TAC Reviews...Bloodrayne

Date Posted: 23/06/15

Vampires exist and are capable of having half-vampire children with human women; BloodRayne follows one such child, a dhampir, that has all of a vampire’s strengths and none of their weaknesses with exception of their need for blood. She teams up with the Brimstone society to take down a Vampire lord who controls the land and murdered her mother.

There was a PS2 game that was released in 2002 and featured a sexy-as-hell half vampire named Rayne that worked for a mysterious organisation called the Brimstone Society. She took on the Nazis in 1933 as she sought to prevent them from possessing artefacts of ancient power that would help the Nazi to wage their upcoming war.

Whilst the game was a bit repetitive and the combat was not exactly more than just button mashing, it was still pretty fun…now enter Uwe Boll, a man that has found a way of making money from movies no matter how shit they are. He puts no effort into his projects and the majority of his films seem to have been based on video games. But surely even a man who directs some of the worst films in recent memory cannot fuck up the idea of a sexy half-vampire taking on the Nazis, right??

Err…[…I’m currently rubbing my forehead weakly…]…Bloodrayne the film…

In the Eighteenth Century, vampires walk the earth, and most are under the control of the vicious Vampire King, named Kagan (Ben Kingsley). Some years ago Kagan raped a woman and fathered a dhampir (a half-vampire half-human child), who would later witness Kagan killing her mother, and grew up to become Rayne (Kristanna Loken). Initially Rayne is an attraction at a Romanian carnival freak show, her skin cannot tolerate water (not holy water just water in general) and burns when in contact with it. She is kept in a cage and one night a drunken member of the carnival attempts to force himself upon her. She kills him, then in her blood lust she attacks and kills everyone else in the carnival before she escapes.

She is tracked down by Sebastian (Matthew Davis), Vladimir (Michael Madsen), and Katarin (Michelle Rodriguez) members of Brimstone, a secret society dedicated to tracking down and killing the vampires of the world. They agree to help her in tracking down her father, so that she can kill him in revenge for raping and murdering her mother.

Kagan has human servants and is seeking the pieces of the ancient vampire so that he can become all powerful.

Let me just give you a quick summary…ahem…A computer game about a half-vampire taking on Nazis has been replaced with this generic vampire action film featuring some atrocious acting, a flimsy story, woeful direction and not a Nazi in sight

Before I go on let me show you something…

Clearly the Rayne on the right is the computer game version of the character and the one on the left is Kristanna Loken’s version…which looks sexier?? Which one fills out the costume better?? More importantly which of these two characters would you be expecting to take on her enemies cutting them into pieces??

I am not blaming Loken for this but in the video game the outfit made Rayne look sexy, in the film, it just looks a bit weird. The outfit could have worked too, if it had looked more like it did in the game the film is based upon…

See what I mean…it could have worked. The outfit needed to be leather, it needed to catch the light, it needed shine, but in the film it just looks stupid and makes you wonder why such a token effort was made to make the outfit look like it did in the game when something new could have been designed.

Anyway, I’m not going to bang on about the game anymore, let’s look at the film itself.

As I said earlier, Uwe Boll has become famous for producing some of the worst movies in recent years. His name seldom appears in the credits of the projects he has directed these days because seeing his name is now enough to cause most filmgoers to change their mind about watching a movie if he is directing.

BloodRayne was his third adaptation of a game (the previous two being House of the Dead and Alone in the Dark) and is without a doubt one of the worst vampire films ever made.

These days it seems that any low budget or big budget horror film will focus on vampires in some way. However, because of the amount of vampire films out there already and the number still being made it is very difficult to make something truly original. In the case of Bloodrayne there was a pre-existing story line thanks to the game that had been released in 2002 so surely it should have been easy to do something good. Ask yourself: who is going to want to watch a film about the character of Rayne from the game?? Fans of the game…so base a film on the fucking game…seriously Uwe Boll…how stupid are you that you can’t even make a film about a half-vampire killing Nazis??

Sorry I am aware that I keep getting bogged down comparing this piece of shit to the game but I liked the game

Right, focus…Rayne is a dhampir but unlike Blade from the Marvel comics and films (another half-vampire), she has spent her life as a freak show attraction, as a result Rayne has no martial arts training what so ever. The fights scenes are poorly choreographed and look like the actors were just given the weapons and told to fight whilst the cameras rolled. It is abysmal and you’d have more realistic fights scenes if you’d gone to a heavy metal gig and filmed the organised chaos of the mosh-pits

So the plot then…If Kagan finds parts of some ancient vampire he gets more powerful. Now Rayne finds one of these artefacts, an eye and when she holds it in her hand, she somehow absorbs it into her own body. Before she absorbs the eye she cannot tolerate water of any kind which begs the question of how she goes from blood-soaked in one scene to being clean in the next?? If she cannot wash in water then how does she possibly get clean?? What happens when it rains?? Also Rayne can swim later on in the film despite the fact that she hasn’t been able to enter water for her entire life. Are the audience supposed to believe that even though the audience hasn’t seen it, Rayne has gone off and learned how to swim?? If she did then maybe she should have prioritised learning how to fight rather than learning how to swim.

The supporting cast have had movie success; Michael Madsen was once the terrifying Mr. Blonde who happily tortured a man whilst playing “Stuck in the Middle with You” in Reservoir Dogs. Here he isn’t even a shadow of Mr Blonde. Here he says a few words of his line, pauses and draws breath, then finishes the line, this is because he is obviously completely and utterly pissed the whole time. The sentences are not that complicated, he could quite easily say them all in one breath without having to take a gasp of air midway through. I’m pretty sure that after each take someone handed him his bottle of vodka and he had another swig because he knew he could not make it through the film sober. Billy Zane appears, credited as a ‘guest star’…er…are there guest stars in a film?? He achieved worldwide recognition for his role in Titanic yet here he pretty much does nothing but blink and is pointless, other stars include Meatloaf who is just embarrassing, and Michelle Rodriguez who mutters most of her lines. Both of these people have proven that they can act when the occasion calls for it but clearly they know how shit this film was going to be so was determined not to put in any effort what so ever.

There is a sequence in which Rayne, whilst in the grips of bloodlust pushes Sebastian up against the bars of a cell and sex with him. The scene is yet another that is entirely pointless because there has been absolutely no chemistry, sexual or otherwise, between the two up to that point and there is none afterwards. All the scene entails is a couple of people obviously dry-humping up against the cell bars, nothing about the scene is sexy, and has just been thrown in for the sake of it.

There is a flash of Loken’s nipple during the scene so if you have watched Terminator 3 and want to know what the T-X’s tits look like, here is your chance to find out…[…alright, here’s the screen shot so you don’t have to watch the film…]…

I know that vampires and sex seem to go hand in hand. In both modern films and television series vampires and humans cannot help to help getting naked and having sex with one another. I have talked about this in detail in the TAC Reviews…What’s on my Mind section of this site so won’t repeat myself here. Sex scenes for the sake of showing sex or nudity are unnecessary and suggest that the point of them is to draw in an audience. If a film or show cannot draw in an audience without providing cheap titillation then maybe they shouldn’t have been made in the first place.

Do not…I repeat…do not watch this film because it is absolutely diabolical and was made to draw in fans of the game who wanted to see the sexy half-vampire Rayne kicking some ass, not watching a bunch of people that obviously don’t care about the characters, or the story they are involved in, wandering about because they had absolutely no direction and had no idea what they were supposed to be doing.

This is yet another addition to the heap of crap that audiences should be using to beat Uwe Boll to death with, or better yet, force him to sit down and watch his own movies. I have no doubt within minutes he’s be screaming for death but we would show him no mercy because he deserves none.

Uwe Boll has challenged critics to boxing matches before and beat the shit out of them…so he’s a class act through and through…personally I wouldn’t need to box him because I would simply use my Thumb to smash him Down into a pit of his own shit films and make him watch them over and over until he begs me to just vaporise him

1/10 - One of the worst films ever made…never ever watch it. Like Embrace of the Vampire it shows off a bit of skin from one of the stars, in this case Kristanna Loken, and as I have included a screen shot of her nipple I have saved you from watching it…and you are welcome