Uwe Boll wants to let you in on a little secret: he’s not the next Orson Welles. As if he doesn’t make it lucidly clear with his slapdash videogame adaptations. And yet, somehow somewhere someone must have mistaken him for legit for why else would his producer feel compelled to make this so explicitly clear to you when he mentions it in the DVD liner notes for House of the Dead and states it again on both the documentary special features and the film’s commentary? This begs the question: did anyone watching House of the Dead REALLY expect it to be Citizen Kane? Yeah, we get it; it’s based on a video game, not the film that consistently makes most critics’ lists of the greatest films of all time. Does that excuse its shoddiness, or the fact that problems with continuity were concealed by inexplicably inserting screenshots from the video game?
If you ask me, the reasoning here is more than a bit specious. Critics didn’t respond well to the film not because they were anticipating something profound, but because it was, frankly, just not very well made. But if I must adhere to the backward logic of Boll & co then I suppose if Uwe Boll is not Orson Welles and House of the Dead is not his Citizen Kane then it follows that BloodRayne is not his Touch of Evil. Still, that didn’t stop me from renting it. Who could resist? After the delightful treats of both House of the Dead and Alone in the Dark – films so poorly put together they’d make Ed Wood cringe – how could I not take it one step further? The only thing more ill advised than a vampire period piece directed by a hack German director is one based on a videogame (or possibly his forthcoming gaudily named project In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale an epic video game adaptation that reportedly extends well beyond three hours in length!).
Now I could feign enjoyment or pretend I received some absurd level of entertainment from its sheer incompetence, but I’ll be honest; the film was a bit of a letdown. HOTD benefited from its piss-poor editing and 360 degree, game over death scenes. Alone in the Dark likewise made brilliantly absurd use of its trio of washed up actors (Tara Reid, Christian Slater, Stephen Dorff). BloodRayne stood to capitalize on these previous ventures with a cast that included Kristanna Loken, best known as the impassive Terminatrix in the most recent Terminator movie (surprise, she expresses the same emotional range here), Ben Kingsley (apparently desperate enough to agree to both this and A Sound of Thunder), Michael Madsen (?), Billy Zane (back from obscurity) and Michelle Rodriguez (who’s been down this path before in Resident Evil). Boll assembled the cast of his dreams, and almost all of them phone it in, with the exception of Loken who may have attempted to but apparently dialed the wrong number. No big deal, as members of the audience, most of us were phoning it in as well.
To label the film baffling, confounding, or infuriating would be an understatement. There’s so many disparate factors to discuss – none of which amalgamate into anything resembling a working whole – that I struggle to cite them all for fear of bogging us all down in the muck and mire of it. For one, the soundtrack appears to have been recorded for a different movie. It swells and it sweeps and it reaches those epic crescendos, but the images on screen never appear to compliment its movements. While I can accept (though not necessarily enjoy) that swelling score that rises up after the death of important character in a well-made epic, I don’t know how to feel about it when it occurs during a scene in which several men with unwieldy large swords nonchalantly strike at an already dismembered corpse. This is the kind of stuff you could easily fix in postproduction.
Or how about the fact that most of the film is told in flashbacks or tedious, extraneous exposition, both of which draw its already clunking plot to a screeching halt since the exposition is delivered without enough grace or wit to make it bearable and the flashbacks have been inserted during what very well could have been climatic points in the story, thus undoing any potential dynamism the film might have possessed.
There’s more I could discuss (like the inexplicable sex scene inserted randomly into the film, or the fact that Kingsley appear to have been plagued by extreme drowsiness throughout production) but I’ve already spent way too much time on the subject so let’s skip ahead to the ending, the most virulent part of the film.
There is a moment where the film clearly should have ended. Everything had been wrapped up, just cut to black, roll credits. But no, as if defying all accepted logic the film continues on quite inexplicably for another four minutes, outdoing even the Chronicles of Riddick ending. For what? All it consists of is a montage of earlier death scenes strung together for no apparent reason.
I turned to the director’s commentary, hoping for some insight into this madness, but Boll reveals that he “artistically” removed the voice over from this scene in favor a more ambiguous finale leaving the interpretive work to the audiences’ faculties. Judging by the deafening silence of the commentary track over this final montage sequence, the task of endowing the final moments with meaning should have first been handled by the director before being unwittingly forced upon an unsuspecting audience. Then again, I can only ascertain that Mr. Boll is one who often confuses ambiguity with just plain incomprehension.
