Movie Review - Blood Rayne

Ever wonder what you can do with weird sets of things? For instance if you have a hand watch, a match, and a needle you can GPS your location and manage to get out of a maximum security prison McGyver style. Or if you had a positron deflector and some photon torpedoes you can go and protect the human federation from alien enemies. BUT, if you had 100 bored untalented actors, lots of red paint, and a memory span that lasts 5 seconds you can make the movie: Blood Rayne.

While i was in queue to buy the tickets for the movie, there was a sound in the back of my head that was tingling and saying "No, don't do it... you'll live to regret it" but i dismissed it as another part of my paranoid life style. Little did i know that it was my subconscious trying to save me from one of the most horrible experiences in my life. As soon as the movie started i remembered that Blood Rayne was in fact a video game, and that this is a movie adaptation of the game. I immediately braced myself for the worst; we all know what game movies turn out to be, and i figured that this one won't be any different.

If you ever played the game Blood Rayne, you'll agree that It is indeed a very strange game that tried to combine too many incoherent things. The movie adaptation -which is a prequel to the game-, was no better. Apart from the already mentioned problem, it had a very.... "interesting" mix of characters. Every body's motive to conquer or save the world doesn't go beyond 5 worded sentences. There is the evil vampire Kaigen who wants to rule the world, the damphire Rayne who wants to avenge her mothers' death, the enigmatic Vladimir who is there to protect the world from vampires, the side kick Sebastian who tags along with Vladimir for the heck of it, and the venomous Cathrin who wants -along with her father- to turn the tables so that they rule the world instead.

Some interesting directive points were that any fight lasts a maximum of 15 seconds and always ends with LOTS of blood spluttering all over the place, probably a poor attempt to hide the lack of acting skills or perhaps the crappy dialogue.
I am also convinced that the director is in fact a computer programmer, because he managed to implement the round-robin method to dialogues. You would be in one place hearing two people talk, and before their conversation is over, you get yanked into another scene with another conversation, into a third one, back to the first to continue where they left off.

Everybody in the film was looking for the 3 parts of the ancient vampire "Belia", because they can endow a vampire with unimaginable powers. Rayne got 2 of them, and Kaigen got the last one, and neither one of them used it along the entire course of the movie. You might think the parts are worthless, but without them the movie would be about a bunch of people running around killing each other in gory and bloody ways.

Of course, somebody taught the script writer that day the phrase "So be it" because Kaigen (played by Ben Kingsly) keeps on using it every other line.
Kaigen: Give me the heart and i shall let you live.
Rayne: You will have to rip it out of my body.
Kaigen: So be it.

Kaigen: What news you have?
Underling: Vladimir is attacking.
Kaigen: If it's a war he wants, So be it.

over and over and over and over...

The single thing worth watching in this movie are the R-rated scenes which are almost lettered all over the place, but thanks to Jordanian theaters, those were cut out, making the entire experience so much more rewarding.

None of the characters was acting convincingly, and definitely the script didn't help. Maybe the game story sucked, but even then the director and actors could have saved face by a) doing a decent job at it. b) not doing it in the first place. A total train wreck from start to end. Hope you enjoy it as much as i did.

Palestine is alive, well and kicking (Israeli butt)

This is a letter my uncle wrote to one of his friends in Canada, that were concerned about hearing disturbing news about "echoes of the crusades". Here it is in full:

The war in Gaza today is a Palestinian Stalingrad, the first major battle between Israel and the Palestinians to be fought on Palestinian soil since 1948. It is also a battle over the future of Palestine. If Israel fails to win it decisively, all its future will come into doubt. In the forty two years since its victory in 1967, Israel failed to make " PEACE". If Israel now fails to win this battle that it has waged under "Super ideal terms and conditions" unprecedented in any known war, on a bedraggled Gaza that it had kept under siege and starved of all its needs for almost three years, in spite of its overwhelming superiority in technology, fire power and numbers, the conclusion will be that it has also failed in war .

This, and many other consequences, will emerge into the light when the dust of battle settles and the fogs of disinformation are dispelled. The Israeli – American- British – European fiction of a" PEACE PROCESS" will be found lying slain on the killing fields. The Oslo Palestinians will, not before long, go with it, and the two warring peoples on the land of Palestine will collide in spiraling armed conflict intermittently interrupted now and then by increasingly shaky truces and ceasefires.

That is why, in its impotent rage, bewilderment and disbelief at its escalating failure to subdue and subjugate this proud and brave people in spite of all the power and force it and its allies have brought to bear on them in over sixty years of savage conflict strewn with intermittent massacres, Israel now intensifies its levels of brutality in its wanton killing of Palestinians and willful destruction of Gaza. It will not work, but it will bring the Israelis much closer to realizing their existensial dilemma: They are damned if they do and damned if they don’t . Nothing will save them from the coming doom of their own making, and no amount of Palestinian blood spilled, women, children, and all, can conceal the writing on the wall.

We the Palestinians have a proverb that applies wonderfully to the current Israeli incursion in Gaza. It is about the coyote that swallowed a sickle. All went well until time came for the coyote to …t.