bloodrayne Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Saw some movies last weekend. Some trailers, too. One was for a kidnapping thriller called Taken. A young woman is kidnapped, presumably for ransom, but little do the criminals know that their captive's father is some sort of secret agent badass who will stop at nothing to get his daughter back. Distressingly standard-issue stuff. Even worse, arguably, was The Uninvited -- just the title is so trite it practically begs you to forget it. I mean, this is at least the twelfth movie called The Uninvited. (For the record, there have only been seven Takens.) The plot concerns a teenager who returns home following the death of her mother to find that dad has shacked up with a new girlfriend who, it would appear, is a serial murderess. Also, there are ghosts, J-horror style.

This is not promising. Ordinarily I'd drag myself to these movies out of a sense of obligation, or skip them altogether. (Well, Luc Besson's involvement in Taken would probably ensure a viewing.) But wait -- who are those actors? What is Liam Neeson doing lending his gravitas to a Jason Bourne-style figure with a personal vendetta? And is that Elizabeth Banks, taking time out from being charming and hilarious to play an evil step mother/serial killer who threatens to choke Emily Browning with a pearl necklace?

I think it's time for the Energizer Bunny to be retired so that Uwe Boll can take over. Man, that guy never, ever stops. I wonder if he exhausts himself just getting worked up about everything, rather than just plain working. Last month, he goaded anti-Boll legions together in an anti-Uwe petition. On the heels of that news, Erik posted that Boll was ranting up a storm again, calling Michael Bay a "f**king retard," and complaining about Eli Roth's movies.

But anger, vehemence, and drama are never done for Boll. Now The Hollywood Reporter posts that he has sued Billy Zane in Los Angeles Superior Court. No, not the Zane! How could anyone hate Zane? Uwe Boll. That's who.

Boll claims that he's owed around $700,000 in revenue from his big floppity flop Bloodrayne. He says that Zane suggested Romar Entertainment handle distribution, he promised the film would open in 2,000 theaters, and that a $10 mil advance from Boll would be used to promote the flick. He goes on to say that almost a million bucks was paid to Zane and Romar's James Schramm, and the movie opened in only 950 theaters. Perhaps this doesn't have to do with a Zane scheme, but the fact that after a budget of $25 mil, it only brought in about $4 mil worldwide.

You can take 'im Zane! Now that would be a good showdown -- Zane and Boll in the ring!

Moviegoers are about to be up to their (succulent) necks in vampire movies. Currently in theaters is non-mainstream vampire fare like the Russian film Day Watch, the very limited release Rise: Blood Hunter and the short film "Quartier de la Madeleine", which is Vincenzo Natali's lame contribution to the otherwise enjoyable compilation Paris Je T'Aime. But on their way to multiplexes near you are the big-deal vampire pics Castlevania, I Am Legend, 30 Days of Night, Daybreakers, Cirque du Freak, Dracula Year Zero, The Un Dead, Hotel Transylvania, Bloodrayne II: Deliverance, Already Dead, Town Creek and Blood: The Last Vampire. And straight to your rental queue is Lost Boys 2: The Tribe. This isn't even counting a lot of the vampire indies being made right now.

Officially added to the pile now is Sony's adaptation of Elizabeth Kostova's novel The Historian. The movie was announced two years ago when the studio paid seven figures for the rights to the book, which hadn't yet hit stores. Finally, long after watching the novel become a bestseller (it was ranked #28 for 2005 by Nielsen BookScan), the studio is finally moving forward with the movie. Sony has hired former child actor (Starship Troopers) and singer ('Aladdin' in Aladdin) Brad Kane to write the script. According to producer Douglas Wick (Hollow Man), who is overseeing the project with his Red Wagon partner Lucy Fisher, it has taken two years to find just the right person to capture the novel's sexiness and its credibility. Kane has been rising as a screenwriter recently, having scripted an upcoming film titled These City Walls and having done rewrites on the Richard Pryor biopic, Live. The plot of The Historian deals with a young woman searching for her father who is in turn searching for the grave of Vlad the Impaler (the inspiration for Dracula).

While we all know that the notorious director Uwe Boll likes to act a little nutty now and then, I don't think anyone could have seen this coming. Boll is attempting to auction off a role in his new film Far Cry on eBay. This is just the latest in a series of console-based entertainment that Boll just can't seem to stay away from. Up for grabs is an undisclosed role for the low price of a little over $3000, but you will have to cover your own travel and accommodations. The film is based on UBI Soft's first-person shooter game about an ex-special forces agent for hire stranded on a mysterious island out to rescue his client; the plucky female photojournalist Valerie Constantine. So far, the only casting we have from the film was the rumored addition of Til Schweiger, but that has yet to be confirmed.

Whether the auction is a desperate attempt for publicity or a genuine casting crisis, when it comes to Boll nothing should surprise us. One of his latest films (and there does seem to be an awful lot of them), Postal, managed to offend just about everyone with a gag about 9/11. So in the history of Boll's publicity stunts, auctioning off a movie role might not seem so bad, right? But here's where it gets a little embarrassing: so far Boll has pulled in zero bids. It almost makes you feel sorry for the guy, but then I remember that Bloodrayne 2 teaser and the feeling passes.

[via Kotaku]

It was a good year for much of Hollywood, but a bad year for A Good Year. The Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe team-up only grossed $7 million domestically, and has been labeled a flop. Variety has listed the major box office disappointments for 2006, and interestingly enough, a few of them have to do with water. The appropriately bad way to describe their fate, then, is to say that they drowned. Flushed Away, The Lady in the Water, Poseidon and The Fountain (okay, I didn't see it, but I don't think there's an actual water-type fountain), just couldn't swim. Here's some more bad puns: Sharon Stone didn't have the Basic Instict 2 stay away from a dumb sequel; Producer Dean Devin said, "Flyboys," to his new movie but it crashed and burned; All the King's Men stayed away from this remake, and so did everyone else; Audiences let their Freedomland in other activities besides seeing a movie starring Julianne Moore and Samuel L. Jackson. There's no pun needed for The Wicker Man; it just sucked.

Unlike the biggest flops of all time, none of these movies from 2006 broke a studio or likely ended a career. Ridley Scott and Wolfgang Petersen (director of Poseidon) have had flops before, but they can be forgiven for "flukes" every once in awhile since they usually turn out successful work. Plus, their films did okay business overseas. International box office saves more flops these days than back in the times of the really big bombs. Most of the other filmmakers represented are also probable to bounce back, or at least fall back on their other talents. Joe Roth (Freedomland) has already returned to producing. Steve Zaillian (All the King's Men) is back to writing. Tony Bill (Flyboys) may continue acting. Michael Caton-Jones (Basic Instinct 2) will eventually make another crappy film. M. Night Shyamalan (Lady in the Water) might need to be forced to work on somebody else's script for once, but he isn't going to disappear anytime soon, unfortunately.

Cinematical favorite Uwe Boll has just signed a deal with Brightlight Pictures to bring BloodRayne 2 to a DVD store near you, a piece of news that inspires one to throws one's hands up in the air, look around the room vacantly and mutter "Gee, thanks a lot, Brightlight Pictures."

Citing inspirations like Sergio Leone and John Ford, Dr. Boll is all kinds of psyched about BloodRayne 2, which will actually be a prequel that takes place in The Wild West. (Nope, juast kidding; BloodRayne took place in Renaissance Faire times, so the Wild West setting would still make this a sequel.) And this isn't just ANY horror / action / western sprequel, oh no. Uwe's breakin' out some new weapons on this production: Gone is original Rayne Kristanna Loken, and in her stead we'll get an all-new seksy-vamp chicklet: Natassia Malthe, who played "Typhoid" in Elektra and will soon be appearing in the oft-delayed jiggle-fu epic DOA: Dead or Alive, will be stepping into the demanding role of Betty BloodRayne. So those who were just sure that Loken was Grace Kelly to Uwe Boll's Hitchcock, well, this is a sad day for both of you.

According to ComingSoon.net, BR2 will be written by film editor Christopher Donaldson and assistant cameraman Neil Every. Boll, for his part, still has to finish scotch-taping together his long-awaited trilogy of Seed, Postal and In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale before he can get down to his BloodRayne prequel. Hey Uwe, I speak for most of the world's movie geeks when I say: Take your time.

Apparently more than certain that the brilliant piece of cinema known as BloodRayne was done in by poor marketing and lazy distribution, Dr. Uwe Boll has filed suit against Billy Zane and his Romar Entertainment for their downright ineptitude where the flick's theatrical release is concerned.

Uwe, you see, was hell-bent on getting BloodRayne released in over 2,000 theaters, which shows just how much the guy knows about American movie audiences. But Romar had some print problems and the flick only made it into about 980 movie houses. The grand tally for BloodRayne's domestic release was just under $2.5 million. (Now, call me nuts, but if they'd struck another 1,020 prints ... they would have lost even more money, so perhaps Billy Zane should be suing Dr. Uwe Boll!)

Anyway, Boll (who probably could use the extra income these days, what with his German tax loopholes being zipped shut) is suing Romar for an undisclosed sum. The suit also claims that Billy Z. stuck half a million into his own pocket, which is kinda weird considering the awesome things Boll had to say about Romar last January.

In related news, Cinematical's Scott Weinberg is filing a civil suit against Uwe Boll for making movies that cost nine bucks a ticket, but are actually only worth about 99 cents. If you've paid to see films like House of the Dead, Alone in the Dark, and BloodRayne, join my civil case and get your $27 back.

• Bloodrayne - Teutonic terror Uwe Boll directs movies no more than gravity directs objects to Earth. His grasp of pithy things like story and character development is nearly non-existent, and his penchant for adapting video games has earned him a reputation as a sort of idiot savant (only without the savant part), kind of like if the kid on the porch in Deliverance only knew how to play the riff that Vanilla Ice nicked from Queen's "Under Pressure". His latest, a shameless Blade ripoff about a half-human, half-vampire avenger (Kristianna Loken), is miscast, barely written and staged with the skill of a spastic with cataracts. Currently residing on the IMDB's Bottom 100 (at #34), it and Boll's rotting body of work have elevated the oeuvre of Ed Wood, whose non-charting Plan 9 From Outer Space was once considered the worst film ever made, to common hack status. At least the inclusion of the free PC version of the Bloodrayne 2 video game will help soothe buyer remorse.
 

Alright, I don't pretend to fully understand this news, but it appears as if Uwe Boll not only controls a "group of companies," but also plans to take them public on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. Seriously. According to Screen Daily, starting this summer, shares of Boll AG will be available for public purchase (German financial papers are guessing that initial value of the stock will be listed at around $10 million); Boll hopes to use the fresh infusion of cash to "handle the international sales of [his] own productions as well as to take on sales of films by third parties." Ah. Yes, I'm sure people will be lining up to have Boll's name associated with their projects.

My main response upon reading this article was something along the lines of "The hell?!" While we reported earlier that investors have, in the past, used Boll's films as a sort of tax shelter -- to the tune of nearly $340 million -- it's sort of hard to imagine that people will see movies like BloodRayne and Alone in the Dark as good investments when they're no longer cinematic tax loopholes.

You might recall us mentioning Uwe Boll's hilariously bad BloodRayne around here a time or 12. The ill-fated film cost an estimated $25 million to make, but made only $2.5 million at the box office, a total that I'm sure came as a complete shock to everyone involved. "But ... but ... Uwe Boll directed it! How can it fail?" Despite the box office disaster, however, DVD distributor Visual Entertainment is determined to turn the movie into a hit in the home video market, and they've got a plan to trick people into bring BloodRayne into their homes: package it with a video game.

Since the movie was based on a video game in the first place, it's logical that gamers are pretty much the only people who might be interested in buying it on DVD (though since none of them went to see it in the theaters, Visual might be being a bit over-optimistic here); will they want to play BloodRayne 2 badly enough to drop $26.95 on it? Whether buyers watch the DVD or use it as a coaster, the purchase goes into the charts as a sale for the movie. I know nothing about the BloodRayne game, but this sounds like a brilliant idea by a small distributor -- and what better movie to test the marketing power of packaging a game with a DVD than one that nobody wants to see? If the package sells, you can be sure we'll see a lot more crappy game-based films on shelves with the games in question.