A Week Of Uwe Boll #4: BloodRayne.

Travis is probably gonna hate me for this one. Let me start off by saying out of all the Uwe Boll movies I had up to watch, BloodRayne was my most anticipated. Why? For a couple reasons. First, it's considered by many to be up there with Alone in the Dark as one of Boll's absolute worst films, and I couldn't wait to see this for myself. Second, I remember when it came out in theater and when the trailers first came out; I remember how fake it looked, and I often said that a Sci-Fi Channel Original looked more convincing. Combine that with a completely bizarre cast and a scene where you get to see Kristanna Loken's boobs, and I was in. And no, I've never played the video games the movie is based on.

The movie is about a Dhampir (where the P is pronounced like an F)--a half human/half vampire--named Rayne (Kristanna Loken). Many years ago, her vampire father, Kagan (Ben Kingsley), raped and murdered her mother. Ever since, she's been out for revenge. Then we also have the members of a vampire-killing society--Vladimir (Michael Madsen), Sebastian (Matt Davis), and Katarin (Michelle Rodriguez). Katarin's father, Elrich (Billy Zane), was in charge of this society... that is, until he became a vampire himself. Anyway, this society protects powerful objects/body parts that can make any vampire super powerful, and--of course--Kagan is after them. But Rayne will get these objects herself if it means finding a way to get to Kagan and kill him.

The movie's story is all over the place. Half the crap in this movie doesn't make sense, and that's being generous. Hell, Billy Zane's character ends up having absolutely no point. He's in maybe 3 scenes which go absolutely nowhere, and then he's never heard from again. It wasn't necessarily confusing as it was just laughably bad. There's even a sex scene that comes out of nowhere, which is the infamous scene where we get to see Kristanna Loken topless. And then it's never mentioned again.

The acting is atrocious, as well. The majority of the cast is incredibly out of place. Ben Kingsley doesn't even phone it in; Hell, he doesn't even sleepwalk through it. He gives us what is probably the most boring villain in any vampire story, not to mention one of the laziest performances of his career. Michael Madsen is obscenely out of place, and his pauses in between his monotone speech makes William Shatner look like Alan Rickman (oh yeah, I went there). As for Michelle Rodriguez, let's just say I pull off a more convincing British accent than she does, not to mention I can keep it going longer. Half the time she talks normal. Kristanna Loken is guilty of the same, but it was more noticeable with Miss Rodriguez. I mean, Jesus, when Billy Zane gives the best performance in your movie... though I should have realized this when the opening credits actually said "With Special Appearance By Billy Zane." Yeah. Billy Zane actually gets the "special appearance" tag for this movie. That tells ya something.

I never find reason to talk about props and costumes in movies. If you're a regular reader of mine, you'll know that. But I have to comment here. The costumes, primarily the wigs, are so bad they're ridiculous. From Ben Kingsley's to Meatloaf's (yes, Meatloaf is in this movie. You know what they say, some Meatloaf Aday keeps the doctor away... or something like that). And the weapons? Never have I seen duller swords. My Sword of Gryffindor (don't be jealous) could do more damage than Rayne's arm swords. And Ms. Loken moves so slowly with them, she gives you plenty of time to take it all in.

This leads in to the action. This movie was a gore fest. Granted, the blood was incredibly fake, as were any damaged body parts (sliced limbs, bashed heads, cut torsos, etc.). The camera stayed on them long enough that you could tell how fake they were. And the bright fake blood didn't help. There's actually one scene that's pretty funny when there are a bunch of guys beating a ripped open corpse with their swords, but they're doing it so slowly and with such bored looks on their faces. It's like they were trying out for the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disney World. Just going through the motions. But besides the gore, the action wasn't half bad. Sure, it was slow and not very fluid, as if the actors were too scared to play with their fake weapons, but it was still entertaining.

On top of all this, the script is terrible. Now, to his credit, Uwe Boll didn't write it. A woman named Guinevere Turner did. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the same Guinevere Turner who was partially responsible for the screenplay of American Psycho. And it. is. bad. The conversations are jilted, mainly for 2 different reasons. First, everything is expository. There is no character building conversations. Every single sentence has to to with moving along the plot, even to the point where transitions in scenes make no sense and are forced. The second reason is that there are absolutely no contractions. This movie is apostrophe-phobic, I guess, because every little syllable of every word must be said. And as I said earlier, the story makes no sense part of the time, giving us unnecessary moments of story (Billy Zane's character... or Meatloaf's character).

All of this being said, I have to say that I actually enjoyed the movie. Some will say it's painfully boring. Some will say it's just bad. And some say it's a total rape of the video game. But I haven't played the video game, and I think this movie is actually so bad it's good. With bad acting reading the words from a bad script with actors wearing bad wigs and doing bad action scenes with overtly fake gore, all to further a plot that nobody really cares about? It's just so bad it's hilarious. And yes, I did laugh at points from the badness. And the reason I think I enjoyed BloodRayne more than some of Uwe Boll's other works thus far, such as Postal or Far Cry, is because of its consistency. Postal actually has some truly good moments in it, so its inconsistency to be either good or bad made it hard to watch. Far Cry just tried too hard; it had good ideas, but a really poor execution. BloodRayne is just bad all around, a bad that is so bad you're not sure that it wasn't made like this on purpose. Even the cinematography is bad, which is why I had the initial thought from the trailers that it came off as a really bad Sci-Fi Channel Original. So what did I think of at the end? That I was wrong. I actually think it would have made a pretty decent Sci-Fi Channel Original, though it was still at that quality and did not deserve the theater run. The only reason it did was the star power, I'm sure.

If there was anything I didn't like about the movie, even in a so bad it's good kinda way, it was the ending. There's about a 2-3 minute flashback montage of a bunch of bloody/violent acts that occurred throughout the rest of the movie (some of it in slow motion), just in case you had tried to forget it by this point. And it is a bloody montage, indeed. Still, it serves absolutely no purpose other than to confuse, which it did. But that was just a minor quibble in an otherwise super-campy, super-bad, so-bad-its-good vampire flick.

When it comes to these types of movies, I hate giving them ratings, because there are two levels to it. There's the actual movie score and the "how I perceived it" score, and I really don't like doing more than one score per movie. So I'm gonna go ahead and invent a brand new score, premiering today (actually, there are 2 new scores. The second I'll hardly ever have to use, but I have had to score a handful of movies with that rating in the past, so I figured it might as well get a picture). Ladies and gentlemen, I give you... the "Hot Mess" rating:


A Hot Mess

(P.S. Both new ratings can be found in the sidebar "Ratings" section.)