In 18th-century Romania, after spending much of her life in a traveling circus, human-vampire hybrid Rayne escapes and plots to take down her father, Kagan, the evil vampire king. When she's discovered by three vampire hunters, she manages to convince them to spare her life and join her cause. But slaying a vampire as powerful as Kagan will be no easy task.
22 Jan Bloodrayne (2005)
The Vamp Within
Yes, I know this stinks like a Belgian elevator. Bad movies are sometimes worth it.
I came to this for three reasons. One was that I am on a circus kick and I heard this story begins at a circus. Its often the case that what follows in the body of the movie is implied to be the show you see beginning in the tent. Not so here.
Also, I knew that the girl was apt. Whoever she is, her job is to wear the costume attractively and convey that adolescent notion of untapped, uncontrolled power, a mix of perversion, curse, sex and active destruction. They got this part right enough and our character wears her clothes better than Kate, Milla or Charlise, Angela or the other ones. Its not easy, I suppose, to get this right. She’s redhead as required.
But the main draw was the writer. We can pretend otherwise, but movies are art and often the artist that matters is the writer. That’s so in this case, where everyone else seems to be an amateur, busying themselves around the very solid forward movement of what our writer wants to do.
And it isn’t about making good movies, or even smart one. It is about constructing a public personality for herself to inhabit. I’m all for it. The woman in question here is Guinevere Turner.
She’s written, directed and acted, working out of New York. She wants to be outrageous, a sort of Hedwig. She’s lesbian and challengingly so; one of her early projects was “Go Fish,” a personal, rather effective little movie about lesbian dating.
Since then its been deliberately edgy and publicly so, including the psycho and Bettie Page projects. If you take it all, its an attractive outline. Sure, I know it is a fabricated life, that she is writing a life first and populating it with characters her character creates.
But there’s a path, a line of sight through it all that she allows into herself. Honesty, risk, relatively competent writing. Bodies obvious. Rare enough to follow. She may be a friend some day.
Posted in 2006
Ted’s Evaluation — 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.
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