BloodRayne: Critic Reviews

It's time to start paying attention to the oeuvre of German director Uwe Boll. At this rate, he'll become the Ed Wood of this new movie century.

The film might be the first of its kind: something to bring Maxim subscribers, video gamers, and loyal Logo viewers together.

After Rayne breaks out of the circus, it's a simple story, really, about a mixed-up girl who wants to slay her father.

How fitting that director Uwe Boll (House of the Dead) would choose a vampire flick as his latest project - the man has a career that, despite the horror he continually inflicts on innocent moviegoers, simply will not die.

There's nothing certain in life except death, taxes and ... that movies based on video games are going to stink. Cue BloodRayne.

Just when you thought camp was dead, along comes this bizarre cross between a Tarantino knockoff and a Hammer horror film.

Pic lurches from incident to incident at a graceless plodding place, offering little in the way of genuine excitement -- the swordfights often are confusingly cut and choreographed -- and only minimal amounts of guilty-pleasure titillation.

Halfway through, the guys put Rayne through a training sequence, even though we've just seen her kick butt for 45 minutes, then there's a long, talky stretch that is woefully short of impaling - perhaps suggesting that the movie's financing was dwindling.

Who is Uwe Boll and why does he hate moviegoers so? The German hack, the one-man Blitzkrieg of Bad, is the worst filmmaker in the movies today.

Most of the budget seems to have been spent on the cast, with apparently little left over for sets or costumes.

At the rate Boll's improving, he'll achieve a film worthy of a thumbs up rating sometime late next decade.

The fight scenes are the worst kind of editing-room cheating, meant to cover for actors who haven't been trained to wield anything more intimidating than a cell phone.

Turgid drama and incompetently staged action sequences...

Only as bad as ordinary bad films and not as bad as getting your eyelid caught on a nail.

This is a movie that begs you not to watch it.

BloodRayne is quite cheesy %u2014 the costumes resemble something out of the cosplay closet, and the dialogue is often appalling.

All in all, not as bad as you'd suspect and certainly serviceable for all who love the bloody, low-budget vamping gone wild.

The supporting cast is mind-melting: Michael Madsen is as out of place in this Medieval milieu as Meat Loaf in a hoop skirt, and Meat Loaf is just out of place.

It's as if Boll brought together the best team of talent he could possibly secure on short notice and then told them all to suck. And they do!

[Uwe Boll] is fast becoming known as one of the worst directors on the planet.

When on-line petitions beg directors to stop making films, is that the beginning of the end?

BloodRayne is a movie of unconnected plot dots. In the hands of director Uwe "German Tax Dodge" Boll, a simple sword and sorcery story with vampiric overtones turns into genre-jumping attempts to find an audience.

It'd be a stretch to call the movie good, but at least it's fun-bad.

If I thought for a minute this Roquefort-riddled camp-fest was as intentionally ridiculous, stilted, witless and over-the-top as it actually is, I'd congratulate Boll.

Uwe Boll is such a bad director that it must be intentional.