BloodRayne (2006)

Films based on video games have a pre-established reputation as very rarely reaching above mediocrity, with the vast majority of them being uncompromisingly bad. Not helping the stereotype is German director Uwe Boll. A "filmmaker" in the loosest sense of the word, Boll has gained some form of infamy for his involvement with two of this decade's most reviled films, House of the Dead and Alone in the Dark. Both were adaptations of video games, both crashed and burned at the box office, both were atrociously bad. I mean, they were so bad that they make those crappy Sci-Fi Channel original movies look good by comparison.

But I assume that poor box office income and horrendous critical reactions don't matter much to Boll, who ventured into the world of video games a third time with his acculturation of BloodRayne. Based on the horror game franchise developed by Terminal Reality and released by Majestic Games, the movie is nothing short of a great big suckburger with a side of suck fries and topped off with a tall glass of Suck Cola.

The story opens in Romania sometime in the eighteenth century, where we are introduced to a trio of vampire hunters that are part of a secret society dubbed the Brimstone Society. The three — Vladimir (Michael Madsen), Sebastian (Matt Davis), and Katarin (Michelle Rodriguez) — stroll into a pub looking for information on a certain someone they believe to be in the area. And apparently, the killing of vampires is quite commonplace, as nobody bothers to even look up when Sebastian stakes a vampire at the bar. Perhaps this particular town is a medieval version of Sunnydale from the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series. So anyway, there's these three vampire hunters looking for somebody, and they find her location.

Their quarry is the main attraction of the local carnival's freak show, a grossly mistreated young woman named Rayne (Kristanna Loken). Dragged into the freak show by chains, her right arm is sliced up pretty bad, while her left arm is dunked in a barrel of water that badly burns her. One of the carnies kills a goat and pours its blood into a cup, and upon giving Rayne a sip of the red stuff, her injuries immediately heal. She's led back to her cage after the show and locked up tightly.

That evening, she's approached by a fellow carny named Amanda (Madalina Constantin), who tells Rayne that she's formulated a brilliant plan to get them away from their horrible lives with the carnival. And I mean, this plan is absolutely ingenious. It's the most brilliant plan ever conceived by anyone. Not even the A-Team could come up with a plan this amazing and with this much potential for success. Not even The Great Escape had an escape plan this impressive. And because not even a simple summary could do it justice, I must quote the dialogue verbatim:

"My uncle, he's a sailor. And he once told me of a place where people play all day, and the trees grow fruits in every color of the rainbow. And the sunsets set the whole sky on fire. Doesn't that sound wonderful, Rayne? He'll send for us soon, I know it."

Why don't we point out all the things that are wrong with that plan? What really gets me is that "play all day" thing. Why not just add that after they get done playing all day, they're going to ride unicorns over lollipop rainbows and sleep on bubblegum clouds? I'm going to assume that the character was written for a six-year-old, and Madalina Constantin — who is very much an adult — was all they could get. If they wanted to keep the line like that, couldn't they have just brought in a kid for a couple of hours to shoot this one scene? Because it would have made more sense coming out of a child.

And another thing: Is that even really a plan at all? It doesn't look like a plan. It looks more like some major wishful thinking. Because if that is a plan, then it's pretty doggone flimsy. So anyway, Amanda gets that out, then tosses Rayne a crucifix necklace for good luck before bidding her adieu for the evening.

Even later that night, the carnival's strongman (T.J. Storm) lets himself into her cage and tries to get himself a little lovin' by force. She's in no mood to be raped, so she shatters a bottle over his noggin and cuts him up good. Some of his blood drips onto her face, and as she tastes it, she goes absolutely insane. Rayne starts running around, biting the necks of anybody that gets in her way, and she even bites Amanda before she can realize who she is. And once she does notice who she just bit, what does Rayne do? She just takes the fancy swords Amanda was carrying and runs away. Some friend she is.

Vladimir, Sebastian, and Katarin stumble upon what's left of the carnival the following morning. Knowing what they have to do, they start decapitating and burning every lifeless body they come across, while Amanda manages to explain what happened before they're forced to put her down too. Night falls, and Rayne stops and kills two vampires she catches attacking a caravan, even going as far as to drink their blood. The caravan gives her a ride to the nearest city, which appears to have a rather sizable vampire population. Rayne pulls a vampire hooker aside and sucks her blood for God and everybody to see, and the only people that care are these two thieves that pick the dead vampire's pockets, and a nearby fortune teller (Geraldine Chapman) that watches what happens intently.

The fortune teller captures Rayne's attention, telling Rayne her purpose and future through her deck of tarot cards. Y'see, Rayne is a dhampir, the result of her human mother (Daniela Nane) being raped and impregnated by Kagan (Ben Kingsley), the most powerful vampire on Earth. Due to her mixed heritage, she retains all of their strengths and their unfavorable reaction to water of any kind, while possessing none of their other weaknesses. So that explains why the crucifix around her neck doesn't bug her.

The fortune teller knows of Rayne's quest to avenge her mother's murder at the hands of Kagan (which the five-year-old Rayne witnessed), and tells her of a magical eye that, if she can possess it, will gain her an audience with Kagan so she may fulfill her quest. The entire conversation is overheard by a vampire, who relays the message to Kagan. So what does Kagan do? He sends his chief lieutenant Domastir (Will Sanderson) to lead an army after the eye as well.

Rayne leaves, eventually arriving at a monastery seeking food and shelter. The monks gladly let her in, and not too long afterwards, she sneaks into the monastery's basement to retrieve the eye. How she knew where in the monastery it was, I have no idea. But regardless, getting the eye is not going to be a cakewalk for Rayne. Once she gets down into the basement, she discovers a sleeping ogre holding the key to the chamber the eye is in. She dispatches the ogre in a relatively easy fight, but there's one more step in her way: the large whirring blades that pop out of the chamber's floor on a regular interval. But it's not so bad; a simple cartwheel across the room gets Rayne past them. She goes for the box containing the eye, at which point a torrent of water starts flooding the room.

Since Rayne would rather not be burned, she jumps and hangs from one of her swords that she had previously embedded in the ceiling. The box opens and the eye starts to fall out, but when Rayne catches it with a free hand, she gets a really good look at it and somehow absorbs it. She loses her grip on the sword and falls into the ankle-deep pool of water beneath her, and when a few drops of water splash onto her arm... nothing happens. I guess they really weren't kidding about it being a magical eye after all.

Just as she realizes that the water hasn't affected her, some priests bust in and start reading her the riot act. Okay, that's probably an exaggeration, since the main priest (Udo Kier) doesn't seem too angry or upset that Rayne just killed their ogre and stole the eye. I mean, good ogre guards and disembodied magical eyes are pretty hard to come by. Believe me, I've tried to track some down, and I haven't had any luck yet. The priest's main concern seems to be if Rayne is in the employment of Kagan. She assures him that she's not working for him, as the priest explains just why that eye is so special.

Turns out there was this ancient vampire named Beliar that had figured out a way to overcome the three main vampire weaknesses. When he was finally defeated, three body parts — one of his eyes, one of his ribs, and his heart — were separated and divided among three remote locations to prevent other vampires from using them for their own gain. So the priest doesn't trust even a half-vampire with the eye, so he's kinda gonna need it back just to be on the safe side. But as always, things just aren't that easy.

Domastir and his crew arrive at the monastery, the Brimstone Society hot on their heels. A bloody battle ensues between Domastir's guys, the Society, and the monks, and in the chaos, Domastir knocks out Rayne and leaves with her. Vladimir and Sebastian trail him, catching up to him that morning at a castle called home by hedonistic vampire Leonid (Meat Loaf). Domastir is just looking for a place to crash for the afternoon, but his host is more interested in making Rayne part of his harem. Leonid is so into Rayne that he just has Domastir thrown out when he tries to warn him of Rayne's toughness. Before he can start putting the moves on the unconscious dhampir, Vladimir and Sebastian bust in and slay Leonid.

They take Rayne back to their hidden lair, where they train her in proper vamp-killing methods before Domastir and a bunch more goons find them and start raising some hell. And I know I said it was a hidden lair, but it doesn't really stay hidden if a certain someone would have kept her mouth shut. Turns out the newly-vampired Katarin sold them out with the intention of giving the three vampire parts to her father (Billy Zane), who seeks to overthrow Kagan (who has already obtained the rib through unseen, untold means). Rayne takes out Katarin and obtains the heart, and with Vladimir and Sebastian in tow, she heads for Kagan's castle to obtain her revenge.

I'm not going to lie: I really don't want to write this review. The quicker I can wipe my hands of BloodRayne, the better. It's so awful, I think it gave me cancer. And as you can probably guess, the movie was a financial disaster. It played in only 985 American theaters, pulling in a paltry 2.4 million dollars during a theatrical run that lasted two weeks. So if the movie was meant to be a flop, it certainly succeeded.

But even if BloodRayne played in every single theater in the United States for six months, it still would have been a bomb. And why is that? Because everything about it is horrendously bad. The direction, the script, the acting, the music, the effects, the set design, the props, everything. And I'm going to come right out and say that everyone involved with this cinematic bowel movement should be ashamed of themselves for participating in this crime against humanity.

First up, the screenplay penned by Guinevere Turner. How she went from writing the brilliant movie adaptation of American Psycho to writing this, I have no idea. Turner's screenplay could not make less sense. It's so convoluted, so confusing, so absurd that it took me three days to figure out how to properly write that synopsis up there. It's like they stuck a bunch of chimpanzees in a room with a typewriter for six hours, then slapped Turner's name on what the monkeys churned out.

But let's get to some specific complaints. There's that silly "play all day" bit, along with all the other hackneyed dialogue. There's also the out-of-place Billy Zane subplot that accomplishes nothing and ultimately goes nowhere. If it had been properly written and fleshed out, then it could have made for something interesting. But no, we can't let a Uwe Boll movie be any good, so this subplot only leads to a twist that offends the intelligence of everyone who sees it.

I also wonder about that whole pointless thing with the eye, rib, and heart. To my understanding, it was inspired by the first BloodRayne game, but it had a logical conclusion there. And as we all know, we can't have logic or even common sense in a Uwe Boll movie. Couldn't they have just made it a simple quest for revenge, as opposed to a quest for these silly little things that ends up weighing the whole movie down?

Going back to the topic of insulting the intelligence of the viewers, why is just plain ol' everyday water such a big deal with vampires? Holy water, I would believe. But vampires not exactly enjoying regular water is absurd. The legion of the undead could be wiped out by a freak rainstorm or blizzard, or even a thick fog. And last I checked, blood is at least ninety percent water, so why isn't that a drawback? If this is another one of those things that are drawn from the games, then it just makes the games look stupid too.

And then there's the lame effects. Yes, I know that geysers of blood shoot out of every victim in the BloodRayne games, but it looks corny and derivative in here. Besides, the effects look awfully cheap too. Rayne's vampire teeth look like oversized plastic dentures at times, and you could probably see better blood and gore effects in a middle-school production of Sweeney Todd. The music composed by Henning Lohner is also disappointing, as I got the feeling that it was attempting to make up for the complete and total lack of emotion in the acting and the direction. Lohner's score wouldn't have been so bad had it not been trying so hard, but due to that, it suffers.

While we're at it, how about that cast? I pity every person forced to be in front of the camera, even the cheap Romanian prostitutes in Meat Loaf's scene. It appears that Michael Madsen, Ben Kingsley, Billy Zane, Udo Kier, and Meat Loaf all realized how awful the movie is. I say this because Madsen's performance alternates between exhibiting boredom and exhibiting total apathy toward the entire production, while the others completely ham it up and do what they can to make the horrible material look worthwhile.

I've read that Madsen may or may not have been drunk during nearly all of his scenes, and I can't really say as I blame him. I don't drink, but I'd chug a whole brewery if I had the unfortunate luck of starring in a Uwe Boll movie. And if I were Madsen, I would have myself surgically attached to Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez, just so to avoid doing any more horrible movies like this one.

The rest of the cast, though, appear to be taking the whole thing seriously. And to that, I ask why. If the entire cast had treated the whole thing like it was an episode of the old Batman TV show from the '60s, then BloodRayne might have ventured into "so bad, it's good" territory. But unfortunately, we're stuck with this crap.

Seriously, the performances contributed by Kristanna Loken and Michelle Rodriguez might not have been so bad had the material been better and if there had been a talented director to motivate them. But the fact that they treat this stuff as if it were Shakespeare really makes them look bad. I should also note that I like Rodriguez, I really do, but she doesn't exactly strike me as being the right person for the role. Her character is supposed to be Zane's daughter, but it's odd when you consider that Zane's only twelve years older than her. Add to the fact that they look absolutely nothing alike, and having them play father and daughter doesn't make a whole lot of sense. But nothing about the plot makes any sense, so why should the casting make any sense either?

And last but most certainly least is the captain of this sinking ship, the one and only Uwe Boll. No matter how bad any director may be, he or she can at least take comfort in the knowledge that they're not Uwe Boll. He obviously cannot get decent performances out of his cast, no matter what kind of talent they may have, and anything decent about BloodRayne's look could only be attributed to decent camerawork from cinematographer Mathias Neumann. Boll's dramatic scenes are laughable, his humorous scenes are lame, his action scenes look really bad, and the sex scene is awkward and out of place.

Let's talk about that sex scene for a second. If Boll is anything, he's the king of the badly-done sex scene. I thought Christian Slater and Tara Reid's romantic interlude in Alone in the Dark was bad, but it was only the tip of the iceberg. Loken and Davis have no romantic chemistry whatsoever; they didn't even seem like there's any sort of feelings between them at all. But then, out of nowhere, she's got him pinned up against a jail cell door screwing his brains out. The scene lacks any kind of passion, and since we don't care about the characters, we don't care about the scene.

I have two theories about this, actually. One is that all of the "budding romance" scenes were left on the cutting room floor. The other is that Boll simply wanted a reason to see Loken topless. As a red-blooded heterosexual male, I can't say I fault him for that one if that's true. Either way, Boll's managed to craft one of the least-sexy sex scenes ever, and how he did it is beyond me.

Boll's action scenes are also pretty bad. The swords look like cheap plastic at times, and like cardboard covered in tinfoil at other times. The scenes are poorly edited as well, and the choreography could have been a lot better. The majority of the fights had the appearance of either being improvised on the spot, or that the participants had simply been told to just walk around and swing at one another.

And in one of the most bizarre mistakes with the movie, there's this completely pointless montage at the end of the movie. It's just a bunch of random shots thrown together for no good reason, and it causes the credits to roll three minutes later than they should have. It's like Boll said, "Okay, guys, we're going to cobble together a bunch of stuff that the viewers have already seen and hated the first time, but I'm sure they'll love it when they see it a second time." Screw that. And screw this entire movie too.

In my review of House of the Dead, I compared Boll's movies to those of Ed Wood. But in retrospect, I probably shouldn't insult Wood like that. He might not have made the best movies ever, but at least he was passionate about filmmaking. Wood's films are far more entertaining than they have any right to be, and you can tell simply by watching them that he loved making movies no matter what. And for that, I have the utmost respect for Wood and his body of work. Boll's work has no passion, no self-enthusiasm, and they just make him look like he's out to make a few bucks by exploiting a German tax shelter that rewards those who invest in poorly-performing movies.

The thing that gets me is that instead of admitting that these horrible films are his own fault, he blames everything on reviewers and audiences that are supposedly too stupid to understand that his movies are awe-inspiring classics along the lines of Casablanca and Gone with the Wind. It's that kind of bloated egotism that makes me long for the day that Uwe Boll and his horrible, offensively bad movies fall off the face of the earth forever and make the cinematic world a far better place. 

Final Rating: *

Alone in the Dark (2005)

Among all the varying genres that comprise the world of video games, one of the most popular is survival horror. The genre, as you may gather from its name, is populated by games whose players must survive attacks from various undead creatures, supernatural ghouls, and/or monstrous beasts while escaping from an isolated location. The genre has been popularized by immensely successful franchises like Capcom's Resident Evil games and Konami's Silent Hill games, but its roots can be traced to a PC game titled Alone in the Dark.

First released in 1992 by Infogrames (currently the bearers of the Atari name), Alone in the Dark is not the first survival horror game nor the most recognizable, but it has become one of the more influential titles in the genre, helping pave the way for games like the aforementioned Resident Evil and Silent Hill. With the moderate financial success of Paul W.S. Anderson's Resident Evil movies, I guess it only made sense that an Alone in the Dark movie would come sooner or later.

But what would have been a movie with a lot of promise ended up being directed by Uwe Boll, the genius behind the cinematic classic House of the Dead. Apparently not satisfied with presenting us with just one absolutely horrendous movie based on a video game, Boll thought it wise to ruin another potentially good video game adaptation. So let's get this over with, shall we?

The movie opens with a boring, two-minute text crawl that establishes that an ancient Native American tribe named the Abkani tried opening a gateway to a "world of darkness," but something evil got out and wiped their entire civilization off the face of the planet. Ten thousand years later, that evil has waited in the darkness, waiting for the gate to be reopened. Miners first discovered remnants of the Abkani in 1967, and the government established Bureau 713, a top-secret paranormal research agency charged with going to the most remote places on Earth, tracking down Abkani artifacts, and bringing their darkest secrets to light.

Professor Lionel Hudgens (Matthew Walker), the man placed in charge of Bureau 713, was removed from the project due to his "controversial research," so he decided to build a laboratory in an abandoned gold mine, where he could conduct experiments on orphaned children in order to, quote, "merge man with creature." His victims apparently survived as sleepers, waiting to be called into action. And that's pretty much the gist of it. I had the idea to just reprint the thing word for word, but I just couldn't force that sort of torture upon my readers.

Now that we're past all that silliness, let's get to the meat of the plot. We're quickly introduced to Edward Carnby (Christian Slater), a former 713 agent that became a freelance paranormal detective following his dismissal from the bureau. He's just returned to the big city from the Amazon, where he found an Abkani artifact. But as soon as he gets in a cab, he ends up in a car chase with a very suspicious individual (Ed Anders). This leads to a very drawn-out fight between Carnby and this individual in a back alley, who shrugs off gunshots as if they were only a minor annoyance. Carnby ends up knocking the guy off a ledge and onto a conveniently placed wooden spike, which proves that just because you're impervious to bullets doesn't mean you can survive a good impaling.

Meanwhile, we are also introduced to Aline Cedrac (Tara Reid), the assistant curator of a nearby museum. Like Carnby, she too is researching the Abkani, as well as preparing the artifacts for an upcoming museum exhibit. She gets a call from the museum's main curator, the previously mentioned Professor Hudgens. He tells her that he has discovered a new artifact, a large golden sarcophagus, deep beneath the ocean, and that he will be bringing it to her soon. The ship's crew begs to open it and reap the riches they believe to be inside, but when Hudgens denies their requests, they knock him out and lock him up.

The crew opens the sarcophagus, which will end up being both the worst and the last decision they'll ever make. Opening the sarcophagus lets all kinds of nasty things out, and when Hudgens manages to break out of his room, the entire crew has been slaughtered. I'm betting that this sarcophagus saw the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark and figured that if the Ark of the Covenant can melt all those Nazis, surely it can wipe out a few greedy deckhands just fine.

Back at the museum, Carnby arrives and is greeted by Aline. There isn't much time for pleasant hellos before the power goes out. Aline hears bizarre noises coming from other areas of the museum, and when she and Carnby check it out, they're attacked by a group of monsters that look like the evil offspring of Cujo, the Predator, and the creatures from the Alien movies. Carnby manages to get in a few shots on one with his trusty handgun, but they obviously can't take it on. But never fear, a fleet of commandos from Bureau 713, led by Commander Richard Burke (Stephen Dorff), crashes in through a skylight and makes short work of the monster.

After Carnby and Burke get into an argument, Carnby manages to sneak off with Burke's security pass and heads for the Bureau 713 science lab. There, Dr. Sam Fischer (Frank C. Turner) is running an autopsy on the man that previously attacked Carnby. Fischer has managed to identify the man as an ex-713 agent that had been missing for twenty years, and has discovered a long centipede-like bug had fused itself to the agent's spine and took over his entire nervous system.

It turns out that these bugs are somehow connected to the monsters (which 713 has named "Zenoes," for whatever reason), though they never really explain how. I'm not sure, but I guess we're just supposed to assume the monsters are very evolved, very angry versions of the centipedes.

To tell you truth, they probably did say, but this movie's so awful that I just stopped paying attention after a while. But it's not like it matters, since these bugs are only involved in maybe two scenes in the entire movie. But while we don't learn much of anything about the bugs, we do learn that Carnby was one of the twenty orphans that Professor Hudgens experimented on two decades prior. Turns out he has one of those spine-eating bugs in him too, but his bug is long dead, thanks to Carnby suffering an accidental electrocution as a kid. The other nineteen orphans had those bugs in them too, and when Professor Hudgens's crewmen opened up the Abkani sarcophagus, it awakened all those bugs and turned their hosts into guys like the one that tried killing Carnby.

Bureau 713 somehow manages to track the presence of the monsters to Professor Hudgens's gold mine — which is conveniently underneath the orphanage where Carnby lived in his youth — and Carnby, Burke, and Aline learn that Hudgens was behind the whole thing. I guess they didn't read the crawl at the beginning of the movie, otherwise they wouldn't have been so surprised. But then God knows I didn't want to read that crawl either.

So Hudgens ends up opening the Abkani gate back up and starts to let all these monsters out, but Burke kills him and sacrifices himself in order to blow up the gate and close it again. Carnby and Aline survive, but it turns out that the entire human race has presumably disappeared just like the Abkani. Yes, I know I gave away the ending, but I don't care. This movie sucks too much for me to bother trying to avoid that sort of thing. Me doing that just saved you 96 minutes that you could use to do more resourceful things like watching paint dry or smacking your face against a brick wall.

If that whole summary comes across as being a little on the nonsensical side, then I feel I should state that the movie itself didn't give me much help at all. It makes absolutely makes no sense whatsoever, and even thinking about this horrendous excuse for a movie makes me so angry that after watching it, I wanted to beat the hell out of the first person that looked at me funny.

Perhaps I could have just summed it up in a few sentences. Maybe something like: These Native Americans opened a door to Hell, and monsters got loose. A zillion years later, this mad scientist took all these orphans and stuck little monster parasites in their spines. Two decades after that, these little monster parasites turn people into zombies, and they team up with some ugly CGI monsters. Christian Slater and Stephen Dorff kill them all, though Tara Reid's awful acting could have made the monsters contemplate suicide instead. There. Now that I think about it, why didn't I just do that in the first place?

Where to begin, where to begin. Sigh, let's go with that dreadful script first. Credited to Elan Mastai, Michael Roesch, and Peter Scheerer, the movie is apparently less of an adaptation of the original Alone in the Dark game and more of a "quasi-sequel" to the fourth game in the series. Not that it matters, not that I give a damn, but I'm just saying. But no matter what game it's based on, the screenplay is so abysmally bad that it makes my brain hurt. The movie's plot could have been done with some reasonable amount of intelligence, but no, we can't have that. They had to go and make this thing as frustratingly complicated as they could get. It's like they had all these ideas they thought were cool and slapped them all together with no sort of rhyme or reason, with nothing that really connects one scene of the movie to the next.

I also got the impression that Mastai, Roesch, and Scheerer weren't entirely sure what kind of movie they wanted to write. So they just threw in a bunch of horror and action elements, then added a lame voiceover from the Carnby character to make it seem like a bad film noir. The screenplay seems like it wants to do a lot, but it doesn't accomplish much of anything.

The characters are terribly flat and one-dimensional as well. I don't even know if you can really call them characters. They're more like cheap character constructs, placeholders for where the actual characters would have been. There's the rogue detective with the gruff exterior; the mad scientist (who only has five or six rather small scenes in the whole thing); the cute, brainy research assistant; the macho commando that just wants to shoot some monsters and treats most people like dirt; and the mountains upon mountains of nameless, faceless cannon fodder. These characters might not have been so bad if there had at least been some decent dialogue, but Mastai, Roesch, and Scheerer don't even give us that. I'm not saying I could do any better, but I don't believe I could do any worse.

And how about that long text crawl that starts the movie? I just want to punch that thing in the face. If you thought those long text crawls in front of the Star Wars movies were taxing, then you'll probably be looking for the "fast forward" button on your remote control about two seconds into this one. Either they had so little faith in their audience that they believed nobody would "get it" without having it all spelled out for them, or they were just too lazy to set things up properly. I personally think it's a little from Column A, a little from Column B. The crawl is also completely insulting to the viewer's intelligence, as is both incredibly confusing and guilty of giving us way too much information. The movie's first five minutes tell us nearly every major revelation to come, so when the characters find all this information out, it's not shocking or surprising. It just leaves us saying, "Well, it's about time."

The music could have used quite a bit of work as well. Composed by Bernd Wendlandt, the music is overbearing, intrusive, and annoying. The movie's overuse of random heavy metal songs performed by bands nobody's ever heard of really grinds my gears too. It seems like every action scene is set to some metal song that's had its volume turned up to eleven. I can't really concentrate on the movie if I'm too busy trying to keep my ears from bleeding, which should be a lesson to all potential young film composers and soundtrack compilers.

Then there's the cast, who certainly aren't making matters any better. Christian Slater does as good a job as can be expected, but considering the material, I'm not surprised that his performance may be a little lacking. But it could be worse, very worse. He could have mirrored Tara Reid's performance. Holy crap, does she stink up the joint here. Reid's probably the least believable person they could've hired to play a museum curator. She's right up there with Denise Richards playing a nuclear physicist in The World is Not Enough. Reid plays her role here with almost no emotion at all, like she's more concentrated on simply saying her lines than, y'know, acting. Like an actress would.

The third major actor in the movie, Stephen Dorff, seems to realize that the character doesn't require a whole lot of effort from him, so he puts his performance into auto-pilot. Dorff just coasts through, further emphasizing how hollow these characters are. And then there's Matthew Walker. They hint that his character is important, but I doubt this, considering how little screen time he is given. As I said, he has maybe six scenes tops, and considering how flimsy the material is, that doesn't really give him enough time to make any sort of impression. Though even in his limited screen time, I can't really say I thought he'd have made the movie any better with a beefier role.

And lastly, there's our fearless leader, Uwe Boll. If there is just one reason for him to continue directing movies, it's to show potential filmmakers how to screw up a movie. I just don't see why video game publishers continue to hand him the film rights to their properties. At the time of this review, he's done three video game adaptations that huge flops at the box office, and he has three more lined up that would probably be better off heading straight for video store shelves. I'm not usually one to make accusations, but I'm willing to bet that he could screw up Pong: The Motion Picture. But I'm here to discuss Alone in the Dark, so let's do that.

The whole movie looks like it was done with the intentions of making a low-rent made-for-TV movie. Outside of a few really good camera angles from cinematographer Mathias Neumann, the movie looks really, really cheap. For example, the big action scene about fifty minutes into the movie is so horribly done that it's laughable. It's filmed badly, it's edited badly, and the whole thing looks fake. It looks like it was done by putting a strobe light in front of a black backdrop with some crates and miscellaneous junk scattered around. If you're not even going to bother trying, why do it at all?

Everyone involved with this movie should be ashamed of themselves. I understand that some people in Hollywood will occasionally participate in less-than-stellar movies in order to make sure their bills get paid on time, but this is just ridiculous. The truth of the matter is that inside Alone in the Dark is an awesome action/horror movie that is begging to be freed, but all we're given is a half-assed waste of 96 minutes that's comparable to the most mediocre of Sci-Fi Channel Original Movies. It's poorly directed, poorly written, poorly acted... the entire movie is straight-up poor.

I will admit that Alone in the Dark is an improvement over House of the Dead, but that's like saying being punched in the face is better than being kicked in the testicles. It's definitely the lesser of two evils, though not by much. I'll end this review with a warning: unless you're a glutton for cinematic punishment or have extremely low standards, you may want to avoid Alone in the Dark.

Final Rating: *

House of the Dead (2003)

Along with the ideas of remakes and sequels, movies based on video games have become a Hollywood trend in recent years. From games like Resident Evil and Tomb Raider to Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter, if it can be made into a movie, it probably will be. Why else would someone have done a movie version of Super Mario Bros.?

But if anything is certain, it's that cinematic adaptations of video games are very rarely good. While some can be fun to watch, others are so absolutely dreadful that you regret ever having heard its name. One of these movies is House of the Dead, based on the series of arcade games produced by Sega. Nearly offensive in its lack of quality, House of the Dead should be an example of how you shouldn't make a movie based on a video game. So let's get right to the review, and I'll tell you why they think that.

The movie begins with an introduction to five college students — Simon (Tyron Leitso), Alicia (Ona Grauer), Greg (Will Sanderson), Karma (Enuka Okuma), and Cynthia (Sonya Salomaa) — as they search for a boat to take them to a big party on a secluded island off the coast of Seattle. The island is conveniently named "Isla del Muerta," so of course, nothing bad could ever happen. Naming an island "the Island of the Dead" is good luck, right?

So anyway, the group stumbles across the cigar-loving boat captain Victor Kirk (Jürgen Prochnow) and his eccentric first mate Salish (Clint Howard), and offer him a handful of cash in exchange for a ride to the island. Despite Salish's protests that the island is evil, Kirk agrees, and they ship out. However, hot on their tail is Jordan Casper (Ellie Cornell), a cop that may or may not be a member of the Coast Guard who intends to arrest Captain Kirk for something. I guess because he's smuggling illegal cigars, I don't know.

Upon arriving at the island, they discover the island completely deserted, with the exception of a handful of survivors that include Liberty (Kira Clavell), Hugh (Michael Eklund), and Alicia's ex-boyfriend Rudy (Jonathan Cherry). Said survivors explain what exactly turned the party into a ghost town: a huge army of zombies crashed the party and began feasting on every living person in sight. At this point, everything begins going to Hell.

Stranded on the island thanks to zombies overrunning Captain Kirk's boat, those that aren't killed by the zombies take refuge in an abandoned house they discover in the woods. There, they make the discovery that their predicament was caused by a mad scientist named Castillo (David Palffy), who was exiled from Spain hundreds of years earlier for his experiments regarding the reanimation of the dead.

Luckily for these college students, Captain Kirk isn't just a cigar smuggler, but he's a gunrunner too, and he's packing enough weapons to make him chairman of the NRA for life. Now armed to the teeth, these ill-fated party-goers make their last stand against the swarm of undead threatening to overtake them.

Everyone involved with this movie should be ashamed of themselves (though I'll give Clint Howard a "get out of jail free" card, because I like him). One review I've seen calls House of the Dead "the Showgirls of horror," and I think that's a close description. It's a lot like Plan 9 from Outer Space or Howard the Duck, in that it sucks so bad, it nearly overdoes itself and sucks its way into being something worth watching. It's just too funny for words.

The script, written by Dave Parker and Mark Altman, has absolutely no character development at all, along with a severe lack of tension or drama. And would it have been so hard for them to think up a more creative name for Jürgen Prochnow's character than "Captain Kirk"? Why not just call Clint Howard's character "Spock" and refer to the zombies as "Klingons"? Parker and Altman's script also features dialogue so preposterous that it's insulting. Check out some examples...

• "You created it all so you could be immortal! Why?"
• "To live forever!" 

Well, duh. Thank you, Captain Obvious. Take a break, we wouldn't want you to pull a muscle answering any more of these brain busters. And I can't say for sure, but I think someone let Mojo Jojo from The Powerpuff Girls write some of the dialogue. "I became immortal to live forever and be immortal! Bwa ha ha ha ha!"

• "Guys, check out this book. Looks pretty old, maybe it'll help us."

Because God knows any random old book would contain the answer to every possible zombie-related question one could ask. Or did I miss the words "Encyclopedia Satannica" stamped on the side of the book?

(I wish I was making all that dialogue up. If you're not laughing at its inanity, you don't have a soul.)

There's also a plot hole or two that the movie never bothers to explain. Why is the so-called "rave of the century" being held in the middle of the afternoon with only fifteen or twenty people in attendance? (As an aside, why is the rave sponsored by Sega? Was the logo being in there part of the deal to get the film rights?) And just why are the characters so doggone stupid? Surrounded by flesh-eating corpses? Meh. Just saw your girlfriend get slaughtered? No big deal. Gonna die soon? Whatever.

Also, where did all the characters learn to become such good marksmen? These braindead excuses for party-goers, who probably have never even seen a gun in their lives, suddenly turn into John Rambo as soon as they get their hands on a weapon. Despite all evidence pointing towards the contrary, all of the characters are apparently highly trained sharpshooters and skilled martial artists on par with Bruce Lee.

And despite being "college students," they all look like they're over the age of 30. I know television and movie casting directors often cast twenty-somethings as teenagers and young adults, but the cast looked like they were way older than they should have been. The only way they could possibly be college students is if they were all going for their doctorates, which is incredibly doubtful. And not a single member of the cast is worth taking the time and effort to watch the movie, so I'm not going to bother about talking about their terrible, terrible performances. But then again, it's not like they had a decent script to work with or a decent director to motivate them.

And boy, was Uwe Boll's direction horrible. The first noticeable bad move was his decision to overuse the "bullet time" effect. Yeah, it was cool the two or three times it was used in the first Matrix movie, but seeing it multiple times for each character over the course of a twelve-minute shootout is absolute overkill. Is it too much to put the camera in one place and let the action go down? Let's not look past his editing, which was so choppy it made my head hurt. I think Boll went into the editing booth hopped up on a combination of speed and Jolt Cola while battling Attention Deficit Disorder.

But the killer was the video game footage edited into the movie for no reason. Let me repeat that: Boll spliced in footage from the House of the Dead games into the movie at the most insane moments. What's up with this crap? It wasn't even put to good use either. I wouldn't have minded it so much if they'd limited it to just the opening or closing credits, because that was at least a novel idea. But this footage just keeps showing up over and over. If I want video game footage, I'll play the game.

And the sad part is, Boll just keeps on directing horrible movies based on video games. Why any video game company would let him near the movie rights of their games, I'll never know. People crap on Paul W.S. Anderson for doing mediocre movie versions of Resident Evil and Alien vs. Predator, but Uwe Boll makes him look like the reincarnation of Orson Welles. Boll is like the 21st-century Ed Wood, only Wood's films were more charming.

The movie's only redeeming factor was the gore effects, and that's pretty much it. Well, that and being able to see a pre-Smallville Erica Durance (credited here as "Erica Parker") get topless as the movie's second victim. The whole thing is just one big crapshoot. I have no idea how bargain-basement direct-to-video garbage like this got even a limited theatrical release. House of the Dead is one of those movies where you need to watch it with a bunch of friends and spend the whole movie yelling at the screen. So if you and your buddies want to have fun watching an awful horror movie, rent House of the Dead. Otherwise, don't bother. 

Final Rating: *½