Another year, another Uwe Boll videogame adaptation. This time out he's going after the leather-clad, arm blade wielding vampire vixen Bloodrayne (played here Kristianna Loken, who was Arnold Schwarzenegger's cyborg foe in the third Terminator movie) and while it's probably Boll's more competent effort as a director, the movie is still pretty sloppy and not worth your while. And, really, that's too bad as the character of Bloodrayne is much cooler than the movie (or the mediocre games for that matter) deserves.

Those prepared to hate this going in, are going to. Seems that over the years Boll has built-up a cult of "haters" who attack everything he does. They blame him for ruining videogames-turned-movies, they say he's the worst director out there, and they just plain don't cut the guy any slack. Maybe those people haven't seen the equally horrid second Mortal Kombat movie and perhaps they haven't seen as many shitty movies as I have, but Boll isn't the worst director out there - he's just the worst at picking his movies.

Bloodrayne starts off okay as we see a trio of, what we assume are, vampire hunters ride into a town and go into the local tavern. One of them proceeds to stake a patron next to him (since he wasn't giving a reflection in the lid of the beer stein sitting close by) and this is our first introduction to the "Brimstone Society".

The society is a group of trained warriors who have taken up the task of trying to eliminate the land of bloodsuckers, which doesn't please the nasty head of the vampires Kagan (Ben Kingsley, miles away from his Oscar winning performance as Gandhi). But things are about to change when it turns out Kagan's ill-bred offspring has been working as part of a traveling circus sideshow.

If you haven't figured it out yet, said offspring is indeed Bloodrayne who escapes from the circus during a bloodlust and vows to fight her vampire tendencies by setting out on a quest to collect three talismans before her father with the help of Brimstone while Kagan and his vampire hordes try to capture her.

Boll's attempt at a "period piece" gathers together a reasonably decent cast (though it is hard to take hard-drinking, slobbish looking Michael Madsen as the leader of Brimstone) and he does manage a few mildly enjoyable moments (such as when Bloodrayne has to traverse a room filled with traps), but the movie is much too low-budget to pull off the era it's set in as the costumes/wigs never look right and things such as the CG rendered castles and sets just look too cheap to convince.

And what about that script by Guinevere Turner? It's so badly put together that it feels like she was trying much to hard to have a "sweeping" story that creates it's own separate universe. She fails miserably at it as the movie lumbers along piling on hackneyed dialogue and low-scale action sequences that gives the filmmakers a chance to toss as much blood sprays and weak gore scenes as they can at the audience (the effects were partly handled by Olaf Ittenbach who unleashed the atrocity that is Legion Of The Dead on us genre fans).

Bloodrayne is just not a good movie. It's not the absolute worst thing out there, but it's definitely nothing worth wasting your time over. It's cheap, it ends with a pointless recap of the entire movie (no doubt to pad things out), and the final fight with all its sped-up action in truly horrible. And I can't forgive a movie that gives Kingsley nothing to do put sit around trying to look menacing.

Review based on unrated version. (Chris Hartley, 5/31/06)

Directed By: Uwe Boll.
Written By: Guinevere Turner.

Starring: Kirstianna Loken, Michael Madsen, Matt Davis, Will Sanderson.