BloodRayne Movie Review

German director Uwe Boll is making a name for himself as a schlockster, methodically working his way through a long list of video game adaptations for the silver screen, to painfully bad effect. Now, hot on the heels of the almost-straight-to-video Alone in the Dark with Christian Slater and Tara Reid, Boll is hitting us again with a film adaptation of the hot vampire title BloodRayne. And this is just a brief stop on the road to upcoming productions of Dungeon Siege, Far Cry, and Hunter: The Reckoning. Sadly, Boll is rushing so quickly through each of these absurdly bad pictures that he isn't taking the time to put the schlock where it belongs, so even fans of bad cinema are going to be pretty disappointed.

BloodRayne is the story of a red-headed half-vampire vixen (Kristanna Loken), a dhampir, on a mission to take revenge against her vampire father (inexplicably portrayed here by a wooden and probably somewhat disoriented Ben Kingsley) and the kingdom of night stalkers over which he rules. There are some motivations behind all this, and from time to time Kingsley and Loken utter lines apparently intended to illustrate these motivations, but mostly it doesn't make sense at all and it doesn't really matter. What does matter is that Rayne comes equipped with a pair of awkward-looking sword-type things and she knows how to use them. Well, she doesn't really, but a series of quick edits make that a moot point.

Wandering the countryside in search of Rayne and her vampiric foes is a ragtag team of vampire hunters led by Michael Madsen and Michelle Rodriguez, neither of whom seem to realize that they're supposed to be wandering through the 18th century Romanian countryside rather than, say, the Palos Verdes Mall. Of course it doesn't help that most of the sets appear to be taken from your local county's Renaissance Faire and populated by those stoner D&D kids from your college dorm.

How Uwe Boll managed to round up this cast of actors, all of whom have reasonably respectable resumes to fall back on and -- we can assume -- highly paid agents whose job is to protect them from this sort of career-killing mistake, will forever remain a mystery. Of course, not a single one of them, Kingsley (a freakin' Oscar winner) included, manages to deliver one line of worthwhile dialog throughout the entire picture. But that's clearly got a little something to do with the movie's appallingly clichéd script, which was penned by none other than American Psycho writer Guinevere Turner, who also somehow managed to make her way to this pitiful production. It's as if Boll brought together the best team of talent he could possibly secure on short notice and then told them all to suck. And they do!

Unfortunately, nothing about BloodRayne sucks well. Though critics repeatedly compare Uwe Boll to the legendary schlockster Ed Wood, Boll's pictures invariably lack the one redeeming quality consistent with those of that old D-movie master. They're not even funny. In scene after scene Boll misses every possible opportunity to inject humor and camp into this painfully retarded story, which might otherwise have salvaged this idiotic exploit. Instead, Rayne is dry, dull, and senseless from start to finish. Given a choice between watching this movie or watching an 11-year-old kid play the video game version for two hours, you'll likely get a more fulfilling cinematic experience from the latter.

When it Raynes, it's poor.