After Sapph trashed my weekend, the bastard, I had no choice but to seek solace in something always worth the time -- really terrible movies. This time I picked what I hoped to be a really terrible fantasy vampire movie, and a really terrible sci-fi vampire movie. BloodRayne and Vampire Wars: Battle for the Universe.

BloodRayne's plot really wouldn't be so bad (apart from not making sense with the game, something I really liked about House of the Dead, how its plot dovetailed with the game plot), only it's got really stilted and poorly written dialog. Then the actors were coached to deliver it in an even more horrible manner. Especially Micheal Madsen, who I know is a good actor. True, he has a generally deadpan and stilted delivery (which is perfection for his character in Sin City), but this is just remarkable in its horribleness. The sex scene is pretty good, I'll grant, but if one good scene involving nudity was enough to make me buy movies, I would own Darkwolf. At least the nude scene in Darkwolf was longer. Not every movie can support a fifteen minute nude photography session the way Darkwolf does -- if only they made that the main point of the movie and had five minutes with a werewolf at the beginning and the end, it would be a much better movie. But I digress. The movie was not the be all end all of crappy horrible movies. It was not as bad as everyone claims it to be (even granting the lonely guy hormones going which suggest any movie with attractive female nudity has some good points, there have been much worse movies I've seen, Darkwolf, for instance). It was, however, very very bad. Uwe did not disappoint me in that at least.

For Vampire Wars, ignore the IMDB commentator -- he didn't even get the main vampire alien enemies right. The one he mentions is a side note, not the main villains, who are far more traditional vampires. I'm guessing he A.) doesn't like sci-fi in general, B.) doesn't like vampires, and C.) didn't get the surprising social commentary -- or disagrees with it. I was pleasantly surprised with the movie. It delivered what I wanted, a sci-fi romp with people shooting lots of vampires with shotguns, managed to be somewhat better than I expected, and even featured the aforementioned surprising social commentary. It's actually a modern social commentary about the dangers of moral equivalence. You can tell that's what it is because of the language used. I heard the exact same language (the discussion of imperialism and manifest destiny) come out of some people when the Coalition first hit Iraq in Gulf War 2. And it came out of Canada. How about that? I might just buy this one. I think it's a message from the Canadian right wing, saying "Hey, America, we're here, and even though our idiot friends are the loud ones, we're behind you." But maybe I'm just projecting Canada onto the hippies that learn the error of their ways and help the vampire hunters at the end.

2 Comments:

• At 1:59 PM, August 13, 2006,  Unknown said…

  You can complain about me not wanting to go bar hopping only after you are rendered incapable of doing shots of anything alchoholic. I STILL get sick from the mere idea of drinking right now.

   

• At 2:17 AM, August 14, 2006,  Avvy said…

  heh. That's your own fault really. And I'll cure you of that soon enough. Besides, I've been sick before. Hell, this last week I went out drinking with a friend from back home and got sick the next day (stomach bug or something), so I took the day off from work and still sucked it up to take my brother out drinking for his birthday that night. Wow, that makes me sound like an alcoholic.

   

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