Day 40: Bloodrayne: The Third Reich

"Guten tag, motherfuckers."

Uwe Boll. The name alone makes me cringe. I quiver with fear when I think of Uwe Boll. In the span of nine years he's gone from directing video game adaptations that bombed upon being released in theaters to directing video game adaptations that go direct to video. Anyone familiar with the plot of The Producers will understand that he made films for the better part of a decade using a tax loophole in Germany that allowed a filmmaker to profit off of films he made even if they didn't turn a profit or better yet, bombed outright.

He has directed several of the worst movies of all time, among them, House of the Dead which is, in my humble opinion, the absolute worst movie ever made. He's been compared to Ed Wood, which is an absolutely unfair assessment as Ed Wood clearly had a love of cinema, he just didn't have the basic competence it took to make a film. Uwe Boll makes garbage and is utterly remorseless of the fact, calling his detractors "internet trolls" and dismissing anyone who doesn't like his movies as "fucking retards."

In 2006 he unleashed his film version of the "popular" video game Bloodrayne on the world, and it was as terrible as you would expect it to be. On a side note, it is worth watching for Michael Madsen's performance which fits the definition of phoning it in. He made a direct to video sequel two years later and in 2010, he completed his trilogy with Bloodrayne: The Third Reich.

The film allegedly had a budget of ten million dollars, but I find that hard to believe. District 9 was made for three times as much and looked about one hundred times better, but I digress. It's a bad sign when you're watching a movie and it takes you sixty seconds to realize that the film has started and you're not watching another trailer.

I imagine that Uwe Boll saw Inglourious Basterds and said to himself, "yeah, this is okay, but you know what would make it awesome? Vampires." That's essentially what this movie is trying to be. It's like Inglourious Basterds without the meticulous historical accuracy (not a typo).

The movie tells the story of Raine (Nattasia Malthe, who has a nice rack, and that's the best compliment I'll be paying anyone involved in the proceedings) a dhampir (basically a mega-vampire who can daywalk) that doesn't like Nazis. And who does, honestly? But she hates Nazis so much that she teams up with a resistance force of some vague sort to kill her some Nazis. Quick diversion, everyday on set seems to have been "bring whatever accent you feel like to work" day, because there's no consistency from character to character, let alone from scene to scene for some characters.

Anyway, she "accidentally" turns a Nazi commandant (Michael Pare, lo how the never mighty have fallen even further) into a dhampir while killing him and now has to face the potential for an entire Third Reich made up of dhampirs.

But how is this possible you ask? Well, the Nazis have a secret weapon in the form of crazy Nazi Doctor Clint Howard. His character has a name, but he's playing Clint Howard. Let's talk about Clint Howard for a minute. It's sad when his appearance lends an air of gravitas to a film, but he's pretty much the standard bearer here. He's been in good movies (all of them directed by his brother, but good movies nonetheless). Is it horrible of me to say that he looks right at home in a Nazi uniform? Anyway, Dr. Howard is going to take some of Raine's blood to Berlin to make Hitler immortal.

Beyond that, I wasn't able to glean any of the plot. I'm not even sure there was one. The script is beyond clumsy. It's screenwriting of the absolute worst order. Writer Michael C. Nachoff is a fucking asshole. I don't know him personally, I just know that only an asshole would write like this. The entire fucking movie is exposition. There isn't a single scene, that's not an action scene, which moves the plot forward. Every scene with plot points literally has people just standing around reciting them, or worse yet, regurgitating information that we'd been given a scene or two earlier. I would love to lay the blame for this fiasco squarely at the feet of Dr. Boll, but he didn't get any help from this script.

Let's talk about what an awful director he is though. The opening credits (which take up five minutes of screen time) feature Jews being brought to a concentration camp. Every time there's a credit, the screen fades to black and the credit appears. At first I thought this was a stylistic choice, but it turns out that Boll could only afford two boxcars, so he repurposed them on an endless five minute fading loop to look like an entire train. I rewound it just to be sure that's what he did. Boll seems to have gotten around to watching the last two Bourne films because he is a big fan of the handheld immediacy of those films' action sequences. He's unable to recreate that exactly though, so it's hard to tell what the fuck is going on in any given action sequence. His hard-on for The Matrix has yet to die, as evidenced by Raine's costume which looks like it was ordered from The Inner Sanctum's website. The dude needs to get it over with and just remake The Matrix already. I'll certainly be glad when he does.

Also, only Uwe Boll would cut to an expository scene involving Clint Howard in the middle of a lesbian scene. Oh yeah, did I mention there's a lesbian scene? There is. It's not terribly sexy and one lady involved has big fake tits that would not have been available for purchase in the 1940's. I don't need to sit here and justify my love of lesbians and their scenes, but this one felt totally tacked on and unnecessary.

This film is notable for featuring the god damned dumbest Nazis ever put on screen. These guys are the definition of incompetence. Maybe Uwe Boll just likes to see dudes like himself on screen, but nobody in this Third Reich was firing on all cylinders, that's for sure. I know they were evil bastards, but they weren't morons. They likely didn't run into gunfire the way the guys in this movie do. They more than likely didn't stand around waiting for a vampire lady with two swords to finish killing the guy she's fighting before attempting to disarm her. Just stupid.

The best thing I can say about this movie, beyond the fact that I got it for free (thanks Chad!) is that it's total running time was about 67 minutes. The opening credits were five minutes long and the end credit started right at the 72 minute mark. Somehow it managed to drag and be boring as shit, but at least it didn't overstay its welcome.

Yesterday I spoke about how bad movie fans need to see Old Dogs. Fucking no one with a pulse should see this piece of shit. It's a travesty, top to bottom. You can easily find the nude scenes online if you're thinking that's a reason to watch it. You can watch much better movies with Clint Howard in them. You can definitely watch other movies with Michael Pare in them too. Do not subject yourself to the horrors that await the poor, unsuspecting people who place a digital video disc of Bloodrayne: The Third Reich in their home entertainment players. This is a fate they've doomed themselves to, and I urge you to avoid it at all costs.

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