7 posts tagged “unintentional comedy”
Bloodrayne is a movie that readers have literally asked me to sit down and watch. So, yesterday, I rented two movies. One of them was surprisingly and genuinely good, and the other was Bloodrayne, and it’s Bloodrayne I’m going to talk about today.
I’m going to stick up for Dr. Boll on two things right out of the gate, and that’s the last equal time you’re likely to see him get. First of all, Bloodrayne is far from the worst movie ever made. Second, if Uwe Boll sat down at the first pre-production meeting and said, ‘I want to make a movie with a smoking hot girl and a metric shit-ton of arterial spray,’ then Bloodrayne is actually an unmitigated success. From a certain point of view.
During the director’s commentary, Boll comments negatively on Stephen Sommers’ Van Helsing. And if it were anyone other than Uwe Boll, I’d more than likely have agreed with the sentiment. I mean, Van Helsing is really bad, unless you really, really like to see Frankenstein’s Monster swinging from a rope, Errol Flynn style. If you like that, Van Helsing is THE movie for you; not even Monster Squad has that business.
Where Boll’s distinguished competition went right, though, was in its attempt to make a fun, campy swashbuckler. Bloodrayne, for contrast, plays it straight, and after maybe 15 minutes, it becomes strenuous to watch. All the film’s dialogue is long, drawn-out and free of contractions, let alone common sense.
Bloodrayne appears to take place in Europe in ‘the past’, but I’ll be damned if I can determine when. Best as I can tell, it’s a pre-industrial Eastern Europe where people rode horses, fought with swords, and dressed like extras in a Falco video. Hell, I guess it could take place in the modern day. The biggest offender when it comes to fashion faux pas in Bloodrayne has to be either Michael Maden or everyone’s favorite theatrical rocker from a bygone era, Meat Loaf. I love the hell out of Meat Loaf, but I needed to leave the room and vomit during his big scene, a scene in which he is apparently so fucking high and surrounded by Romanian hookers. Right after this, he fights Madsen’s epically coiffed character Vladimir, and it’s like Dave Coverdale and Steve Perry get into a bitch-slapping contest.
Despite all the internecine double-dealing and secret history in the movie, Bloodrayne’s plot is ill-defined and pretty bare-bones. Talking is only a vehicle to move characters to places where they get to make other characters spray their blood all over the place. And I mean all over the place. Likely, this is to distract people from the fact that the fight choreography was done by the film wizards behind the Hobgoblins rake fight. And oh god, there’s a lengthy (and clumsy)kata sequence. Really, the best fight in the movie has to be the 'duel' between Rayne and Michelle Rodriguez's Katarin. And it has nothing to do with the fight itself. Look at this:
Kristanna Loken's stunt double, dressed as Rayne, is standing there watching. It's completely surreal. I kept expecting another, more dishevelled Rayne to walk into the frame and start to speak-sing "Rocket Man."
What's the best part of the movie? Well, it's Ben Kingsley. It's like after Dungeons and Dragons, Jeremy Irons made some kind of bet with every other respectable British actor that they couldn't appear in a worse film. Kingsley is great to watch because he doesn't give a shit at all. Hell, in one scene near the end of the movie, Kingsley gives a rousing speech to his army of thralls (one thing Bloodrayne never tires of explaining is that Kingsley's evil vampire Kagan has an army of thralls) that sounds like he's reading a grocery list to someone over a speakerphone.
Nearly topping the unintentional comedy of The Wicker Man, Bloodrayne ends with a slow-motion clip montage that has no meaning or context whatsoever. Watching it was like a religious experience, but not in the way you think. Watching this clip montage was like discovering that God doesn’t exist.
I said up top that Bloodrayne is not the worst movie in the world, but the catch-22 here is that the worst movie in the world – Nail Gun Massacre or Skeleton Man – is about ten times more entertaining than a simply really, really bad movie. I think I can best sum Bloodrayne up by saying that I’d rather watch Queen of the Damned.
I watched The Wicker Man last night, not the good one from the '70s, but the remake with Nicolas Cage. I missed this in theaters, so I have no idea what the SHOCKING ALTERNATE ENDING even was. You'd think that, if you were making a significant change to a film, that the original version would be available as at least a deleted scene. If you agree with me, you obviously had nothing to do with this film's dvd release, which boasts a commentary by Leelee Sobieski and some other person whose name escapes me. Now, just in case you haven't seen The Wicker Man, I'm going to clue you in: Leelee Sobieski is in this movie for maybe five whole minutes, and only spends about two of those minutes with her mouth open. Why not just throw the Best Boy on the commentary track, too? Or a couple of extras? I can understand you not wanting to have Nic Cage talk about anything at all, but what about, like, Ellen Burstyn or something?
The film is basically a thriller, and like most thrillers made these days, it has absolutely no ability to create or maintain suspense. Especially because this is a remake, and the big reveal of the film is also the title. Director Neil Labutte really, really tries to make Summers Isle seem creepy, but he fails so much. Yes, the ladies of the island seem cliquish, secretive and rude, but I would seem cliquish and rude if some asshole big city cop showed up unannounced and went out of his way to be a flaming cock to absolutely everybody. Cage's character - who is nothing more than a traffic cop, as near as I can tell - has no idea how to do anything approaching detective work, either, as evidenced by his penchant for walking to a crowded room and browbeating about 20 people at a time instead of actually asking questions or soliciting assistance from potential witnesses. By the time Nic busts into a schoolhouse and tells the kids they're all jerks (actually happens), you get the feeling that nobody's talking to him because he's an abrasive idiot; the creepy cult and its secret plot are merely incidental. Showing some Batman-like prowess, Cage's amazing detective skills, when they are on display, consist of asking the same question four to five time without allowing any time for a response. My favorite example of this is, "How'd it get burned!?" If you've seen it, you know what I mean.
I think that certain elements of the film could have benefited from, say, new music. The scene where Cage is chased by enraged bees, for instance, would go great with Yakety Sax. And this - scenes that are supposed to be taut and tense, but are actually fucking silly - is the hallmark of the film. The gran gala of this comes at the film's climax, when Officer Cage runs wild through the creepy village, kicking down doors and tearing masks off of kids' faces, all in an last, desperate attempt to locate his missing daughter. Out of context, though, this looks like a man going from door to door and ruining a very festive party. Which is a movie I would watch in a heartbeat, but not one that I'm prepared for when I sit down to watch The Wicker Man.
Really, the only good thing I can say about this film is that it begins with an explosion and ends with a giant fire.
It's simply not enough for me to hold forth on the end of this movie. I combed the internet for some still images I could use to share my pain, but I have hit the jackpot here. Effects studio Velocity Ape has a clip of the end of Gravedancers set to Rammstein. It is a surreal and insane experience. I urge you to watch it over and over again.
Click here for a spectral skull chasing a Humvee through a house.
So, The Covenant.
Dumb, dumb WB-style fun. Simultaneously the best and worst part of the movie is the quipping villain. If there's one thing the screenwriter of The Covenant is bad at, it's writing quips. If there's one thing the tool who played the villain is bad it, it's apparently delivering quips. It makes for a train wreck. Around the time he tells another magic using character that he's going to make him "his wiyatch", I couldn't decide whether I wanted to walk out or watch the movie a second time.
Last night, I watched Alone In the Dark.
Why? Because I hate myself and want to die, and I figured Uwe Boll might just be the man to do it. That I am typing this may be proof that he was not, although it could have given me some sort of slow-acting fatal illness.
I've never played an Alone in the Dark game, so I can't tell what elements of the movie constitute the brutal rape of the franchise and which are simply badly adapted, but seeing the film has drastically reduced my desire to spend coinage on anything with the title Alone In The Dark stamped on it.
The film is simply mediocre to begin with, but it reaches a point where it becomes laughably bad, and you'll know it when you see it, because you will have two options: insanity or laughter.
Dead End Road is a hillariously bad film about an Edgar Allen Poe themed killer. the film peaks early in, though, when a detective examining a murder scene says, "Quoth the Raven... what's that mean?" to which a senior detective snaps "READ YOUR POE!" which prompts a staredown between the two.
Good stuff. Good stuff.
I do it to myself.
I sought out possibly the worst movie I could find, and I purchased it, and I watched it.
Now the genie is out of the bottle. And it cannot be put back.
A half-hour film that I wrote and directed nearly 7 years ago, one that stars stuffed animals in the forest, looking for a witch, is more professionally done than Nail Gun Massacre. That cannot be emphasized nearly enough. This film had a budget of nearly twenty US dollars and was shot over the course of one day. Nail Gun Massacre cost, at most, three times as much in terms of time and money spent, but the human cost, nay, the spiritual cost, is so much deeper.
The watchword of this film is 'bad'. Bad acting, bad writing, bad hair, bad breasts, and bad, bad, bad jeans. Yes. Bad breasts. Breasts so bad that I begged for the overexposed orbs to be closeted away deep inside a blouse or sweater. The strongest suit of the movie is the original score, a derivative pastiche of the Halloween and Friday the 13th soundtracks. It is as stirring as it sounds.
Perhaps the biggest failing in the film, and I won't even address the plot here, is this: the killer quips incessantly. however, his motorcycle helmet prevents him from being distinctly understood. Imagine Freddy speaking into a voice changer while stuffing his mouth with socks.
Watching Nail Gun Massacre has burned at least five years off of my allotted stay in Purgatory.
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