Bloodrayne

A very hot half-vampire/half-woman who loves to wear leather gear while kicking ass, suits up in order to find some “eye” that possesses powers (don’t they all?), so that she could use that “eye” to find her dear ol’ dad and stab the shit out of him, as he apparently raped and murdered her mother back in the day. You know…your typical hot-vamp-wants-to-kill-her-dad-cause-he-raped-her-mom story. If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. Lots of blood, swords and a man by the name of Doctor Uweron Boll ensues…

I’ve never been one to bash filmmakers simply because I believe their movies stink. I try to watch their films hoping that they might be good, write a review about them afterwards and if I see a pattern, simply avoid the person’s movies in the future. Director Paul W.S. Anderson used to be the poster-child for all things wrong with movies according to the online world, but I never really saw him that way. He had his bad movies, sure, but he also had a lot of good points, and even some decent flicks like EVENT HORIZON and RESIDENT EVIL. Enter German director Uwe Boll, who most recently manhandled the title of worst director in the world away from Anderson (again, according to the onliners) and decided to take a certain amount of pride in fans’ resistance to his films, by banging out more movies than Woody Allen from year to year. I’ve only seen one of his so-called stinkfests so far, HOUSE OF THE DEAD, and it did, indeed, suck the big one. BLOODRAYNE, on the other hand, does not suck the big one, in fact…it doesn’t even suck the small one all that much. It’s actually pretty decent…for what it is.

Of course, “what it is” is yet another movie adaptation of a videogame featuring a female vampire in the lead, kicking butts, taking names, handling swords, chopping heads, chewing necks and basically…walking around in a hot tight leather outfit for about 90 minutes or so. Now forgive me for saying so, but…what the fuck is wrong with that?! In fact, even though the film’s storyline is about as flaccid as my penis most Sunday mornings, the film’s real draw is its hot lead, Kristanna Loken, who honestly does a pretty solid job of portraying the half-human, half-vampire, all-out hottie with thank-you cleavage to inspire me to, at the very least, pay attention through most of the picture. Add to that, a number of surprisingly fun and bloody action sequences featuring decapitations, tons of red stuff, arrows through body parts, knives through the chest and all kinds of swordplay, and well…if you’re looking for a basic medieval vampirish way to spend an hour and a half, this film might just whoop your trick. Does the film’s dialogue suck a lot? Well, sometimes, but that problem is also exasperated by some of the actors’ delivery, like Michael Madsen, who in no way, shape or form should ever have been allowed to even audition for this movie! Also, the film’s action scenes, despite being quite bloody and mostly fun, suffer from the same problem as many action sequences coming out of Hollywood these days: they’re cut way too fast!

The film also wastes a ton of actors and characters, who bounce in and out of the plot for very little reason, like Bitch Tits Bob and that bald guy from TITANIC (with wig here). Ben Kingsley, on the other hand, an Oscar-winning actor who you’d never imagine touching this vamp flick with a ten-foot pole, is actually well cast here as the head baddie blood-sucker, having little more to do than sit around and look creepy and act campy—which he does quite well. And let me not forget the lovely Michelle Rodriguez, also miscast in this film, but certainly not in a bad way, since I was more than happy to follow her sneer around in all those tight leather outfits. In fact, a couple of scenes even feature the two lead hotties battling it out womano-a-womano and the cat squeals are a hoot (why the film’s marketing folks didn’t jump all over that, is beyond me!). One of the sequences even takes place underwater…yeah, baby!! The film doesn’t have many special effects either, but the ones they do utilize (like faces stone-ing up and shit) work well, within the confines of a medieval film about Draculs, of course. All that said, the overall story is still pretty lame, there are way too many shots of people riding horses across plains, the action sequences could have been better shot, the casting was a little off here and there, and you really couldn’t care less about anyone in the movie, save for Loken’s cleavage, whom incidentally…I was rooting for all the way! Which reminds me, Boll was also nice enough to toss an entirely gratuitous sex scene of Loken topless into the film to boot.

I mean c’mon Boll-haters…you gotta give the man that much! All in all, not as bad as you’d suspect and certainly serviceable for all who love the bloody, low-budget vamping gone wild.

(c) 2021 Berge Garabedian