Amateur Fright

It sucks.  It bites.  And we're not talking about the vampires...

by Michael Sean McGowan

The Upside: It blows.

The Downside: No, I mean really- it blows.

    Bloodrayne is a movie that has to be seen to be believed.  No, wait, scratch that.  You don't want to see it.  Trust me, you don't want to- just take my word for it.  Just close your eyes and picture a movie with the most inept direction, most horrid writing, and absolutely soulless acting you've ever seen.  Is that what Bloodrayne is like?  No.  You've just imagined the movie I wish I could have sat through rather than Bloodrayne.

    I don't know what Uwe Boll is thinking (and if I had the opportunity, I'm not sure I'd want to).  Don't know the name?  I don't blame you- not many did until he did for the world of moviedom what Japan did for Nanking with his 2003 debut stinker House of the Dead.  Since then the German-born Boll has made a cottage industry not only out of producing and directing movies based on video games, but also giving film critics from all walks of life new reason to appreciate the comparatively cerebral and spiffy works of Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Bay.  Bloodrayne is Boll's third crime against humanity, following last year's Alone in the Dark, a movie which holds the dubious distinction of having vacated theaters before most its audience had the good sense to do the same.  I watched Bloodrayne trying to pick up, I don't know, something.  Something that would tell me how a man can devote so much energy into a medium of storytelling and have such total disregard for it, too.  Is it kind of an Ed Wood complex?  Is he trying to make movies so lame and trashy that we'll end up loving them in an aw-shucks kind of way?  No way.  Even connoisseurs of bad movie are able to differentiate between bad movies that try so hard they're almost adorable, and just plain garbage.

    Bloodrayne is just plain garbage.

    Set in (damn, I don't know- apparently not even subtitles were in the budget) some Eastern European nation sometime between, oh, say the Crusades and the invention of sliced bread, members of the "Brimstone Society" are at war with the "most powerful vampire in the world," Kagan (played by Ben Kingsley- why, God in Heaven, why?) when they come across one of his dhampir- half-human, half-vampire offspring who's apparently fallen off the Dr. Phil wagon and wants to take a pair of her wrist blades to dear old papa.  The product of this uber-dysfunctional family is Rayne (T3's Kristanna Loken, whose cleavage sports more personality than she could ever hope to), an escapee from a traveling freak show whose supernatural powers including ripping into people's throats at random and bewildering the audience with long, completely vacant stares.

    I'm sorry, I have to know why an actor who not only possesses such fiery talent, but is also as revered as Kingsley is doing here in amongst a troupe that must have served as a fallback list for Skating with Celebrities.  As if period authenticity hadn't been blown from the cannons already, we get Michael Madsen (Kill Bill) playing a weathered old European vampire hunter and not even attempting an accent, which, in retrospect, I probably should thank him for.  He's saddled up with the inert Sebastian (Matthew Davis), and the very, very miscast Michelle Rodriguez as Brimstone partners whose only purpose is to- well, expository dialogue never sounds right when someone's talking to themselves.  And really, how sad is your production when Billy Zane and Meat Loaf are your "special guest stars"?  What, was Maria Conchita Alonso already booked?

    The biggest (okay, forget biggest, try only) amusing thing about Bloodrayne I've seen as of yet is the plot description on the Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com) which says:

        the vicious Lord Kagan (Ben Kingsley) wields power so fiercely that almost no one dares oppose him. Worse yet, Kagan now has within his grasp the opportunity to become invincible and possess immortal powers of untold horror...

   From the best that I can tell, these "immortal powers of untold horror" consist of primarily the screenplay, which is where the root of most of this evil lies.  Penned by Guinevere Turner (American Psycho), the writing for Bloodrayne is the kind of monstrosity that mistakes intelligence and coherency for laborious articulation of every word, all made doubly painful by the lifeless acting of everyone involved (I'm not surprised anymore by the rumors that Madsen showed up on the set everyday stone drunk).  Of course, there is no story except what is on the surface and keeps the movie skipping from one badly orchestrated action set piece to another, and what we have left is a mishmash that has something to do with the requisite Ancient Relics that will bestow a Great But Evil Power if they fall into the wrong hands.  It's just another sign of Bloodrayne's ineptitude that the relics, supposedly lost for centuries, all seem easier to find than, say, an Xbox 360.

    Boll has become like the Tom DeLay of modern moviemaking- a man we just seem to love heaping our contempt and scorn on.  And like the embattled Texas congressman, everyday Boll seems more and more like a con artist whose game is catching up with him.  A friend of mine recently explained a curious little fact- a loophole that's soon to be closed in German tax laws allow losses on failed movie projects to be borrowed against, and are completely tax deductible.  I've never had the mind for economics to understand exactly how it works, but it basically goes like this- every time Boll makes a movie like Bloodrayne, he makes a fortune by paying no taxes when it tanks, and people like me are eight dollars and a few degrees of self-respect lighter.  F

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