Entires are listed in chronological order, and if I ever happen to see enough of the film to write a review or at least give it a proper categorized scoring, I'll tack that on top of this page.

December 7, 2005

Looking a bit farther ahead, I had to share this. Did you know they'd thrown together a Bloodrayne movie? I had no idea. Better yet, it was directed by the legendary Uwe Boll, who is to quality video game movies as battery acid is to a tasty cocktail. I've never played the game, but Bloodrayne is some sort of Castle Wolfenstein reprise with a female vampire as the lead character. She kills Nazis with huge swords, guns, and blood-sucking bites, and achieved some minor level of fame by posing topless in Playboy. Yes, the computer modeled female was topless in a magazine. Pixel boobies.

I had to see, so I downloaded the Bloodrayne trailer while typing this entry out, and having just watched it, I can say that it looks... um... well, horrible. We're talking special episode of Xena here, with slightly lower production values. It looks like a cross between Elektra and Zorro, set in a fantastically-anachronistic midieval England, and has a truly dreadful trailer. Nothing but Mr. Voice spouting cliches, and not even good ones! "A leader with a dark army... A land without law... A land with the potential for greatness... A mighty hero... And a mysterious stranger who would aid him!" It wraps up with a shot of the untelegenic female lead and Mr. Voice saying, "Bloodrayne, the adventure begins." Bit overly optimistic there, eh kids?

What this movie has to do with the game, which seems to largely feature a hot, redhead vampire female killing Nazis, is beyond me. Also beyond me is the sword fighting in the film; just the few seconds of it in the trailer actually made me laugh out loud, and I'm trying to be quiet since Malaya is long since asleep with a 7am wake up time. Let's just say that when the narrator says, "A mighty hero." and you cut to a guy doing a very limp-wristed twirl with a short sword, and he looks like he just fell off stage from a boy band concert, it's not especially inspiring.

If you want more laughs, scroll down to the bottom of the Rotten Tomatoes coming soon page. It currently extends to the weekend of January 6th, 2006, and the five films listed for release that week are enough to make you weep. Yes, the first week of January is the ultimate dumping ground for studio rubbish, but Jesus Christ. Hostel might be a watchably cheesy and gory horror flick, but the rest include Bloodrayne, an Adam Sandler-produced movie about a 35 year old video game tester who has to move in with his grandmother, a movie starring the members of Outkast as mobsters in the 1920s, and a crime drama starring Fast and Furious beach twinkie Paul Walker as a mafia hit man. Wow. I'm guessing Ebert won't feel any real need to rush home from his Christmas vacation this year.

Added from the comments:

Seriously though, why in the hell would anyone hire Uwe Boll to do a video game movie at this point? Yeah, he's done a few already, but they've all been horrible, among the worst-reviewed films ever, and they didn't make any money either. Angelina Jolie did a pair of tomb Raider movies and Peter Jackson's exec producing Halo; it's not like you can't get actual talent to bring your video game to life. Hiring Uwe is like hanging a kick me sign on your film from day one, FFS.

Oddest of all, if you look at some of the E3 photos (1, 2, 3) on the bloodrayne results, you'll see that the E3 model looks much more like the character from the game, and is much hotter to boot. True, she's wearing a scarlet wig that's almost as fake as the one Storm sports, but if they were going to make a terrible Bloodrayne movie, why didn't they make one that at least looked like the game, with a busty female lead who would at least sell some tickets to the young male demographic? Instead we've got this woman, who looks like an extra from Conan.

And yes, I should have just done an entire blog post on fricking Bloodrayne the movie, incorporating the last half of this post and all these comments. If only I had a blogger format that allowed that sort of thing.

Oh wait.

Most ridiculous of all, it turns out that Bloodrayne is played by Kristanna Loken, who played the Terminatrix in T3. And she's ridiculously hot in basically every photo online -- except for the ones involving her role in Bloodrayne.

Amusing sort of review of Bloodrayne by Harry Knowles. The article is more about Uwe Boll's performance at the Bloodrayne premiere than the film itself, which is a very good thing, since the press conference is funny while the film sucks ass.

To recap: they started casting 2 weeks before the film, they got major stars who just happened to be in Europe with some free time, they paid them by the day for their shooting, they hired Romanian mafia whores when they needed naked women for some vampire scenes, and there's even a quote of Uwe bagging on Speilberg. An alltogether enjoyable piece, and since it's all we have to tide us over until the movie opens and the horrible reviews start rolling in, I say enjoy it.

As for why in God's name people keep hiring Uwe Boll to make their movies, it has something to with tax dodges and government financing of movies made in whatever country Uwe's from. Essentially, it can mean that any movie they have him make is an earner before he's even started. Even if it (inevitably) bombs at the box office and gets panned as one of the worst movies ever made.

As it is though, I understand this.. loophole (?) may have been closed now though. So hopefully we'll see even less movies made by him.
#: 1:20 PM posted by Vamino

Re: Uwe Boll's continued Hollywood occupation, check out the AICN article I linked to in one of the comments here. In it Harry Knowles talks about his utter hackitude, and how it's balanced by his enviable ability to get "name" actors for his fly-by-night productions, and how he attracts foreign investors with said "name" talent.

You can also consider his low budgets, quick work, and overseas/DVD profits. And in the end, what's so wrong about having profitable hacks working in film? It's not like Speilberg was eager to make the Bloodrayne or House of the Dead films, and it's not like there are vast armies of disappointed fans of those games. People buy lots of crappy pulp fiction genre novels and enjoy them, even though they know what they're reading is very predictable and formulaic and not actually any good. Cinemax 4 has to show something at 2am, after all.

Moving along to Bloodrayne, it goes Grandma's Boy one better, with 14 reviews, 13 of them bad. And more to come, no doubt. A sample:

It's tough to pinpoint what's worse about the movie: the performances or the direction. It's strange to watch Boll continually stage sequences he has no idea how to capture properly. In his mind, he's Steven Spielberg; arranging danger and adventure on the screen with clarity and a roaring sense of excitement. However, the tragic reality is that Boll has all the artistic ability of the average 4th grade finger-painter, and his direction is often so clumsy, he should really be embarrassed of his productions. He's a B-list, straight-to-video director with A-list aspirations, and "Bloodrayne" is asphyxiated in the battle between what Boll wants to accomplish and what he's actually capable of.

Better than the reviews, and certainly better than the film, is this review/discussion of the preview and a meeting with Uwe Boll, by Harry Knowles. I linked to it in my comments after my initial BloodRayne post, and I'll just quote myself here, to save time.

Amusing sort of review of Bloodrayne by Harry Knowles. The article is more about Uwe Boll's press conference than the film itself, which is a very good thing, since the press conference is funny while the film sucks ass.

To summarize; they started casting 2 weeks before the film, they got major stars who just happened to be in Europe with some free time, they paid them by the day for their shooting, they hired Romanian mafia whores when they needed naked women for some vampire scenes, and there's even a quote of Uwe bagging on Speilberg. An altogether enjoyable piece, and since it's all we have to tide us over until the movie opens and the horrible reviews start rolling in, I say enjoy it.

No, it wasn't one of my bolder predictions, but it's still good for some schadenfreude. 

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