BloodRayne 2: Deliverance (2007)

Time: 99 Minutes
Age Rating:
Cast:
Natassia Malthe as Rayne
Zack Ward as Billy the Kid
Michael Pare as Pat Garrett
Chris Coppola as Newton Piles
Michael Teigen as Slime Bag Franson
Michael Eklund as The Preacher
Director: Uwe Boll

A hundred years later, the dhampir Rayne (Natassia Malthe) has arrived in the town of Deliverance where a group of vampire cowboys led by Billy the Kid (Zack Ward) have emerged, who is hell-bent on creating his own kingdom. Rayne aligns herself with Pat Garret (Michael Pare), a member of the long-thought-dead Brimstone society, a dishonest preacher (Michael Eklund), and a lowlife named Franson (Michael Teigen) to stop him.

Uwe Boll’s Bloodrayne was a terrible movie and I knew that before watching it. Still, nothing could prepare me for how awful its sequel could be. Bloodrayne 2 has bad acting, awful camera work and a plot easily summarised in 3 sentences drawn out to 90 minutes. Although the first movie had some entertaining moments (intentional or not), this movie has none at all.

The story is very drawn out; whereas the first Bloodrayne’s plot flew by really fast, this movie has a straight forward plot that is drawn out to incredible lengths. The dialogue is even worse here than in the previous movie, I swear it’s like a 12 year old tried to write an episode of Deadwood and he threw in some vampires. It also contains probably the worst final lines to a movie I’ve seen so far. After a while I actually figured out that Uwe Boll didn’t really want a Bloodrayne movie, he just wanted a vampire movie set in the wild west; I don’t think that using it as an excuse was the best idea, for example, it doesn’t make much sense for Rayne to have her blades when most of the time she uses guns.

Natassia Malthe replaces Kristanna Loken as Rayne and she did as well as the original actress, which is to say, not very good; however to be fair, none of these actors are given anything to work with. Zack Ward plays Billy the Kid, who’s a vampire and he’s not good either and he may be worse as a villain than Ben Kingsley in the first movie, topping it off with a strange unidentifiable accent. Chris Coppola plays a reporter and he was very annoying, he just made me wish that his character would be killed off. The acting was pretty much the same from everyone. The only over the top acting was in the first scene of Michael Eklund playing a preacher, that scene was hilarious, if only for how over the top he went, it makes Meat Loaf from the first movie look subtle. Unfortunately that’s the only hilarious acting moment; none of these actors leave an impression on you.

The cinematography is very clunky; it looks like the camera man forgot to use a tripod as the camera was shaky, even in steady shots. Whereas the previous movie had buckets of blood that were very over the top, the blood has been reduced; although it at first sounds like Uwe Boll made the right call in reducing it, the first movie’s gore at least entertained. The action scenes aren’t good, and there are even less of them than in the first movie; it’s a shame because even if this was a bad movie, it could’ve been a bit entertaining, like the first movie from time to time. Even the locations were bad, throughout the movie; the weather keeps also kept changing, one moment it’s desert, next moment it’s snowy, you can clearly see that this was shot in Canada.

This movie makes Bloodrayne actually look good, at least it had entertaining moments. This movie was just completely dull, with no redeeming qualities. In retrospect of my Bloodrayne review, there are actually some ‘so bad it’s good’ moments and if you look at the movie at a certain way, it can be entertaining. It’s not the same here, it’s just a bore.

Advertisement

BloodRayne (2005)

Time: 95 Minutes
Age Rating: Violence and sex scenes
Cast:
Kristanna Loken as Rayne
Michael Madsen as Vladimir
Matthew Davis as Sebastian
Michelle Rodriguez as Katarin
Ben Kingsley as Kagan
Director: Uwe Boll

Rayne (Kristanna Loken) is a half-human half-vampire Dhampir out for revenge for the king of the vampires Kagan (Ben Kingsley) who killed her mother. In her journey she meets Vladimir (Michael Madsen) and Sebastian (Matthew Davis), the leaders of the fortress of vampire hunters Brimstone, and joins their society to face the forces of Kagan.

Uwe Boll has been called one of the worst filmmakers of all time; because Bloodrayne was on TV I decided to check it out, and I’m now paying the consequences. It has wooden acting, a shallow, uninteresting plot, and poorly done action scenes. I haven’t played the video game it’s based on but I feel sorry for the fans who were subjected to this abysmal adaptation.

The plot goes so fast it’s hard to understand what’s going on. We also don’t know anything about these characters so we can’t really care for them; they make the characters from The Happening look like the Guardians of the Galaxy. The dialogue is not used well; it is either used for backstories, moving the plot, or exposition. The movie doesn’t even say what time period it’s in or where it is set. The film also has some odd ideas such as having normal water hurt vampires; here they are like the aliens from Signs. The last scene is a montage of whenever blood has been spilt and is nearly 4 minutes long; it comes out of nowhere and doesn’t make any sense in any form of context. Surprisingly, the screenplay was written by Guinevere Turner, who previously wrote the screenplay to American Psycho. It turns out that Uwe Boll demanded that she handed in a rough copy of the script and that he went with that version, so that explains a lot of the problems.

Kristanna Loken was quite wooden here and barely showed more emotion than the T-X in Terminator 3. Michelle Rodriguez doesn’t give that good of a performance either, however she does seem like she’s trying to give a good performance. A stand out bad performance is from Michael Madsen, who doesn’t show any emotion throughout the movie and looks drunk (which he was) and bored; even when he’s fighting people, he doesn’t change his expression. There is a major thing that happens to him near the end which I won’t spoil (in case some of you actually want to see this movie) but he doesn’t even change his expression for that. He really looks like he doesn’t care, just look at this image down below, he’s not even holding his sword right.

Billy Zane is only in a few scenes in this movie and doesn’t make any impact on the plot. Ben Kingsley plays the villain and most of his scenes are very short, barely lasting for 30 seconds; his performance is unfortunately phoned in, which is a shame. I won’t even go into the hammy performance from Meat Loaf as he was only in one scene.

The action scenes are not done that well; there is a fight between Rayne and a big monster; there were so many cuts in that scene that I wonder how much of the footage was cut at just the right moment. The blood in this movie is so exaggerated that Quentin Tarantino would probably roll his eyes at it. There is one moment where a guy is cut in half at the waist but if you slow it down, you can clearly see his real legs behind some fake legs. The costumes are also questionable, particularly Rayne’s, one has to ask what type of person would wear that in any time period.

Bloodrayne is a terrible movie; it’s not a so-bad-it’s-good sort of bad movie, it’s just boring. I wouldn’t recommend anyone to watch this movie (then again if you already know about Uwe Boll you probably weren’t even thinking about doing that) as there’s nothing enjoyable about it unless you are someone like me who wanted to make fun of it.