reMedia!

An entertainment blog that pops culture right in the kisser.

Friday, June 23, 2006

film | Fangs for nothing

"Why would Domastir bring her here?"
"Perhaps she needs to feed, or the sun."

Everything you need to know about the barrel-bottom medieval thriller BLOODRAYNE can be summed up in that goofy exchange, partially delivered by a more-detached-than-he-was-in-Sin-City Michael Madsen as a slovenly warrior who groggily stumbles around 1700s-ish romania in search of evil creatures and/or the mother of all hangover cures. He and his badass allies (Legally Blonde's Matt Davis and Michelle Rodriguez of TV's Lost) encounter a ferocious human/vampire hybrid (Kristanna Loken, Terminator 3's Terminatrix) on the lam from captivity as a carnival sideshow freak, and together they occupy the kind of half-assed mystical adventure yarn you expect to see sandwiched in between airings of Cobra vs. Komodo and Mansquito at 3 a.m. on the Sci-Fi Channel.

Director Uwe Boll previously helmed Alone in the Dark, a braindead monster mash with Tara Reid as an archaeologist who always seemed moments away from tearing off her lab coat and horn-rimmed glasses to arch her back and flip her hair Van Halen-style. Collectively, Bloodrayne's cast is even weirder, featuring Meat Loaf Aday (!), Geraldine Chaplin (!!), Ben Kingsley (!!!), and what the opening credits bill as "a special appearance" by Billy Zane. (Oh, come on. Billy Zane could materialize hovering over the Statue of Liberty in Liberace's gaudiest frock with rainbows shooting from his fingertips, and it wouldn't be "a special appearance.") Also quite oddly, the script is credited to The L Word's Guinivere Turner, and she's a rather uncanny choice to massage the main character of a popular video game set mostly in Nazi-era Germany into a castles-and-crossbows movie mythology where everybody gives the rumpled impression they just clocked out from an unenthusiastic day shift at the Renaissance Festival hawking mead and fried pickles.

Even indiscriminate genre fans aren't apt to find much bite in Bloodrayne. The action sequences are so ineffectual that they make Lucy Lawless' hammy acrobatics in Xena look like the artfully balletic brawls of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, a hilariously gratuitous sex scene exists solely to flaunt Loken's D-list C-cups, and Boll curiously caps his epic with a flashback montage of Bloodrayne's goriest moments — as if viewers would be sitting there to nod, "Yeah, you know, I sure was hoping they'd show that splattered cranium from 23 minutes ago one more time." But hey, throw in a a bit of cross-dressing and some grave-robbers from outer space, and Bloodrayne's exactly the kind of flick notorious schlock auteur Ed Wood would return from the dead for. F

1 Comments:

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