The 2006 movie BloodRayne belongs to a number of subgenres: It’s a vampire movie, a video game adaptation, a medieval action picture, and one of those low-budget movies featuring an extremely low-impact performance from an Academy Award winner. But more than any of that, BloodRayne is a January movie (derogatory). If a solid pulp thriller like The Commuter or The Beekeeper is the platonic ideal of a January movie in terms of quality, BloodRayne, first released in North America on Jan. 6, is the platonic ideal of a January movie in terms of artistic and financial failure.
Only four percent of BloodRayne’s Rotten Tomatoes reviews were positive, and the movie made less than $4 million worldwide. Somehow even more fitting: It also spawned two sequels, albeit both direct-to-video obscurities minus the first movie’s weird assortment of name actors. Yet in its way, BloodRayne has proved indirectly influential over the past 20 years of January Cinema studies: It has allowed room for a strong counternarrative to develop in the face of dump-month clichés.
To be sure, the busy holiday box office period and platforming of various awards hopefuls has ensured that plenty of new-release garbage is quietly taken to the January curb over the years. Only in January could a re-release of Star Wars reign as the month’s biggest movie of the entire 1990s. But BloodRayne came out on the early end of a January comeback. A year earlier, January 2005 saw the release of multiple hits: Are We There Yet?, Coach Carter, Hide and Seek, and White Noise – a horror movie released on the very first weekend of the year. That continued in 2006, with the success of Hostel, Big Momma’s House 2, and Underworld: Evolution.
It’s that last movie with which BloodRayne — the single lowest-grossing release of January 2006 — has some janky kinship. Being the adventures of a sword-wielding, sexily attired woman warrior, BloodRayne recalls 2000s-era series like Underworld (which became a January mainstay after its first autumn-released installment) and Resident Evil. Specifically, BloodRayne confirmed Uwe Boll as the poor man’s Paul W.S. Anderson: a filmmaker specializing in hybridizing action and horror, often while adapting various videogame properties.
BloodRayne was Boll’s third crack at a videogame movie following House of the Dead and Alone in the Dark, and it shows only the most meager evidence of improvement at his chosen trade. Mostly the advantage comes from Boll’s starting place: He was working from a script by writer and actress Guinevere Turner, who wrote several screenplays for director Mary Harron including their adaptation of American Psycho; and somehow assembled a cast including Michelle Rodriguez, Michael Madsen, Terminator 3’s Kristanna Loken, Udo Kier, Meat Loaf, and the aforementioned Oscar winner, Ben Kingsley. (It’s not exactly an A-list line-up, but it looks like awards bait compared to some of Boll’s earlier ensembles.) Loken plays Rayne, a human/vampire hybrid referred to as a “dhampir,” who goes on a game-y quest to collect some magical objects that will allow her to confront her evil head-vamp dad Kagan (Kingsley). She’s uneasily assisted by the Brimstone Society, an anti-vampire brigade.
Seems pretty simple! Medieval warriors and vampires in a big, bloody scrum; just what the post-Christmas season needs. Yet apart from his enthusiasm for gore and nudity, Boll shows almost no aptitude for the straightforward language of cinema, like cutting back and forth between plotlines. (Early on, Rayne’s escape from freak-show captivity is portrayed as a pointlessly confusing flashback, even though it happened only moments earlier in the film’s timeline.)
The battle scenes are particularly uncomfortable. The actors look poorly trained and choreographed, and as a result they aren’t just unconvincing in action. They appear genuinely reticent, as if they’re afraid they might actually hurt themselves. This sense of holding back is further exacerbated by Boll’s hilarious tendency to cut around the action of swords entering bodies. The number of shots where characters have already been stabbed is, again, confusing.
So no, BloodRayne is not the type of shlock that looks better 20 years later simply by virtue of being slightly better-lit and less CG-saturated than its contemporary streaming equivalents. It is both of those things, but it still looks plenty cheap and ugly. There are glimmers of interesting ideas (and a more fluid sexuality), which might be the work of Turner, who later estimated that only 20 percent of her screenplay made it into the final film (and in that same interview calls the movie one of the worst ever made). Boll heavily rewrote it himself; he has the stubbornness and passions of a true auteur, with his greatest passion reserved for making movies absolutely terrible.
Anderson himself had this reputation early in his career, and the less discerning B-movie viewer might well fail to see the difference between Resident Evil: The Final Chapter (or non-Anderson action-fantasy junk like Underworld: Rise of the Lycans) and BloodRayne. The reality, however, is that the January B-movie has become much better-crafted than this movie. In the 20 years since BloodRayne, January has been home to offbeat versions of blockbusters like Cloverfield or M. Night Shyamalan’s Split and Glass; effective horror movies like Mama and The Boy; and surprisingly decent crime thrillers like Den of Thieves, with stalwart January fixtures like Gerard Butler, Liam Neeson, or Jason Statham. Bad stuff like The Bye Bye Man and Replicas still turn up, but genre fans no longer have reason to dread the season, no matter what viral internet videos insist.
What’s gone out of style is the specific lady-centric action-fantasy trash that BloodRayne imitates so poorly. Later Underworld sequels did well enough in January to mitigate any negative impact from BloodRayne’s flop, so it’s unlikely this subgenre’s disappearance had much to do with Boll’s failure. But it did contribute to an overall sense of what kind of crap could eke out a wide release in the first month of the year. This may have ultimately allowed these types of movies to flourish in an environment of rock-bottom expectations, even if they’re increasingly skewed toward older, more stereotypically male audiences. BloodRayne embodied the January movie so it could accidentally destroy it.
