Welcome to the Century of the Vampire, an ongoing weekly feature where Goonhammer managing editor Jonathan Bernhardt watches some piece of vampire media, probably a movie but maybe eventually television will get a spot in here too, and talks about it at some length in the context of both its own value as a piece of art and as a representation of the weird undead guys that dominate western pop culture who aren’t (usually) zombies.
Last week, Greg reviewed the 2006 Kurt Wimmer film Ultraviolet. Today, Bernhardt looks at the 2005 Uwe Boll film, BloodRayne. This article will contain spoilers.
BloodRayne is the first true challenge any of these films have posed to write a full article about. There’s a danger that in writing about truly bad movies, of which this is absolutely one, you make them sound better or more interesting than they are, because most movies that get made and are widely released aren’t all bad. For instance, Dracula 2000 was not a good movie, but I still do think about hot sparkly Gerard Butler with the chimes sound effect when he first reveals himself, or how much of the film centered on a Virgin Records megastore (multiple stories!) and related Virgin Records branding, or the extremely confused ending where Dracula was actually Judas. There was texture there! There is very, very little texture here.
This is a movie based on a video game, if you weren’t aware, and is directed by the guy you got to direct movies based on video games in the mid-2000s: Uwe Boll. If you’re of a certain age and grew up on the internet, there’s a lot of lore around this guy. Many shareholders at Goonhammer are familiar with his boxing career, for instance. His reputation for being a bad director is well-earned, but it’s worth underlining how much of that reputation is staked not on having an unappealing vision of the world or artistically valuing things that are stupid or unaesthetic, but rather being a lazy, cheap, and incompetent craftsman. Rather than ask for edits on Guinevere Turner’s script, he decided to rewrite it on the fly himself; this was a disaster, with lines such as, “I see a journey in your future. A journey…perhaps…to within?” from Geraldine Chaplain’s fortune teller character setting a baseline level of quality for the dialogue. He didn’t bother hiring stunt doubles, so the only competent stunts or action sequences are from the non-speaking extras asked to bump their asses off for brief cut-ins during big chaotic melees, while Kristanna Loken (the bi-titular Rayne) stumbles at half speed through all of her fights. These extras are the source of the one good moment in the film — in the courtyard fight between the monks and Domastir’s forces, a monk straight up tackles both a man and the horse he’s riding to the ground. Sadly within seconds we’re back to bored, lazy sword fighting, and with some of the worst sword props you’ve ever seen.
He wasn’t up for shooting good swordplay so the editor had little to work with when trying to save the film in the cutting room, but even then the sequencing is shoddy and bizarre; we routinely miss important shots during action scenes (for instance, when Rayne gets trivially disarmed by the grotesque monk giant in the monastery basement, we never actually see him knock her swords from her hands; they’re there one shot and she’s scrambling to retrieve them in the very next, without even a foley insert of them clattering on the ground) and on a number of occasions transition shots will linger so long that the actor will forget what they’re supposed to be doing with their body and kind of stand around.
Loken in particular struggles as the lead simply because she’s asked to do so much (relatively speaking) with so little; her fight choreography is particularly horrid, when Rayne is allowed to actually participate in such things — she spends much of the film getting kidnapped by various men in order to drive the plot forward, and whether or not the character is an ass-kicking vampire slayer or stuck in vampire rape peril due to a single blow to the back of her head or a man forcefully grabbing her upper arm and dragging her around is up to whatever Boll’s version of the script demands in order to get into or out of a scene. She doesn’t emote well but she’s not alone there; no one here is trying, everyone here is checked out. The lone exception is Will Sanderson as Domastir, the lead henchman of Ben Kingsley’s evil vampire king Kagan — if you’ve seen the film, you will remember him as the man with the truly stupid haircut.
Frankly, I am glad for this haircut, which is a kind of fauxhawk with inset arrows tapered down the side and back of his head; it’s the only interesting costume or set design choice in the entire picture, and it’s on the only man in the cast who decided he was going to bother taking the time to act using his face, instead of doing single-take community theater line reads. Sanderson is mostly known for doing voice acting in Hot Wheels movies; he’s not some great unknown diamond in the rough, but he is the one guy who decided to try a little. This cast-wide malaise is in particular a Michael Madsen problem because Michael Madsen doesn’t actually have the baseline skill to get away with being checked out and bored. Udo Kier, who is in this movie for five minutes, is also completely phoning it in, but he could sell being a severe abbot about to get sworded in his sleep. Michelle Rodriguez, who in 2005 is currently in the middle of borking the first act of her career because she can’t stop driving drunk, has a much bigger role by screen time but barely says a word until the last half-hour of the movie, with large chunks of her dialogue clearly ADR’d in. Ben Kingsley deserves special recognition for being an actual good actor but having open contempt for the idea of being asked to do anything on this production, and Boll clearly has no interest in directing him otherwise.
It’s possible Boll can’t even tell these performances are lifeless and bad. Maybe the most obvious juxtaposition in this pile is the one between how sexually-charged and violent and gory the depicted content of the film is — there are naked women everywhere, there are some half-dozen scenes where rape is either imminent or attempted, men and vampires alike explode in gratuitous arterial sprays when cut by swords and entire sets are drenched in fake blood — and how lifeless, sexless, and boring all of it actually is in practice. Put all the full frontal nudity in your film that you like; if you can’t be bothered to put more gusto in your vampire king feeding than “a woman walks into the throne room, she walks up to the throne without saying anything, the vampire king wordlessly does the Buffy vampire face change and sticks his head in her neck for half a second before we cut,” none of that provocation or titillation means a thing.
(Perhaps the most 2005 thing about the entire affair is that somehow, out of everything to mock the movie for, a number of outlets at the time alighted upon “he hired actual sex workers to play sex workers in the scene where vampire Meat Loaf sword fights Michael Madsen in front of his naked vampire harem” as one of Boll’s cardinal sins. No! The problem there wasn’t the sex workers, who did a fantastic job playing vampire sex workers; the problem was that “vampire Meat Loaf sword fights Michael Madsen in front of his naked vampire harem” was boring garbage! How do you fuck that up? The sex workers were the only ones who did their jobs! The Bush years in the United States don’t get enough credit these days for how deeply and casually racist and misogynist they were; go back and watch the fourth Die Hard movie some time, see how it treats Maggie Q.)
What’s there to say about the plot? The vampire king Kagan rapes Rayne’s mother; Rayne is born a half-human half-vampire, a “dhampir” in this setting’s telling. Later he comes back and kills her, and Rayne escapes. Kagan wants to rule the world by collecting the three vampire relics that will give him immunity to running water, sunlight, and the cross (recall this is adapted from a video game). Rayne collects the first of these on her own after bumbling through the first act of the film getting captured multiple times, then teams up with Vladimir (Madsen) and Katarin (Rodriguez)’s crew of vampire hunters. Among their number is Sebastian, Rayne’s love interest, who is notable only because actor Matthew Davis looks like a cross between Seann William Scott and Tom Brady when he had that stupid half-mullet. Katarin’s father is also a vampire who is trying to betray Kagan and become the vampire king himself, so Katarin betrays the vampire hunters to help him; Rayne kills her to get the second trinket. In order to get herself into position for the end of the movie, Rayne gets herself captured again and taken to her father. Everyone gets together for the finale in a fight in the throne room where the remaining supporting characters die, Kagan is killed, and Rayne collects all the pieces of the vampire triforce to — look. There are somehow two more movies after this one. It takes until the third one for them to get around to “Rayne fighting Nazis,” which is where they should have started. The second one is about Rayne fighting vampire Billy the Kid in the Wild West? Good lord.
I’ve found redeeming bits in everything I’ve watched up until now; that streak is broken. There’s no reason to ever watch BloodRayne (2005). It’s a complete nullity. It feels like a bad TV production directed by an idiot who can’t figure out how stories work both between scenes and inside of them, and not in the fun, possibly avant-garde way that implies. I only finished watching this because it was for work, and I did even that at 1.75x speed once the real boring sit-around-and-talk bits hit.
I am hoping that next week we get back to form with Queen of the Damned (2002), which is to say that sure, it’ll be bad, but there’ll be something to talk about and it won’t feel like a chore simply to finish the thing. And there’s light on the horizon for me, so to speak: Our patrons have selected 90s Vampire Films for our next theme month, meaning From Dusk til Dawn, John Carpenter’s Vampires, Interview with a Vampire, Cronos, and Nadja. And I’ll be seeing Sinners, the new Ryan Coogler film starring Michael B. Jordan playing twins in the Deep South fighting redneck vampires, when it comes out in theaters and reviewing it here as well.
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