director
Uwe Boll
screenwriter
Guinevere Turner
producers
Dan Clarke
Shawn Williamson
cinematographer
Mathias Neumann
music
Henning Lohner
editor
David Richardson
cast
Kristanna Loken (Rayne)
Michelle Rodriguez (Katarin)
Ben Kingsley (Kagan)
Michael Madsen (Vladimir)
Matt Davis (Sebastian)
Billy Zane (Elrich)
Udo Kier (Regal Monk)
Meat Loaf (Leonid)
Michael Paré (Iancu)
Geraldine Chaplin (Fortune Teller)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 94m
u.s.
release: 1/6/06
video
availability: TBA
official
website
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When the credits proudly announce
"Special Appearance by Billy Zane," you know you're
in trouble. Zane, however, is actually pretty funny in BloodRayne,
a witless action-vampire flick based on a video game. He plays
Elrich, some sort of elite vamp who mostly sits in his study
and acts snarky. "Would you stop throwing things
at me?" he deadpans at a minion who has tossed a scroll
and, earlier, a severed head onto his desk. Zane's dialogue is
the only evidence I could find of credited screenwriter Guinevere
Turner, who wrote the '90s lesbian indie film Go Fish
and has contributed to Showtime's The L Word. Well, that
and the scene wherein the half-vamp heroine Rayne (Kristanna
Loken) seduces a female vampire only to chomp her throat.
BloodRayne is the latest in director Uwe Boll's
ongoing crusade to take horror-oriented video games (House
of the Dead and Alone in the Dark were his previous
efforts) and suck all the life out of them. I've played BloodRayne,
and its cut scenes are better than anything in the movie. The
plot manages the dubious feat of being both dumb and complicated,
like the worst James Bond movies, when all it's really about
is stopping king-shit vampire Kagan (Ben Kingsley) before he
can gather three ancient body parts that can make him invulnerable.
Kagan (no relation to Fagin, whom Kingsley played in 2005's Oliver
Twist) is essentially The Master from Buffy's first
season, with the Darth Vader spin of also being Rayne's father
(he raped her human mother). Rayne, for her part, is essentially
a distaff Blade, only without the impressive arsenal (she could
use a Whistler).
But don't let the presence
of fanged bloodsuckers fool you: BloodRayne is really
no more a vampire film than Grandma's Boy is. It's a derivative
quest film, with Rayne accompanied by a motley crew (Michael
Madsen, Michelle Rodriguez, and Matt Davis) as she searches for
the elusive items -- an eye in a monastery, a heart in a box
underwater. As she collects these items, her energy points go
up -- uh, I mean her powers become greater (she can tolerate
water, which once scorched her flesh). Unfortunately, Kristanna
Loken's acting becomes no greater. Then again, Maria Falconetti
at her peak couldn't do much with the lines Loken and everyone
else (except Billy Zane) is given, and poor Michelle Rodriguez
tries hard to maintain some sort of period-appropriate accent
but winds up defaulting to her sullen mode. (She and her Girlfight
director Karyn Kusama -- who came a cropper last December with
Aeon Flux -- need to reunite
fast and stop faffing about with dorky girl-power fantasies that
are really about giving teen boys a peek.)
This was my first Uwe Boll
film -- weep now for my lost innocence, please -- and he's every
bit as inept as I'd heard. His fight scenes are the worst kind
of editing-room cheating, meant to cover for actors who haven't
been trained to wield anything more intimidating than a cell
phone. Rayne begins the movie as a carny freak, and her escape
from that degrading life is shown in a confusing flashback while
she's escaping. Yeah, it didn't make sense to me either.
Loken's topless sex scene with Matt Davis -- clang, clang
against dungeon bars (ooh, how medievally erotic!) -- might join
Elizabeth Berkley's Showgirls pool-thrashing
in sex-scene infamy. Blood squirts and spurts everywhere, a tribute
of sorts to the sanguinary game, only the blood looked more realistic
there. Meat Loaf collects a check for a couple of scenes as a
vamp libertine; Geraldine Chaplin -- whose father Charlie is
not, let's hope, following her career from the afterlife -- pops
in as a fortune teller who fails to tell Kristanna Loken not
to sign on for any more Uwe Boll movies based on video games.
As it happens, Loken is due to appear in Boll's In the Name
of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale in December 2006. Mark
your calendars.
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