Happy New Year!

The stalker squirrel didn’t get me, but the movie Bloodrayne almost did.

Like most films adapted from video games, Bloodrayne is great. If your definition of “great” is, of course, “poorly directed, ineptly shot, incoherently edited, and really seriously badly cast.”

Through the judicious use of the fast forward button, you can condense the movie down to about 27 minutes of entertainment. That’s not enough to salvage the movie, but it’s an amusing way to spend time drinking a cup of coffee. Even the casting of Ben Kingsley and Geraldine Chaplin couldn’t save this movie.

It occurs to me that if you really disliked someone, you could give them this movie as a present and then insist they watch it. To be sure they have to sit through the whole thing, bring beer, act deadly serious about the entire enterprise and keep control of the remote. Rewind and re-watch the “good” parts just to drag out the “fun.” You’ll suffer, too, but I suspect that your target will never, ever bother you again. (I wonder if this would work on a squirrel?)

Highpoints of “the film” included a graphic slo-motion sex scene in some sort of dungeon. This scene did not, thankfully, involve Ben Kingsley and Geraldine Chaplin. Additionally, there was a lengthy and bizarrely random montage of decapitations with gratuitous arterial blood spurts that were totally out of sync with the rest of the movie in just about every way imagineable, including plot, tone, pacing and lighting.

Also, Michelle Rodriguez in what appeared to be a pirate’s costume. It’s possible that by this point I just wasn’t paying attention at all anymore, so I’m loathe to mention that I’m pretty sure Meat Loaf was running around in drag.

Not even Rayne’s propensity to miss her mouth while gulping blood from a chalice, thereby enabling said blood to splash artfully down her cleavage, could save this stinker.

I think I’m making it sound much better than it is.

At least Michelle Rodriguez can probably cop a “I was drunk and didn’t know what I was doing” plea. Sadly, I just realized the film was written by Guinevere Turner who turned the screenplay of American Psycho into a cutting (no pun intended) feminist social satire. I guess everyone has to pay the bills.

I thought the movie had Bill Nighy in it, but thankfully (for his sake) I was mistaken. (If you don’t know who I mean, he’s the excellent actor who stole the show in Love Actually and Underworld, among other movies, with the sheer force of his presence).

If you’re even slightly tempted to watch Bloodrayne, and you don’t have a sponsor or some other responsible adult who can come over to your house and make you step away from your DVD player, at least go read the reviews at Rotten Tomatoes first. There are so many great ones, I can’t pick a favorite, so I’ll just cite this one: “This is a movie that begs you not to watch it.”

Another review at Rotten Tomatoes said that Bloodrayne was “not as bad as getting your eyelid caught on a nail.” Trust me, you’ll have a much better time reading the reviews than you will watching this movie.

Immediately after watching Bloodrayne, we watched Silent Hill. I suspect that Silent Hill was pretty good, but by comparison it seemed brilliant.

I hesitate to praise Silent Hill too deeply because I also watched Valentine in the aftermath of Bloodrayne and even that didn’t seem awful at the time. Valentine was a serial killer movie starring David Boreanaz, Denise Richards, and Amy Irving’s daughter that Tivo recorded from basic cable at 2 a.m.

Yeah. Enough said.