Leather and Lace, and a Sword to the Face By Fearless Young Orphan Bloodrayne (2005) Directed by Uwe Boll I’ve seen three other Uwe-Boll movies. They were Alone in the Dark, Dungeon Siege: In the Name of the King, and Far Cry. I played all three of the computer games on which they were based. Y’all know me: I love me some computer games. Uwe Boll is a terrible director, but I have sort of a soft spot for the fact that he’s the guy who makes movies out of computer games – even though in my experience, the movies he makes share the same names as computer games and the similarities kind of end there. I don’t know why I feel this way. Let’s call it a personal failing. Anyway, as far as those other three movies go: Alone in the Dark, I could not finish, because it was such a boring film; Dungeon Siege was an awful movie, but it faintly amused me for a few reasons (see my Hunk of Happiness regarding same, if you care); and Far Cry, though it bore resemblance to the game only because of the shirt that the hero was wearing, was scraping for SyFy channel quality and almost made it there. Thus, I think I’m impressed to say that Bloodrayne is the best Uwe Boll movie I’ve seen. I bought the game Bloodrayne, long ago. Due to some error by some clerk in the store (this was back when you did actually buy games on disks rather than just downloading them) I had a Disk One and then the game said, “Insert Disk Two,” and I was all like, “Hrrrrm, I don’t have a Disk Two, this is a poser,” and I took it back to the store and said, “Errm, Disk Two?” and the clerk said, “Hrrrm, I don’t have a Disk Two either, would you like to exchange that for something else?” and that was how I ended up buying a copy of Baldur’s Gate. Anyway no big deal, because I heard the game Bloodrayne wasn’t much good either, but it featured a female warrior vampire and promised a lot of cathartic blood and gore so I was willing to give it a shot. Alas, not meant to be. So, enough about me, now on to the film. It’s the “olden days”, like 1820 or something like that, in the country of vampires and gypsies, like Romania or somewhere like that. The story is that of a dhampir, not a vampire per se. A dhampir is a half-human half-vampire who apparently digs wearing leather. Our dhampir is Rayne (beautiful Kristanna Loken), the product of vampire overlord Kagan (Ben “WTF” You need Disk Two to play with this girl. Kingsley) raping a human woman whom he later murdered too, thus ensuring that Rayne is good and pissed off at him. She was raised in a circus it seems, forced to perform as a blood-drinker. Meanwhile through the years, her father Kagan is putting together a thrall army in his candle-filled, mountain-top castle. He’s got a shopping list of things he needs to take over the world: a magic rib, a magic heart and a magic eye, which is a very standard computer-game trick. Games quite often send their players searching for a number of special things, which serve as Macguffins to put the players through chapters of the game. There is a society called the Brotherhood, led by Vladimir (a hilariously miscast Michael Madsen wearing the worst wig ever), the aim of which is to stop that damn Kagan, and to stop him, they need to get the relics before he does. On the same night poor Rayne escapes from the circus, Vladimir and two of his Brotherhood buddies (one of whom is Michelle Rodriguez, who really is too good for this kind of thing) were coming to find her. And then they do! They invite her (with violence) to either be the Brotherhood’s prisoner or maybe join them in their quest, and Rayne is like, “Hey, anybody who wants to kill Kagan is fine in my book,” so she joins up and then does some really awesomely silly training sequences until they are ready to take on Kagan’s dark thrall army. There is a character-arc of sorts, though it’s no big deal. Rayne has to learn to trust the humans and vice versa. She learns to trust one young handsome human by boinking him against the bars of her prison cell. Yay, trust! Then she has to break up with the humans, saying, “I have to do this alone,” and Vladimir and the boinked guy have to follow her saying, “She can’t do this alone.” Rayne goes off to find the magic rib and the magic heart. Did I neglect to mention that she already found the magic eye? Damn thing went off and infused itself into her face, so that’s weird. Anyway if she gets the magic body parts, they’ll make her more powerful, not prone to the normal vampire dangers of sunlight and water (?) and *I’m gonna buy a new toaster oven. A really nice, big one that can fit a whole Totino’s pizza inside.* whatever the hell. Garlic, maybe. This is all interspersed with obligatory scenes of Ben “WTF” Kingsley behaving like a vampire overlord, assuming vampire overlords are bored to death with their jobs and thinking of how they’re going to spend their paychecks after filming this crap. He growls and snarls in true supervillain fashion, all from the comfort of his candlelit throne-of-evil which I don’t think he ever leaves, which makes me believe that Ben’s scenes were filmed all on the same day because his contract stated he didn’t have to show up any more than that. You will also catch Meat Loaf in this movie as yet another vampire lord, this one surrounded by naked women. I think he got the better part, and in gratitude, he makes some effort to infuse his character with “emotions.” The finale is a big fight in the castle. Guess who wins. Okay, two things. First of all, Kristanna Loken made this watchable for me. She actually does a remarkable job at making her ridiculous character credible. Honestly, corny lines and all! I liked Rayne; I actually hoped she would succeed in her stupid quest. Between her and the boinked guy, there is in fact a little sizzle of chemistry. It’s also rather adorable that her fight scenes look so bad, like she’s not especially good at choreography and nobody bothered to make her look any better at it. Well, it doesn’t matter that she can’t fight for crap, because the weapons they’re using are obviously fake. The blades all have clearly blunted edges; they’d have better luck bludgeoning each other with those things than trying to stab somebody. But for all that, I thought she was fine in the role. I’d hang with this chick. Second thing, though the story is a complete been-there-done-that cliché which cannot even summon enough interest from us to spot the plot holes, of which I am sure there are many, I was not exactly bored by it. There’s something visceral about the movie; maybe it’s the ample gore, the eye-candy of beautiful women stretching their tawny abdomens all over the place, the unintentional humor of the production. For example, one battle scene seemed to have a running gag in place in which people got swords jammed through their faces. Ouch, by the way. It was like a weekly Face Off challenge: your assignment is to create a makeup featuring a sword through the face. The top six designs will be featured in Bloodrayne. Now, as far as vampire movies go, I’m going to give Bloodrayne four fangs out of ten. Most people would probably not feel that it deserved that many, but it worked for me on a few basic levels. I liked the star, it had a lot of gory vampire-crap in it, and I wasn’t aching for the ending. That’s a first for me and Uwe Boll. .