is, actually, the highlight of the film. Yup. It's all downhill from here.
And that's really saying something. Because if Meat Loaf is slumming, what is one to make of what Michelle Rodriquez and Udo Kier are doing in this? Not weird enough for you yet? How about Michael Madsen phoning in his lines in the most uninspired, jeezus-let's-just-get-through-this manner since John Malkovitch in the wretched Man In the Iron Mask, rendering lines like “We will never stop fighting” with all the gravity one usually reserves for “I'll take a whopper with cheese”? No? Still not weird enough for you? Okay. In a bizarro turn that Christopher Walken and Tim Burton working together couldn't conceive of, Ben Kingsley—yeah, the Ben Kingsley, the guy who played Gandhi, the Sexy Beast himself—shows up as the mother-rapin', father-stabbin' vampire baddie. For real. One begins to wonder when Cuba Gooding, Jr. will show up.
But back to the question: what are A-list (okay, B-list) celebs doing in this piece of shit? For the most part, just stoically and grimly reciting their lines, staggering from scene to scene, getting blood and gore and shit sprayed all over them, and, in Madsen's case, wearing really funny-looking wigs. In all cases they're hopping from an improbable scenario to a cinematic non-sequiter and back again, punctuated by dialog insipid by comic-book standards.
Enough generalities. Enjoy some specifics. The film opens with Madsen, some other guy who looks like Sean William Scott (but not as smirky), and Rodriquez riding horses around a renfair, ordering drinks, spouting little snatches of cryptic dialog, and killing idiotic vampires with no provocation in crowded saloons. Because, #1, it's the olden days, and #2, that's what happened in the olden days to vampires who waltzed up to bars and sat down right in front of mirrors where they cast no reflection and ordered a shot of absinthe.
Eventually we cut to some nearby carnival where our soon-to-be heroine Rayne is an abused freakshow attraction. Rayne is a 'dhampir'—half-vampire, half human who... wait. Let's stop for a minute. Let's think about what that means. Aren't vampires just basically humans? Like, humans-plus? Humans plus the ability to turn into bats and shit? Anyway... Rayne, (T3's Kristanna Lokken) despite being a scorching-hot half-vampire with self-healing capabilities that match Wolverine's, is a virtual slave to a nasty carnival operator and the motliest crew of halfwits since, well, Mőtley Crϋe. You'd think there'd be better opportunities for a girl like Rayne, or at least opportunities for escape. But no. Oh, there is a member of the carnival who is nice to Rayne, in that sappy she's-gonna-die-soon way, but, as she dies soon, there's not much to that story. Instead we get a nice scene featuring the sadistic ringmaster physically damaging Rayne, then getting her to drink blood, which heals her up real nice. The crowd goes wild.
Here's another of those huh? moments. One of the tortures inflicted on Rayne is burning her with water. Yep, her skin sizzles, pops, and cracks when exposed to water. Kinda makes you wonder how she keeps clean, huh? How does she wash her (obviously clean) hair? Why does she not stink to high hell?
Never mind. Later that night, as told in a confusing flash-back sequence, some chumpy carny comes to molest her and instead winds up as Rayne-chow. She finally grows a spine, escapes, disembowels her captors, and runs off into the wild. Exactly why she suddenly became a badass is never explained. Later she seduces and kills another brain-dead vampire right in the middle of a crowded street. A fortune teller, Madame Expository or something, witnesses this, invites her upstairs, fills in some backstory and tells Rayne she has to kill her vampire father. Or something. It's actually hard to concentrate at this point.
Rayne eventually falls in with Madsen and his crew, who are also out to kill Rayne's father, the evil Kagan (Kingsley). At this point it's just blood, guts, and tedium. There's lots of stabbing and shooting of arrows and damn near everyone dies, but that's not at all interesting. What is interesting is how poorly all this is executed. Boll obviously blew his wad on Kingsley's salary, and what little was left went into juvenile, and conspicuous, “special” effects shots of various and sundry combatants being torn to pieces. It's not enough that someone gets a sword rammed into his mouth; no, the actor has to turn just so into the camera to showcase the blade protruding out the back of his head. It's like a thirteen year old did the art direction—an attention-starved thirteen year old with a penchant for mindless, inchoate mayhem. “Look at what I can do!” the film seems to be saying. “Ewwwww! Are you shocked yet?”
And if that's not enough, the film's denouement is simply (if confusingly) a five-minute recap of the film's grisliest kills. Yeah, that's how it ends. A slow-mo montage of eviscerated monks, brutalized women, and exploding vampires. The end. To which I can only add: good riddance.