BLOODRAYNE (Uwe Boll). 95 minutes. Opens Friday (April 7). For venues and times, see Movie Listings. Rating: NN Rating: NN
I saw Uwe Boll‘s Alone In The Dark and House Of The Dead, but now I’ve figured out how to make the director’s horror/computer-game movies watchable: see them immediately after Basic Instinct 2, which makes almost any film look better.
Despite the presence of a couple of respected actors (Look! it’s Ben Kingsley !) and an unusually serious screenwriter in Guinevere Turner (Go Fish, the forthcoming Bettie Page biopic), BloodRayne is just a junk vampire movie.
Kristanna Lokken (Terminator 3) plays a half-vampire/half-human bent on revenge against Kingsley’s head vampire, who raped and killed her mother. Michael Madsen and Michelle Rodriguez are slouching around Transylvania as fearless vampire killers.
Vampires seem bent on world domination, so the heroes have to go on a scavenger hunt for lucky charms that help capture them.
The fight scenes are mediocre, but the scenery is spectacular, and there’s a certain crap-tastic entertainment value in the spectacle of decent actors struggling with this kind of dialogue in the interest of making their house payments.
When someone like Kingsley appears in a film like BloodRayne, it’s fun to figure out how many days he worked. Since most of his scenes take place on two sets and have him sitting in a chair, I’m guessing five, six tops.
