Sunday, September 18, 2011

Bloodrayne 3

Posted by Matt


My affection for Uwe Boll is pretty well-stated on this blog. He is the German director who tilts at windmills, but in this case, those windmills are the film adaptation of violent video games. So more like tilting at cheap motels. I have loved the aggressive mediocrity of Bloodrayne, House of the Dead, and Alone in the Dark. He is the German Ed Wood, and for me, that is a compliment. The original video game of Bloodrayne, according to Wikipedia, pitted a hot girl vampire-human hybrid against some Nazis. Boll interpreted this for the first movie to mean, "Hot blonde girl half-vampire swordfights in the middle ages." For the sequel, he recast her as a brunette on Xanax and had her chasing Billy the Kid through the Wild West. Tonight, I decided to watch Bloodrayne 3: The Third Reich, which will finally pit our half-vampire-full-badass heroine against the spectre of a vampire Hitler. Keeping it classy, German director.


We open with a quick reminder that Rayne is the result of a vampire raping a human woman, but she tells us that Hitler, man, Hitler is like way worse than vampires. Rayne is again played by the girl who so ineptly let out her inner cowgirl on our last adventure. It's three minutes in and I am mourning my sobriety, y'all. She has literally spoken the phrase, "Fucking Nazis," as a derisive complete sentence. Then, she proceeds to show us that she is not cool with the Reich by eviscerating a bunch of them with a pair of swords. The leader of the resistance accuses her of being a vampire, but she is way too tough to answer him. Or, given the amazingly flat way she drifts through all of her lines, she just didn't feel like saying anything. I am really fine with her keeping that impulse there.

We jump to some camp or something, and Clint freaking Howard is a Nazi doctor dissecting a live vampire and filling in the open spaces with raspy exposition about the vampire rules in this movie and his quest to make Hitler a vampire. I love Clint Howard in all his creep charm, but this clunky language is beneath him. 

But going a little lower, Rayne and her cleavage go to a whorehouse to get a massage, they end up beating up some guy, and Rayne says that his beat-down represents the refusal to tolerate the history of violence against women, so a pair of naked hookers give her another massage. Which turns into a lesbian threeway because Uwe Boll is not really about much more than that when he gets on his feminist soapbox. And even though the concept is cheap and silly, it's still really boring, like all of these actresses shared a bottle of Ambien with Britney Spears before an awards show.

One of the Nazis Rayne shredded in the first few minutes has caught vampirism from her, and Dr. Clint Howard uses him to make more vampires, leading to a bizarre interchange where he tells a vampire Gypsy hooker that Shakespeare would have called her human body, "the mortal coil." She tries to kill him, probably because she knows that he's misquoting, but he drowns her in holy water. And even if that sounds interesting, it is not.

We then get a dream sequence where Rayne fights a vampire Hitler. In a dream sequence. Because we're going to buy that a catatonic big-boobed brunette is actually a vampire superhero, but no way are we as an audience going to buy a vampire Hitler outside of a fantasy sequence. But she wakes up and goes to hunt her up some more Nazis. And it finally gets a little more watchable when she finds a Nazi vampire to spar with, mostly because she stops talking to do so. I remember the original movie having extended fight sequences and giddy fountains of blood, but this copy-of-a-copy-of-a-copy is more like a shallow puddle. She's decapitating a few vampires, but eventually, Clint Howard catches her and imprisons her. I hate this movie.

She and the leader of the resistance have been put on a train to Berlin, and no one is guarding them, or has even tied them up, so they decide to have lots of sex in a variety of positions. Because escaping would be lame. Also, maybe to show us that not only is she a hybrid of vampire and human, but she's also bi. And easy. The resistance ambushes the transport, and Rayne and her boyfriend just kind of walk out. Because the door's not locked. Didn't think to check that before going for the zippers, but okay. She beats the crap out of lots of vampires and eviscerates some Nazis before dropping a rock through the big vampire's head and yelling, "motherf**ker!" Which I am sure was a punchline in 1943 in Germany. ... Okay, like that's where I stop disbelieving. It's a good thing I decided to just go with it, because in a few minutes, we end the movie with Rayne and company arriving in Berlin, and she punches a Nazi and says, "Guten TAG, motherf***ers!" That's seriously the last sentence of this crappy movie. 

I cannot in good conscience recommend this craptacle. It's not the fun kind of bad movie. Hate to bear bad news.

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