I Finally Watched Bloodrayne for the First Time - Part 2
After watching the first Bloodrayne for the first time and being somewhat amused, but mostly bored by the experience, I looked at the clock and thought, “I’ve got time for another one, I guess.” That, of course, was a mistake, but I knew that at the time anyway. Bloodrayne: Deliverance is a follow-up film by Uwe Boll who decided that he was done with the gothic vampires of the “18th century” and wanted to move further into a more recent historical time, where vampire stories are less often told: the old west. That’s right, he decided to make a western, and it’s probably obvious just by the name alone since there have been plenty of towns called Deliverance in westerns over the decades, but how many of those westerns had to do with vampires? Just in case anyone is wondering, the “wild west” took place in the mid to late 1800’s so the 19th century. So while the setting really jumped in location and time by several hundred years, the synopsis provided by IMDB says that this really only took place a hundred years later. Who knew? Also, in case anyone was wondering, this movie is a lot worse than the first one.
Bloodrayne: Deliverance (2007) - Review
Pros
Zack Ward’s Transylvanian-cowboy accent is really weird and made me laugh
“It’s that damn bear again!” - quote of the movie
Sam Elliot, Josh Brolin, and Keanu Reeves lookalikes fill out the side cast of kooky over-actors
Cons
Is there a plot to this movie? Billy the Kid is stealing children and holding towns hostage?
Abysmal budget made the sets extremely dull; everything is just black and boring
Action scenes are pretty uninteresting to watch
Spend little time assembling and training a team towards the end of the film, for the team to just die; difficult to care about the characters we just met
Dumb movie with bad acting that is sometimes entertaining, but mostly not
Plot & Thoughts
After defeating her father and leaving the far-flung past of the “18th century” Europe behind her, Rayne, now played by Natassia Malthe, has moved on to the wild west in America. Notorious criminal and gunslinger, Billy the Kid (Zack Ward), is actually a vampire with a speech impediment and a penchant for looking at the ground in a menacing, aloof way. He’s going around killing people, turning them into vampires, and stealing children to hold towns hostage, I guess. I’m not really sure what his goal is. What he manages to do is what I’ve just said, but there’s talk at some point of him amassing and army and taking over the country, or something. I guess he never got that part off the ground.
Upon running into Billy and his vampire cronies in the town of Deliverance, Rayne stirs up the hornets’ nest and gets injured/captured. However, she’s saved by Pat Garret (Michael Pare), who teams up with her and helps assemble a team of vampire-killing outlaws. By team, I mean two more people. Also, by the time they actually assemble the team the movie only has about 30 minutes left; I’ve skipped ahead to the more interesting part of the movie.
A majority of this movie is slow, plodding nonsense. It mostly focuses on the people of Deliverance interacting with each other under the marshal law of Billy the Kid, and Rayne just riding around on a horse, investigating the surrounding areas of the town. There’s not a whole lot of action to break up the duller sections of the movie and when the action does occur, as you’d expect, it’s not very exciting.
The most excitement I had watching this was when Zack Ward was on screen and he was talking. I hated and loved his made-up accent that he was doing. It was probably the best part of the film, in all honesty. It didn’t make the overall quality better, but it made the movie more entertaining. Zack Ward is a C/D-list actor who has played several parts in Uwe Boll movies over the years and is clearly having fun with this more central, antagonistic role. The fact that nobody stopped him from doing his stupid voice leads me to believe he was having a good time. I’m sure everyone else was too, even though their acting was all pretty flat by comparison. The Preacher, and part-time Keanu Reeves double (Michael Eklund) helped bring some energy to the latter portion of the film, but it wasn’t enough to make anything more interesting or exciting.
While the original film had a more recognizable cast capable of acting, who mostly looked confused much of the time as to why they were in that dumb movie, Bloodrayne: Deliverance has a more rag-tag cast of people who are trying to act and failing. They’re not overacting in the way that makes bad movies entertaining, unfortunately, with the few exceptions I already mentioned. The clear lack of a budget for the diverse settings and ridiculously gory prosthetics of the previous film make the poorly-choreographed action sequences that much more hollow and dull. So, Deliverance ends up being a pretty bland experience in comparison to it’s predecessor, which already had set a rather low bar.
TL;DR (Conclusion)
Bloodrayne: Deliverance is a boring, bland, and uneventful western with vampires in it. There’s some entertaining schlock scattered about, but this proves that injecting vampires into the wild west does not immediately make a bad film more interesting, in case anyone thought otherwise. The acting is bad across the board, the action is not interesting to watch, and the plot is barely there. The original film, somehow, had a lot more to offer than this. And yet, there is still a third film in the franchise….