‘BloodRayne’: The movie Michael Madsen called the worst of his career
There are few actors who are willing to speak ill of the movies they’ve made. It isn’t just vanity. Trashing a movie is equivalent to insulting the director, screenwriter, producers, and co-stars to their faces, which is a dangerous career move in a high-profile industry. Still, Michael Madsen is willing to go there, and he has plenty of reasons to do so.
The actor has appeared in several excellent movies, including Reservoir Dogs and Ridley Scott’s road movie masterpiece Thelma and Louise (though his role was brief). In fact, he is something of a favourite of Tarantino’s, having appeared in roles of varying sizes in Kill Bill: Volume 2, The Hateful Eight, and Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood. However, he’s also starred in more than his fair share of duds. In many cases, they can’t even be considered flops because that would suggest there were high expectations about them at some point.
Infection Z, I’m in Love with a Church Girl, and CobraGator are just a few of the films he’s appeared in, but out of all the more than 300 credits he has to his name, Madsen says that there is one that is indisputably the worst – Uwe Boll’s 2005 fantasy BloodRayne. Speaking to The After Movie Diner in 2019, the actor said, “Bloodrayne is one of those movies that made itself. It just got made by somebody who didn’t know what he was doing.”
This would be a brutal insult for most directors, but for Boll, it’s practically a compliment. Known for being one of the worst filmmakers to ever look through a viewfinder, the German auteur is the gift that keeps on giving. He regularly takes it upon himself to push back against everything from fascism to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, always falling far, far short of making his point.
When the graphic 2012 film Auschwitz was released, for example, he explained that movies like Schindler’s List weren’t strong enough indictments of the Nazis for younger generations. His 2011 film Blubberella, meanwhile, was meant to skewer superhero movies, but it backfired big time by being so terrible that it made Ant-Man and the Wasp look like Citizen Kane.
BloodRayne was one of the many attempts that Boll has made over the years to adapt video games for the big screen, and it lives up to his abominable reputation. It stars Kristanna Loken as a half-human, half-vampire who teams up with other vampires to exact revenge on the man who raped her mother. The director somehow managed to cast Ben Kingsley as the villain, but the film was beyond redemption. Madsen, who plays a vampire-killing warrior, recognised exactly how bad it was.
“I liked the travel part of it, plus the experience of doing it,” he said. “But then again it’s one of those things where you look at the movie and it’s horrible. Is it a comedy? What is it? It’s preposterous.”
Not surprisingly, the film was panned from all sides, earning multiple nominations for ‘Worst Film of the Year.’ Somehow, Boll thought it was a good idea to make a sequel, BloodRayne 2: Deliverance, two years later. Loken did not reprise her role as the lead character, and Madsen also stayed away. But just like a shameless ex, Boll refused to stay away, and returned for yet another sequel, this time creating the worst sequel-related pun of all time with BloodRayne: The Third Reich.
