BloodRayne

Oh what it could have been...
Finally an action film with big budget queer women stars (Kristanna Loken from Terminator and Michelle Rodriguez from Girlfight, Resident Evil etc.) written by the occasionally talented out lesbian Guinevere Turner. Sounds like the opportunity for smashing conventions and stereotypes of traditional women action films. It could have been the perfect opportunity to thoroughly abolish the ides of Yvonne Tasker in which the tension caused by the presence of a woman hero at the center of the action movie must be allayed by placing her in acceptable roles such as a mother or wife, with an overt sexuality making her available to a heterosexual male audience or through the use of comedy. Here we have unconventional women that reflect the ideas of Mark O'Day's article "Action Babe Cinema" in working toward the dissemination of binary definitions of gender. I was expecting at least a little bit of fluidity in sexual identification and more gray area in terms of the conventional stereotypes of action women cinema. Something that could take a little action film based on, what else but a video game, and use it to create some waves that could ripple out and cause a little bit of change in the way strong women are represented onscreen.

Oh god, that is so far from what we got in this movie that my glimmer of hope for something redeemable has been completely and utterly obliterated from every angle. The writing and plot were abysmal, banal and played on every well established convention known to man. Guinevere Turner took absolutely zero risks and may as well been a 17 year-old boy living our his violent video game, hot woman hetero-sex fantasy. Oh wait, that was the director. Even when Turner did include brief glimpse of slight deviation from heteronormativity in Rayne's close relationship with her carnival "sister" and in the scene when she kills a vampire by seducing her and biting her neck, she immediately fell right back on convention by killing her friend to support the traditional rape/revenge plot that has given both action men and women an nonthreatening means of supporting and legitimizing their use of violence for decades. She also wrote an almost completely unmotivated and rather rough sex scene between Rayne and her untrusting, almost friend-for-5-minutes head of the Vampire hunters, Sebastian (played by Legally Blonde's ultra-normal Matt Davis).

Everything else was exceptionally abysmal. It was a random series of neurotic, barely connected, poorly choreographed "fight scenes." The one memorable moment came directly because of Kristanna Loken's charisma in the scene when she avoids multiple pitfalls and hangs from the ceiling to escape death by water as she recovers the eye of the most powerful vampire that ever lived. The politics behind the vampires and the humans in the Brimstone society were vague and convoluted, despite their possibility to bring a more real world element a la Interview with the Vampire to the plot.

I'd really like to give Turner the benefit of the doubt and say it was all Uwe Boll and his reputation for being the worst film director on the planet, but I honestly don't think there was much hope for it from the beginning. Boll's costumes, props, sets and lighting all look like they are meant to go straight to DVD and are bad even for a B movie. His characters deliver their lines like they are confused ventriloquist dummies, the choreography of the fight scenes is awkward and the camera angles are disorienting. When making a rubutle against criticism of his film in the DVD extras he argues that his films are just as good as other video game films because the special effects are the same quality as the ones used in Resident Evil. I don't know what he is smoking to think that, but someone should tell him that special effects do not a movie make. He provides the audience with no way to connect to or identify with the characters and in this case, I don't want to. Turner's conventional rape/revenge plot is presumptuous and assuming without any novelty or explanation and the Rayne character is just as messed up in the head as the plot and character development.

In the end it was hot women doing awkward things in awkward ways. I won't even talk about Michelle Rodriguez's lack of motivation and misconstrued accent. Even the chemistry between her and Loken was sterile onscreen, like the chemistry between all the characters. I think I'll stick to the video and the wonders of my imagination.