Bloodrayne (2005)

Uwe Boll is the kind of film-maker who says 'actresses want too much money to appear nude - just hire some prostitutes for the scene instead'.  And this is the kind of movie where he says it (in the scene with Meatloaf - because a has-been rocker is someone Boll will pay for).

Based, as many of Boll's films have been, on a computer game, Bloodrayne has spawned two dull as dishwater sequels.  I'm not sure why, given that it made back less than 20% of its budget at the box office, but Boll's ways are mysterious.

So, full disclosure: this film is terrible, but I like it anyway.  It's not as terrible as Boll's House of the Dead was, nor do I have such an unreasoning affection for it as I do for that catastrophically ill-conceived zombie film, but it's pretty darn bad.  Kristanna Loken has her merits as an actor, but none of them (unless you count her figure) are show-cased in this film.  Michael Madsen appears on the verge of falling over drunk in almost every scene he's in.  Michelle Rodriguez seems to be trying to put on some kind of accent (or possibly just disguise her normal accent) with uneven degrees of success.  And then there's the script.

Oh my, the script.

I mean, I'll give the writing in Bloodrayne this much: it feels like something out of a computer game.  We have the characters receiving their quest in a tavern, not one but two expositionary conversations that don't even try to disguise the fact that they're nothing but info dump cut scenes, and a blatant 'mini boss fight' about halfway through.

It's also deeply stupid.  For starters, while there are incompetent minions in most forms of media, the minions in Bloodrayne take it to a new level.  "How do they dress themselves in the morning?" levels of dumb.  Then there are the character motivations which appear, whole cloth, out of nothing. "I will not harm you.  I desire to kill only vampires" says Rayne, two minutes after we saw her kill half a dozen humans, and ten minutes before she'll kill a bunch more.  I mean sure, the humans she kills are all bad people, but they're still not vampires, you know?

The actual plot?  It goes something like this: Rayne's the half-human, half-vampire child of Ben Kingsley's boss vamp, and she's got to go on a quest to recover some magical macguffins in order to be strong enough to take him on in a fight.  There will be large quantities of blood sprayed (it rarely just spills in this film) in the process.

Hypnotically bad.  This was the second time I've seen the film (though of course I'd not previously watched the actual DVD), and I had just as much fun as the first time.