Worst Video Game Movie of All Time: BloodRayne

Worst Video Game Movie of All Time: BloodRayne Time and time again studios try to capture the magic of video games. Time and time again, they fail. Miserably. Unless if they’re about the genre as a whole and not a specific video game. We’re convinced that they’ll never get the whole “adapting a video game to the big screen” thing right, no matter how promising their trailers look. At best, video game movies garner responses of, “Eh... it’s not horrible (Silent Hill),” “This is a great guilty pleasure film (Street Fighter),” or, “That was fun... cheesy, but fun (Mortal Kombat).” At worst? They’re BloodRayne. In 2014, we made a list of the ten worst offenders -- a daunting task when you’re spoiled for choice. Back then, we put Uwe Boll’s cinematic pile of vampire waste at number four, but the director still made the top of the list because of Alone in the Dark, which would later make it onto several more of our worst lists. Now, as we revisit this topic, we’ve got to put BloodRayne where it belongs. It’s the worst video game movie of all time. Yep. It’s worse than Alone in the Dark. There’s a lot of components into making a movie good, and Uwe Boll fails at all of them. His characters are dull. His set pieces are uninspired. His stories have been known to put insomniacs to sleep and the action sequences are completely non-sensical, to the point where watching kids play fight look more convincing. And while Alone in the Dark does fail in spectacular fashion, BloodRayne is on an otherworldly level of “what the hell did I just watch?” The most infuriating thing about god awful video game movies is that they are based on existing franchises. Successful franchises, otherwise, why make the movie to begin with? This means the characters and their story are already established and ready to go. Now we don’t mind little tweaks here and there. There’s some things in gaming that wouldn’t translate well to the big screen, that, and if you’re gonna copy the game word for word, what’s the point of watching the movie? As long as the movie resembles the game at its core we’re willing to give it a shot. At its core, the BloodRayne games are about a kickass, half vampire woman going on some bloody adventures. She wants to kill her father for raping and killing her mother. She’s an agent of the Brimstone Society, which works to protect the world from any supernatural threats. Simple, right? The plot in the movie is this weird mix of the two games, but it’s sloppily put together, like Boll decided to cut up the plotlines and glue them together like some crazed serial killer. If it’s based on the first game, Kagan shouldn’t be the big bad, as the first game focuses more on Rayne joining Brimstone and the missions they assign her. If it’s based on the second game, there should be a Cult of Kagan: a group made up of his offspring that’s trying to stop the sun from harming vampires. They serve as major antagonists because Kagan’s been playing dead, so Rayne’s been killing off her siblings for decades. Of course, none of this is in the movie -- since the movie can’t even get the time period right. So the plot’s a mess, but do we at least get the conflict with Brimstone -- a group that rids the world of inhuman creatures -- recruiting a dhampir? Nope. Not only does recruiting Rayne feel like an afterthought instead of a top priority, Rayne has one of the most random, awkward sex scenes in movie history with one of the... agents...? Mmmm, nothing screams “erotic” like banging a guy you talk to about your raped and killed mother, just listen to that cell door creak. He lost his parents too, ya know? Which brings us to biggest offense to the movie: Rayne, played here by Kristanna Loken. We’d give the plot a smidgen of a pass if Rayne was as snarky and kickass as she is in her video games. When we first meet Rayne in the games, she has no problem drop kicking a vampire and breaking her arm. Her intro in the movie? Kidnapped and easily tortured in a circus, then locked in a cage between shows. Not only that but at times her actress seems to be all smiles and laughs in her first dialogue scene despite, you know: BEING ABUSED AND LOCKED IN A CAGE! She’s basically a wilting flower who, on occasion, does some flips and lucks into stabbing the right baddie. She spends more time being locked up somewhere than she does actually fighting -- if you can call what she does fighting. There aren’t many female leads in pop culture compared to their male counterparts, so this performance is both insulting AND frustrating. Though we suppose the rest of the cast is just as lazily thrown together. Say what you will about Tara Reid, but you at least know what emotion she’s trying to emote. And even the recognizable actors who show up in these craptacular films will give performances that are somewhat likeable. That’s not the case here. It’s actually worse than bad acting: the cast just doesn’t care. At all. Even if we know they’re capable of Academy Award winning performances -- lookin’ at you, Ben Kingsley -- they’re all either half asleep or hungover. Just look at Michael Madsen over here, could you give any less of a crap about being fatally stabbed? Then there’s Billy Zane, who looks like he didn’t even read his lines before they started filming. Michelle Rodriguez really can’t pull off a British accent. And... is Meatloaf drunk on camera? Maybe they all needed to buy a new house, then again, we can’t imagine making much in an Uwe Boll production. It’s definitely not enough to star in the worst video game movie of all time.