Is Uwe Boll, the antichrist of cinema?

Uwe Boll is very fond of making films based on video games. I first saw his House of the Dead (2003), in which he thought it a good idea to intercut in small bits of the video game the movie was inspired by. It was a badly done movie that seemed wholly built around an action sequence in which teens with machine guns blast away unending hoards of zombies. It was bad, but it was laughably bad. I can't say the same for BloodRayne.

The first thing I noticed about this movie was the cast. This movie boasts the acting talent of Michael Madsen, Michelle Rodriguez and Billy Zane, not to mention Academy Award winner Ben Kingsley. Why is the man who played Gandhi in this movie? Seriously, was he that in need of a paycheck? Michael Pare and Udo Kier, I understand. Even Meatloaf and Kristanna Loken. I didn't know if I should laugh or cry when I read all these names.

Despite being a period vampire flick, swords and all, there was little to no choreography for the fight scenes. Boll seems to have made up for this fact by cutting quickly in the fights so you don't actually have any clue what is going on except that everyone is fighting really pathetically. Loken is particularly horrible with a sword and it shows throughout the movie.

There is a ridiculous amount of action in this film that is completely unmotivated. Rodriguez character arc comes out of left field as does the romance between Loken and Matthew Davis' character Sebastian. I gave up trying to follow the plot and assumed it was some horrible attempt to set up the opening of the video game. I've never played this video game but what I could glean from the movie it seems to be little more than a Castlevania ripoff.

I went into this movie with no expectation other than that I could laugh at how absurd it was. It failed to even meet that paltry expectation. It was so confusing, badly done and acted that I just felt sad for everyone involved. As for whether Uwe Boll is the antichrist of cinema? Probably not, but the man who keeps greenlighting him for movies, might be.