Life is Like a Penis
I don’t know why I do these things to myself. When the typical pattern for movie sequels is for them to start really good and slowly go to shit, what happens when the first movie is shit? Do the movies get better because the formula has been flipped, or do they find a way to get worse? In the case of Uwe Boll movies, I know where I’d put my money. Unlike the first movie in this series, I had not seen this movie before I sat down to review it, so I can’t even tell you what my feelings are going to be before viewing it. I can only assume. Let’s see if my assumptions are correct in my review of BloodRayne II: Deliverance, written by Christopher Donaldson and Neil Every, directed by Uwe Boll, and starring Natassia Malthe, Zack Ward, Michael Paré, Michael Eklund, Michael Teigen, Chris Coppola, John Novak, Chris Spencer, and Jodelle Ferland.
Reporter Newton Piles (Chris Coppola) arrives at the town of Deliverance, Montana looking to record stories of the Wild West from the front lines. Unfortunately, Deliverance is a really slow town and nothing is happening beyond some people whacking on railroad tracks with pickaxes. That starts to change as the vampire Billy the Kid (Zack Ward) shows up and takes control of the town, turning most of its residents into vampires and abducting their children to keep them in line. Two of the children taken belonged to friends of the half vampire, half human Dhampir named Rayne (Natassia Malthe), so she sets her sights on Billy the Kid in order to get them back. Instead of that, she gets captured and shot up on her escape. Pat Garret (Michael Paré) rescues her and they collect The Preacher (Michael Eklund) and Slime Bag Franson (Michael Teigen) to assault the city.
For those of you that felt left out because you don’t like video games and so had no characters that Uwe Boll was ruining, now you can join in on the hatred because he’s also violating beloved historical figures. This movie still sucks. As a lover of video games, I am again left wondering why Boll would bother naming the movie after a video game character that has little to nothing to do with the video game. If he had just named his movie Shitty Vampire Movie I never would’ve been tricked into watching it in the first place. Rayne never went to the old west in the video games, so I can only assume Boll just wanted to make a Western. And, of course, taint the memories of Billy the Kid, Pat Garret, and almost Wyatt Earp and Tombstone. It’s mentioned at the end of the movie that the vampire gang of the Claytons is causing trouble in Tombstone and Wyatt Earp is looking into it. Now, Tombstone is one of my favorite movies. I just don’t know what I’d do if Uwe had continued this story and pissed on them for me. Lovers of Young Guns should beware of this movie. Thankfully, I’ve already looked into the third movie and they thankfully don’t hit up Tombstone. It shouldn’t be that surprising though because Boll even shits on his own continuity. Remember how a big part of your first movie was Rayne acquiring the eye? And remember how it changed the color of one of her eyes? Oh, I guess you don’t remember that. The story is very simplistic. Vampire goes to a town, hero tries to stop him, she loses, she comes back again with a bigger posse, and then she wins. How do you stretch that out into feature length? Attempt to copy the classic Western staple of building tension before fights, but fail. You know how in a Western people would stand facing each other with the camera looking at their eyes and their hands to build tension before the gun was drawn? Imagine that happening every ten minutes, building zero tension but taking twice as long, and occasionally ending with nothing happening at all. Every character needs to get a slow motion death scene too, just to further waste your time. Speaking of time wasting, almost all of the dialogue in this movie. I assume that English is not Boll’s first language, but someone on the set should tell him when his dialogue doesn’t make sense. Like when someone is bragging about their prowess with the gun and calls himself, “The best cock suckin’ shooter.” You want to think about what you just said there, man? I wish he had followed it up with, “I mean, I’m much better at cock suckin’ than I am at shootin’, but I am a pretty good shooter too! Anyway, get your cock out and let’s get started.” And I’m on the fence about the time when someone says that something is going to happen at “high midnight”. There’s a chance that was word play because the vampires can’t go out in the daytime, but one thing we can be sure of is that it doesn’t make sense. They call it “high noon” because that’s when the sun is highest in the sky. What’s high in the sky at night time? The moon? That thing can be anywhere depending on the time of the year. There’s also a line in the movie that says, “Life is like a penis. When it’s hard you get screwed. When it’s soft you can’t beat it.” The writer says, “I should write that down!” right afterwards. But, no. No one should ever write that down. I had to in order to mock it. It’s like they’re trying to say something clever like in Team America: World Police, but it’s nowhere near as funny or witty.
The look of the movie remains roughly the same. The settings are still nice, but almost nothing else is. The first thing I noticed was that the movie looked like a shitty student film. It seemed to be a hand held camera and the director of photography had just had an all-night bender. You know you can buy a tripod, right Uwe? Uwe still doesn’t know how to frame things in a way that makes sense of looks good. There’s one point where two people are having a conversation at a table sitting right next to each other like no one would. Later, as Billy and Rayne are fighting, they don’t think that we might want to see Rayne’s face as she’s talking because Boll was filming from behind her as she was on all fours. And you can’t say you don’t like to cut between camera angles because that’s what you do during fights to mask the fact that they’re not interesting: just make lots of random cuts to make it seem more exciting. Most of the fights in the movie are uninteresting gun fights even though Rayne’s primary weapon is her two swords. Boll still hasn’t figured out that you can have a point on the end of those swords so they’d actually look like they could cut something. But, then again, maybe Boll is convinced that vampires have the same texture to their skin as partially-melted butter. And it’s not going to matter anyways because Rayne won’t remember that she actually has two of those swords until the last ten minutes of the movie. And since when does the sound of vampires dying sound exactly like pigs getting kicked in the ribs? And, after you spent so much time explaining how the bullets of Rayne and her posse would damage the vampires because they were silver and blessed by a priest, how could you forget to explain how the guns of the random townspeople did damage to the vampires? If I was going to say something has improved from the first movie it’d be that the blood they use in this one looks more like blood than the red Nestle’s Quik they used in the first one.
I’d say the performances vastly improved in this movie. They were still awful, but I’d say it was improved because they weren’t ruining any good actors. I recognized Zack Ward and Jodelle Ferland, but not from any movies I liked. I didn’t think Silent Hill was awful, but seeing Jodelle in this doesn’t hurt my feelings. Lovers of A Christmas Story may be disappointed to see Zack Ward in a shitty movie, but he was the bully in that movie anyway. Serves him right. I thought it was weird that the hero of the movie, Natassia Malthe, doesn’t show up until 20 minutes in. She did as good of a job as she could, but I wasn’t expecting much. She didn’t impress and she didn’t even have the good sense to get them boobs out during the movie. I preferred Kristanna Loken. Neither one of them can act, but at I find Kristanna more appealing. Zack Ward is the only other person in this movie worth mentioning, but he also sucked. So maybe he also wasn’t worth mentioning.
It’s hard to say which one between BloodRayne and BloodRayne II: Deliverance is worse. They’re probably equally as awful. The story is simple and works to ruin not only beloved video game characters, but also beloved historical figures. The movie wastes a lot of your time in between uninteresting action scenes and the performances offer nothing worth mentioning either. You don’t need to see the first movie to understand this one, but you definitely don’t need to see this one at all. Skip it. You can’t even stream this one on Netflix and it’s definitely not worth more than one click on your mouse. You have better things to do. BloodRayne II: Deliverance gets “You don’t know what you’re dealing with” out of “Is writing stories your reason to live?”
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