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!”

Let’s get these reviews more attention, people.  Post reviews on your webpages, tell your friends, do some of them crazy Pinterest nonsense.  Whatever you can do to help my reviews get more attention would be greatly appreciated.  You can also add me on FaceBook (Robert T. Bicket) and Twitter (iSizzle).  Don’t forget to leave me some comments.  Your opinions and constructive criticisms are always appreciated.

BloodRayne II: Deliverance (2007)

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?”

Let’s get these reviews more attention, people.  Post reviews on your webpages, tell your friends, do some of them crazy Pinterest nonsense.  Whatever you can do to help my reviews get more attention would be greatly appreciated.  You can also add me on FaceBook (Robert T. Bicket) and Twitter (iSizzle).  Don’t forget to leave me some comments.  Your opinions and constructive criticisms are always appreciated.