PREMIERE.COM'S REVIEW (posted 1/6/06)

It was a dark and stormy night and vampires, vampire hunters, greasy human victims to be, and rats were all that stirred in the land of BloodRayne, yet another ill-conceived big screen videogame adaptation.

This tangled orgy of gore and period action cliches—released in January, Hollywood's month of last resort, by no coincidence—revolves around an ass-kicking half-vampire chick named Rayne (Kristanna Loken) out to kill her evil vampire father, Kagan (Ben Kingsley), while being stalked not only by daddy's minions, but a band of ragtag vampire hunters led by a bone-weary Michael Madsen. Along the way, the filmmakers have dragged every fantasy epic convention they could find into the overstuffed, pointlessly convoluted story. There's the quest for dangerous magical talismans, done much better a thousand times before in films like Raiders of the Lost Ark, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, and of course, The Lord of the Rings. There's also the conflict of nature of the half-vampire protagonist, which calls to mind the more agile Blade trilogy. Heck, this one's even got the first Harry Potter flick's nasty troll guarding a gauntlet of booby-trapped rooms.

But make no mistake, this is no kiddie picture. BloodRayne earns it's R rating with a non-stop barrage of disemboweling marauders, blood atomizing from nasty sword wounds, and gratuitous T and A that even includes Rayne's hasty romp with vampire hunter sidekick Sebastian (Matt Davis). And in Rayne's neck of the woods, practically all the women are either angling for a homoerotic catfight, or making out and then sinking their fangs into each other's necks. A lesbian subtext in a movie written by Guinevere Turner is no surprise, she wrote Go Fish and episodes of TV's "The L Word," but in BloodRayne it's nothing but ham-fisted and mostly superfluous.

Blood and sex of course have their place in any faux-Transylvanian vampire movie, but when a room full of writhing naked women are being tweaked and toyed with by a blood-drinking Meat Loaf, you start to wonder if you've wandered into some alternate universe where the Rocky Horror Picture Show was re-written as a crappy 18th century bacchanal that takes itself Seriously, bad vaguely-European accents and all.

The film's look isn't much better. Aside from the fact that every character seems to have on an ill-fitting wig (mullets abound), director Uwe Boll sneaks trite fast-motion sequences into the many fight scenes. Additionally, aerial shots of the characters traipsing through vast landscapes are stuck between scenes like so much hasty Superglue, and the camera unsurreptitiously zooms in on a characters neck wounds to tip the audience off that he's a Bad Guy Vampire.

It's a wonder that so many familiar faces populate this hokey, half-baked mess. Look closer, though, and you see they're all phoning it in. For most of the film, Ben Kingsley may as well be a wax statue as all he does is sit on a throne, barely grimacing. Michael Madsen, who knows his way around quality gore (he was Reservoir Dogs' cleverly homicidal Mr. Blonde), spends his screentime moving from unconcerned, to weary, to resigned. In the climactic showdown, he seems almost relieved that the movie is nearing it's end. His angry, aloof protege Katarin (Michelle Rodriguez) merely pouts the whole time. But it's not the actors' fault, they're just working with material as unappetizing as the endless fountains of fake movie blood spilled here.—Jessica Letkemann