BloodRayne: The Third Reich (2010)

Arbeit Macht Frei

Today is a wonderful day.  Not because I’m watching the third movie in this series directed by Uwe Boll, but because I am soon to be finished watching these movies.  At least I hope so.  I really don’t want to have to watch BloodRayne 4.  Well, to be fair, I didn’t really want to watch the other three either.  I just wanted to make fun of them.  Just like the second one, I had not seen the third BloodRayne movie before I decided to review it, so we may be shocked together.  But probably not.  Here is BloodRayne: The Third Reich, written by Michael Nachoff, directed by Uwe Boll, and starring Natassia Malthe, Michael Paré, Clint Howard, Brendan Fletcher, Steffen Mennekes, Willam Belli, and Annett Culp.

Half human, half vampire Dhampir Rayne (Natassia Malthe) attacks a Nazi train carrying people to death camps, inadvertently assisting a resistance group lead by Nathaniel (Brendan Fletcher).  In the process, she gets shot in the arm and kills Commandant Ekart Brand (Michael Paré), drinking his blood to heal from the wound.  Lt. Kaspar Jaeger (Steffen Mennekes) finds him, already turning to a vampire, and takes him back to monitor him.  Jaeger brings in a scientist that specializes in vampire research for the Nazis named Doctor Mangler (Clint Howard).  Brand starts becoming a vampire with similar resistances to Rayne’s and they start getting the idea to make Hitler immortal.  Rayne and the resistance take it upon themselves to stop this from happening.

This is the best piece of shit in the trilogy, but it’s still a piece of shit.  I was happy to see that they finally decided to make a story that had something to do with the game that offered its name to the series, but I was also unsurprised to find that the story still sucks.  The entire premise of the movie pissed me off.  Rayne’s ability to go out in the daylight was not transmitted to her from a bite.  According to these movies, it’s something she got from absorbing the eye in the first movie.  In the game, I believe it was because she was born of a human impregnated by a vampire.  Since neither of those things happened to Brand, there is no reason that the immunity would get transferred to him.  He’d be a vampire, sure.  And he could make Hitler a vampire, yes.  And that would be a bad thing, absolutely.  So there was obviously no reason to make him anything special when it didn’t make sense.  Another thing that didn’t make sense about it was the fact that Rayne, who has been a vampire for more than two centuries, would make a rookie mistake like feeding on someone and not killing him so he wouldn’t return as a vampire.  And why is the scientist that is supposedly the expert on vampires stupid enough to get into a cage with a vampire because she acted like she wanted to fuck him?  I don’t even call myself a vampire expert and I know that much.  The ending held a lot of shit that pissed me off too, but I won’t bother with the spoiler alerts.  The biggest spoiler would be watching this movie.  That’d spoil your day.  Rayne and the resistance walk into a trap and get captured.  In the back of the truck on their way to death, Rayne and Nathaniel decide it’s time to fuck.  That’s so dumb I don’t even have a joke for it.  Or for the fact that it got started because Nathaniel started groping her while she was unconscious, which I think most women don’t get aroused by.  Then, the rest of the resistance attack the caravan and crash the truck they were in.  Rayne easily kicks the back door open.  If you had the ability to do that, why not do it when the truck was travelling 15 mph to your death?  You could’ve jumped out of that thing and barely stumble.  Then, Brand drinks some of Rayne’s blood from a vial to get stronger to fight her.  How the hell did you think that would work?  That blood came from her!  She’s full of the stuff!

The dialogue continues to be shit.  The greater majority of the dialogue was flat, ill-conceived lines that they tried to ramp up by having Rayne add “mother fucker” to the end of it.  Only Samuel L. Jackson can pull that off … mother fucker!  At one point, they attack a train station because a train was supposed to arrive to take away one of their friends and Rayne feels the need to point out that, “The train’s not here.”  Really?  ‘Cause I see the tracks that we’re walking over right now, but I could’ve sworn it would be on the other side of the station or something.  The massive lacking of train did not tip me off at all.  At one point, as an insult, Brand calls a member of the resistance a Bolshevik.  I don’t think you’re using that right.  Isn’t that the start of the Communist party in Russia?  Mother fucker?

The fights were (you guessed it) still not impressive.  But they at least seemed vaguely choreographed this time around.  They actually stopped trying to replicate Rayne’s swords in this movie, just making them two regular swords that she carried around instead of the swords with the handle in the middle.  In their defense, they failed for two whole movies so far so I kind of support them giving up on it.  The movie starts with one fight that was okay, but really short.  I still don’t understand how a regular human could sneak up on a vampire as one did in the first fight, though.  Then there’s a lot of snooze until a super brief fight in a brothel, and back to more snooze.  It got to the point where I was so bored I was checking the time on the movie every ten minutes or so, which says a lot for a movie that’s just over an hour long.  They seemed to get the idea that their movie was getting more boring, so they threw in a random fight with two vampires with swords that I kept waiting for the purpose of, but it never arrived.  They just threw it in at random, Rayne wins, and she walks away.  Moving on!  Later, Rayne gets in a fight that DOES have something to do with the story, but I got pissed because she had two swords on her back and decided to be ineffectual in hand-to-hand combat instead of using those.  Then she was rescued by a human.  You’re an embarrassment, Rayne.  The final fight (and the entire ending) of the movie was completely deflating, even though the movie had never really inflated you.  For about thirty seconds, Brand is beating up Rayne.  Then she trips him, picks up a big rock, and smashes his head.  The end.  It was the quickest buzz kill of fight with the big bad enemy that I’ve ever seen in a movie.

The most important change in the performances from the second movie to this one was the boobs.  There were a lot of them.  And even Natassia Malthe, who did not get them boobs out in the first movie, whips them things out for this movie.  She even has two sex scenes to do it.  First with a girl and the second was already discussed because of how little sense it made that they’d fuck in the back of a truck on their way to their deaths.  The first sex scene made just as little sense.  Rayne does something for some whores in a brothel where she goes to get a massage for no good reason so one of them repays her with sex.  My guess is that it is just something Boll wanted to see.  He certainly doesn’t mind adding scenes to his movie that have nothing to do with anything.  To talk about Malthe’s performance: meh.  It starts off pretty weak as she reads the narration over the inordinately long, 7 minute credit sequence.  She sounds completely disinterested and bored by what she’s reading.  As a vampire, she’s not really required to act that much.  Just be kind of robotic.  And wear a goofy earflap hat for some reason.  The only thing significant about Michael Paré and Brendan Fletcher to me was that they were in the previous movies and came back for these ones without making any mention to the fact that they were back.  With Paré, at least it could be said that he didn’t look the same.  Fletcher definitely did look exactly as he did when he was hanged in the second movie, but no mention of it is made.  Obviously we can assume that Boll can’t get that many people to still work with him, but it would’ve been nice to mention it in the movie.  Clint Howard just got on my nerves in this movie.  I don’t really know him as a great actor; I just know him as a small part in his brother’s movies.  But in this one he got on my nerves by having a good and appropriate look for the character, but his raspy, Peter Lorre-esque voice was a major irritant.  Almost as much as the horrible pun of his character’s name (Doctor Mangler, like Doctor Mengele.  GET IT?!?!?!?).  Fuck you, movie.

Not only do I think that they should never make another BloodRayne movie, I think they should never make another Uwe Boll movie.  People should never do anything to give this man money.  I was excited by BloodRayne: The Third Reich because they actually took Rayne into a setting similar to the games, but then they just wrote a story full of nonsense and stupidity, random fights and sex scenes that serve no purpose, and irritating performances.  I checked the time so often during this boring piece of trite that you’d think it was 5 hours long instead of one hour and ten minutes.  Don’t watch this.  Don’t watch any of them.  Don’t watch anything with the name Uwe Boll attached to it.  BloodRayne: The Third Reich gets “Guten tag, motherfuckers” out of “…mother fucker!”

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Apollo 13 (1995)

Houston, We’ve Had a Problem

I feel that not having seen a movie as classic as Citizen Kane until recently was excusable because I was nowhere near alive when it came out.  But for me to have not seen a classic movie such as today’s movie when it came out when I was 12 is a problem.  PROBLEM SOLVED!  I’ve now watched this movie.  I and the entire world had heard about this movie and the event it was based on for quite some time, AND it stars at least 2 people that could be in my list of top actors (as well as many others I like a lot), AND it was also directed by a great director, yet I hadn’t seen it.  I had not seen this movie until now because … uh … well okay, I have no idea why I didn’t see it.  I guess I just took my time.  And so, just over 16 years late, I present to you my review of Apollo 13, written by William Broyles and Al Reinert, directed by Ron Howard, and starring Tom Hanks, Bill Paxton, Kevin Bacon, Ed Harris, Gary Sinise, Kathleen Quinlan, Clint Howard, David Andrews, Xander Berkeley, Miko Hughes, Mary Kate Schellhardt, Max Elliot Slade, and Emily Ann Lloyd.

Astronaut Jim Lovell (Tom Hanks) is giving a tour of NASA’s Vehicle Assembly Building when he gets informed that he and his crew – Fred Haise (Bill Paxton) and Ken Mattingly (Gary Sinise) – are getting their mission to the moon pushed up from Apollo 14 to Apollo 13.  Having just recently watched Neil Armstrong walk on the moon during the Apollo 11, Lovell says he wants to get him some of that action.  During training, it is determined that Mattingly is unable to go because he was exposed to measles and may get sick mid-mission, so he is replaced by Jack Swigert (Kevin Bacon).  They get all launched up and that’s when shit hits the fan … continuously for the next hour and a half.

Most people were probably well aware of this before I was, but this is a damned good film.  The story seems like one that would be hard to get wrong when you base your movie around a real life event that captured the attention of the world so thoroughly as it did, but they did not get it wrong.  They got it so right that it kind of bummed me out that I wasn’t alive to witness the world around this time, and even more so around the Apollo 11 time.  Instead, I got to grow up in the time where NASA says we’re not going to the moon anymore and, by the way, we’re gonna shit all over Pluto’s face and call it a bitch planet.  I don’t even know who you are anymore, NASA.  In fact, I’m not even going to capitalize your name anymore.  Anyways, this movie definitely tells nasa’s story with gusto.  It starts out perhaps a little slow, but once you get up into space, it really doesn’t waste very much time before it starts shoveling tension on to you, and it doesn’t really let you unclinch your anus until the last minute or so.  I also found it pretty amazing that this movie was able to turn something as boring as watching people do math and flick switches into something so riveting and engrossing.

You know what takes that there great story and elevates it so much?  PERFORMANCES!!  Tom Hanks, as it turns out, is Tom Hanks!  This dude is the best.  He always has the most real and emotional and charming portrayals of characters in the movies he’s in that you can’t help but love him and feel for him.  In this one, he really doesn’t overdo it and freak out as most of us would in his position.  I would lose my shit, at least that’s what nasa said when I tested to be an astronaut.  (Psst.  I cried and peed myself while filling out the application)  He was the glue of the team and, probably, the movie.  I love Ed Harris a lot too.  He had to keep his shit together and get everyone around him on task following these tragedies and didn’t allow himself to lose it until those astronauts were safe, finally breaking down into tears.  Paxton and Bacon were very good supporting characters on the mission, but they both let the events get to them and they freaked out a little, but Hanks put the kibosh on that nonsense.  I get the feeling that Hanks might not like Gary Sinise very much though.  Assuming (as I do) that he has control over the movies he’s in, he fucks with Sinise every time he’s in a movie with him.  What do you want to do to Gary in Forrest Gump?  Cut them legs off, and make him a drunken whore-monger while you’re at it.  What about Apollo 13?  It wouldn’t work to take his legs off.  Uh…give him the measles and make it so he can’t come into space.  Then tell him later he didn’t actually have measles.  Fuck you, Gary!  But Gary did bring it pretty well to the movie.  He was noticeably bummed out about not getting to be on the mission, but didn’t throw the whole “I was on Earth while you guys were counting the minutes to your deaths” back in their faces.  Instead, he kind of saved the day from the ground.  Hanks should really give this guy another chance.

The only thing I find more regrettable than not being alive when Apollo 13 and Apollo 11 actually went down was the fact that it took me so long to watch the awesome movie about it!  Apollo 13 is what happens when you take a real life event, retell it in an awesome, tension-filled way with a great director, and perform it superbly with actors who are supremely awesome.  There was not a part of this movie I did not like.  It’s available via Netflix streaming, so you too have no excuse to not be watching this movie right now save for the overwhelming compelling nonsense streaming from my fingers right now.  I will be purchasing this movie for my collection post haste, so you should in the very least be watching it streaming.  Apollo 13 gets “So long, Earth.  Catch you on the flip side” out of “Pluto, you’re still a planet to me.”

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