BloodRayne had its world premiere at the Austin Film Festival on October 23, 2005, and was released in the United States on January 6, 2006, and in Germany on September 14, 2006. It received negative reviews and grossed $3.7 million. Two sequels were released, BloodRayne 2: Deliverance in 2007 and BloodRayne: The Third Reich in 2011.
Plot
Rayne is an unholy breed of human and vampire, known simply as a "dhampir". Dhampirs are unaffected by crucifixes and a diminished thirst for human blood but maintain a weakness to water. Rayne is the daughter of Kagan, a vampire king, who has gathered an army of thralls, both vampire and human, in order to annihilate the human race. Rayne was conceived when Kagan raped her mother, who was murdered when she refused to hand Rayne over to him.
Sebastian, Vladimir, and Katarin are members of the "Brimstone Society", a group of warriors sworn to fight against vampires. The trio hear of Rayne working as a carnival freak against her will. Suspecting Rayne's lineage as a dhampir, Vladimir plans to recruit her in order to overthrow Kagan. Kagan is also hunting for Rayne, fearing she will interfere with his plans.
Rayne escapes captivity when an abusive caretaker tries to rape her. On the road, Rayne encounters and saves a family being attacked by vampires. A fortune teller reveals to Rayne that Kagan has become the most powerful vampire in Romania and resides in a well-protected castle. She tells Rayne that Kagan seeks an ancient talisman, a mystical eye, and if she finds it, the eye will allow her to gain an audience with him. Rayne sets out to the monastery, where the eye is hidden, in order to find it.
Rayne shelters for the night at the monastery and later sneaks away to where the talisman is guarded by a hammer-wielding, deformed monk, who she kills. Booby traps further protect the talisman, and when Rayne lifts it from its pedestal, the chamber floods with holy water. As Rayne hangs from the ceiling to avoid the water, the talisman falls from the box, but she catches the eyeball. Examining it closely, the eye magically becomes absorbed into her own eye, and when she falls into the water, she is somehow unaffected by it.
When she leaves the chamber, the monks explain the artifact is one of three body parts which came from an ancient vampire called Belial, who had found a way to overcome the weaknesses of a vampire. The eye overcomes holy water, the rib overcomes the cross, and the heart overcomes sunlight. When Belial died, the parts of his body were hidden across the land. As Kagan desires all these parts in order to assume Belial's powers, it becomes the heroes' mission to stop him.
Rayne is brought to the headquarters of the Brimstone Society and they agree to work together to kill Kagan. Katarin does not trust Rayne and betrays Brimstone to her father, Elrich, who has fallen in league with Kagan, but seeks to betray him and gain power for himself. The location of the heart talisman is known to Katarin as her grandfather hid it in water-filled caves. She seeks it out but Rayne kills her and takes it. With the talisman, Rayne attempts to gain an audience before Kagan, but he takes the heart and throws her in the dungeon. He plans to extract the eye as part of a ritual. He realizes too late that Rayne had only given him an empty box and not the heart.
Sebastian and Vladimir intervene, battling Kagan and his minions, but both are fatally wounded, leaving Rayne in a final battle against Kagan. As Sebastian dies, he fires a final bolt from his crossbow, but Kagan is too quick and is able to catch it. Rayne is able to summon her last reserves of strength and plunge the bolt into his heart. As she tends to Sebastian, he chooses to die rather than let Rayne save him.
In the aftermath of the battle, Rayne sits on her father's throne, reflecting on the events that have transpired. Rayne later departs the castle alone and rides off into the mountains.
Billy Zane as Elrich, father of Katarin and a powerful nobleman. He has fallen in league with Kagan, but secretly desires to take his power for himself. Zane described it as a pleasure to work with such a decisive director.[3]
Production
Screenwriter Guinevere Turner turned in the first draft two weeks late. Rather than ask for redrafts, Boll accepted it and then made many of his own changes; and he then asked the actors to "take a crack at it". Turner estimated only 20% of her script was actually filmed.[4][5]
The film opened in 985 theaters across the United States on 6 January 2006. It was originally to have played at up to 2,500 theaters, but that number dropped to 1,600 and ended up lower due to prints being shipped to theaters that had not licensed the film.[6][7]
Billy Zane was involved with distributor Romar Entertainment and Uwe Boll later sued him for revenue owed.[8]
Box office
In its opening, the film only made US$1,550,000.[1] The film ended up grossing US$3,591,980 (June 2006) against a production budget of US$25 million.[1]
Critical response
On Rotten Tomatoes, it has a 4% approval rating based on 53 reviews, with an average rating of 2.9/10. The site's consensus reads: "BloodRayne is an absurd sword-and-sorcery vid-game adaptation from schlock-maestro Uwe Boll, featuring a distinguished (and slumming) cast."[9] It was ranked 48th in Rotten Tomatoes's 100 worst reviewed films of the 2000s.[10] On Metacritic it has a weighted average score of 18% based on 13 reviews, summarizing the reviews as "overwhelming dislike".[11]
Joe Leydon of Variety said that the film "lurches from incident to incident at a graceless plodding place, offering little in the way of genuine excitement—the swordfights often are confusingly cut and choreographed—and only minimal amounts of guilty-pleasure titillation".[12] Maitland McDonagh of TV Guide wrote: "Though indisputably the best of Uwe Boll's first three video-game-into-film adaptations, this gory, ludicrous horror-action picture isn't good by any standard".[13] Critics ridiculed Boll for hiring actual prostitutes instead of actors for a scene featuring Meat Loaf in order to save on production costs.[14][15][13]
Berge Garabedian of JoBlo's movie reviews described as the film as "actually pretty decent.. for what it is", namely a video game adaptation, with a hot lead actress in the form of Kristanna Loken and a number of surprisingly fun and bloody action sequences. He acknowledges the dialog is poor and the story lame but says the film is "not as bad as you'd suspect" and an adequate, bloody, low-budget vampire film.[16] Steve Chupnick of the Latino Review gave the film a B rating, saying that although it was not a good film, it was far from the worst he's seen and mentioned the Kristanna Loken nude scene as something in the film's favor.[17]
Actor Michael Madsen called BloodRayne "an abomination... a horrifying and preposterous movie", but added that he enjoyed working with Boll and would certainly work with him again if asked.[18]Laura Bailey, who was the voice of Rayne in the BloodRayne games, was asked at her panel at Anime Boston 2007 what her thoughts were on the film adaptation, and said: "Oh God, that movie sucked. And that movie was so bad. I saw it on The Movie Channel and I couldn't even get through 20 minutes of it! It was so bad and it was kinda sad that they took that because I really liked the games".[19]Guinevere Turner, who wrote the draft screenplay, found the film laughable and suggested that it was the "worst movie ever made" but that it was so camp it might ripen with age.[4][5]
In 2009, Time listed the film #6 on their list of top ten worst video game movies.[23]
The film was number one on GameTrailers countdown of the worst video game movies ever. The reviewers from GameTrailers said that "every actor is miscast, every wig is too fake, every sex scene is too inappropriate, and every action scene is too improvised".[24]
A sequel, BloodRayne 2: Deliverance, was released in 2007. Natassia Malthe replaced Loken in the lead role.[25] Due to the poor box office of the first film, BloodRayne 2: Deliverance went direct-to-video instead. A third film, BloodRayne: The Third Reich was released in 2011. Malthe reprised her role as Rayne.[26] Both sequels were directed by Uwe Boll. Michael Paré appeared in all three films, but as different characters: Iancu, Pat Garrett, and Commandant Ekart Brand, respectively.
Home media
Before the DVD of this film was released, Boll removed the Romar name and logo from the credits and packaging of this film. As a result, Romar ceased distributing the film. In addition to the R-rated version which was shown in cinemas, a more violent unrated director's cut including an extended ending was released on DVD. The director's cut DVD box set included a full copy of the BloodRayne 2 video game on the second DVD.[27]
Kristanna Loken is an American actress, model and director. After her modelling career, in which she participated in the 1994 Elite Model Look, Loken started her acting career in 1994 as the third actress to play Danielle 'Dani' Andropoulos on an episode of As the World Turns. She later appeared in several television shows and films, such as Mortal Kombat: Conquest and Air Panic (2001). Her breakthrough role was as the gynoid T-X in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003), for which she was nominated for two Saturn Awards. She has since starred in films such as BloodRayne (2005), in which she portrayed Rayne, Bounty Killer (2013), and Darkness of Man (2024), as well as the TV series Painkiller Jane (2007), The L Word (2007–2008) and Burn Notice (2011–2012).
Alone in the Dark is a 2005 action horror film directed by Uwe Boll and written by Elan Mastai, Michael Roesch, and Peter Scheerer. Based on the video game series of the same name, it stars Christian Slater, Tara Reid, and Stephen Dorff as paranormal investigators who combat a supernatural threat. The film's story is a loose adaptation of the game Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare (2001).
Guinevere Jane Turner is an American actress, screenwriter, and film director. She wrote the films American Psycho and The Notorious Bettie Page and played the lead role of the dominatrix Tanya Cheex in Preaching to the Perverted. She was a story editor and played recurring character Gabby Deveaux on Showtime's The L Word.
BloodRayne is an action-adventure hack and slash video game developed by Terminal Reality and released on October 31, 2002. The game has since spawned a franchise with the addition of sequels, films, and self-contained comic books.
In Balkan folklore, a dhampir is a mythical creature that is the result of a union between a vampire and a human. This union was usually between male vampires and female humans, with stories of female vampires mating with male humans being rare.
Nocturne is a 1999 action-adventure survival horror video game set in the late 1920s and early 1930s – the Prohibition and Great Depression era. The player takes the part of The Stranger, an operative of a fictional American Government secret organization known as "Spookhouse", which was created by President Theodore Roosevelt to fight monsters. He investigates four strange cases and saves people from classic monsters such as werewolves, zombies, and vampires.
BloodRayne 2 is an action hack and slash video game developed by Terminal Reality for PlayStation 2, Xbox and Microsoft Windows. It does not follow on directly from where BloodRayne finished; instead, it takes place 60 and 70 years later in a contemporary 2000s setting.
Uwe Boll is a German filmmaker. He came to prominence during the 2000s for his adaptations of video game franchises. Released theatrically, the films were critical and commercial failures; his 2005 Alone in the Dark adaptation is considered one of the worst films ever made. Boll's subsequent projects, released during the 2010s, were mostly released straight to home media. After retiring in 2016 to become a restaurateur, Boll returned to filmmaking in 2022. His films are financed through his production companies Boll KG and Event Film Productions.
In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale, is a 2007 German-American action-fantasy film directed by Uwe Boll and starring Jason Statham, Claire Forlani, Leelee Sobieski, John Rhys-Davies, Ron Perlman and Ray Liotta. It is inspired by the Dungeon Siege video game series. The English-language film was an international co-production and filmed in Canada. It premiered at the Brussels Festival of Fantastic Films in April 2007 and was released in theatres in November 2007.
Romar Entertainment was a California-based film distribution company founded in 2003 by James Schramm and partnered with Billy Zane in 2005.
BloodRayne 2: Deliverance is a 2007 direct-to-DVD Western horror film set in 1880s America and directed by Uwe Boll. It is a sequel to the 2005 film BloodRayne, which was also directed by Boll, and stars Kristanna Loken. In Deliverance, Natassia Malthe replaces Loken in the lead role. The film received negative reviews from critics.
BloodRayne is a media franchise that originated with an action-adventure video game series originally developed by Terminal Reality and published by Majesco Entertainment which began with the game of the same name in 2002.
Adrienne McQueen is a German-American actress.
BloodRayne: The Third Reich is a 2011 direct-to-DVD vampire action film written by Michael Nachoff and directed by Uwe Boll, and starring Natassia Malthe as dhamphir Agent Rayne and Michael Paré as vampire Nazi officer Ekart Brand.
Noah Dalton Danby is a Canadian actor known for his work in television, film, and video game motion capture. On television, he is known for his recurring roles as Cha'ra in Stargate SG-1 (2004–2007), Sukar in Defiance (2013–2014), Zachary Cain in Bitten (2014–2016), Russell in Shadowhunters: The Mortal Instruments (2017–2019) and Confessor in Titans (2022–2023).
Rayne, sometimes called Agent BloodRayne or simply the Dhampir, is a fictional character in the BloodRayne series of video games. Created by Terminal Reality, she is the series' titular protagonist, appearing in both games and later extended media, such as comic books and films related to the series. In English she is voiced by Laura Bailey in BloodRayne and BloodRayne 2 and Jessie Seely in BloodRayne: Betrayal; in Japanese she is voiced by Romi Park in BloodRayne. She was portrayed by Kristanna Loken in the first live action film, and by Natassia Malthe for its sequels.
Darfur is a 2009 American film directed by Uwe Boll concerning the War in Darfur, starring David O'Hara, Kristanna Loken, Billy Zane and Edward Furlong. The film was also released as Attack on Darfur.
Blubberella is a 2011 German exploitation comedy film written and directed by Uwe Boll. The plot is about an obese dhampir superhero, set in German-occupied Europe. The entire film is a scene-for-scene spoof of BloodRayne: The Third Reich with most of the same cast and crew. The film received negative reviews.
BloodRayne: Betrayal is a 2D side-scrolling action game released in 2011 for PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and Windows. Arc System Works published the PlayStation 3 version in Japan under the name BloodRayne: Crimson Slayer on May 1, 2014.
1 2 Ben Gilbert, @RealBenGilbert (26 October 2011). "Bloodrayne screenwriter explains the perils of working with Uwe Boll". Engadget. Retrieved 2 April 2020. It blows, I mean it's like the worst movie ever made. It's like is it Showgirls worthy in terms of like how it's so bad that it's campy. I think it is I think it's gonna ripen.
↑ Steve Chupnick (1 April 2006). "Bloodrayne". Latino Review. Archived from the original on 26 January 2010. The rest of the film goes on with Rayne kicking ass and taking names. Good battle scenes and sword fights, and a hot-ass chick – what else can you ask for? Rating B.
↑ "Madsen Still Scarred by BloodRayne Movie". ContactMusic.com. 30 August 2008. Retrieved 13 December 2009. But, saying all that, Madsen would consider making another movie with the eccentric filmmaker: 'Uwe was fun. If he called me tomorrow and wanted me to be in a movie, I would do it'.
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