'BloodRayne' fun comes in spurts
A few days ago I made a list of stuff I was looking forward to doing in 2006. ''BloodRayne," I'm embarrassed to say, didn't make the cut, but it has managed to give me a few things I didn't know I wanted. One was a trip to Revere, which is the only place in town this intermittently interesting vampire-slayer adventure is playing. The other is a celebrity death match between Kristanna Loken and the increasingly shameless Ben Kingsley.
Yes, stop the presses! ''Lad-mag princess squares off against Sir Ben." Seeing a fit former model and an Oscar-winning thespian stab the dickens out of each other won't change your life, but one does appreciate the convergence of two disparate universes for a cause I think we can all relate to: Getting paid is fun!
The willowy Loken has been hired to play Rayne. She's half-human, half-vampire, and totally miffed that Kagan, Kingsley's ultravampire, has killed her mom. Revenge is in order, and Rayne spends the movie fighting her way from one crypto-medieval set to the next to get to Kagan's castle, where Kingsley sits on a throne and mechanically performs dark-lordliness like a coin-operated Dracula.
If her journey's success seems contingent on tracking down certain power-boosting talismans (she drinks blood like Gatorade), it's because ''BloodRayne" is based on a video game. This means the director, Uwe Boll, is obligated to shower us with action sequences that hold up the narrative action. But Boll is more convincing here than he was with his previous outing in dank adventure-horror, ''Alone in the Dark," a sinful Christian Slater-Tara Reid-Stephen Dorff flick that, funnily enough, was quickly banished from theaters.
''BloodRayne" has what passes for humor and a cast that passes for interesting. The opening credits, in fact, are the film's funniest sequence: Michael Madsen! Meat Loaf! Udo Kier! Geraldine Chaplin? The rear, meanwhile, is brought up by Kingsley in the pivotal ''and" position; Billy Zane in the ''special appearance by" slot; and Michelle Rodriguez, who plays her crucial ''with" designation something fierce. (She's clearly using the part to get in some much-needed fake-British-accent practice.)
Guinevere Turner, an independent-film actress and smart screenwriter (she co-adapted ''American Psycho" for the movies), gives ''BloodRayne" the woman's backbone usually missing from these wet T-shirt contests. She even contributes sincerely coy, vaguely lesbian banter for Loken and Rodriguez to spout while sparring. ''Your form is lacking passion," says Rodriguez. ''It's part of my plan to weaken you," says Loken. ''Your plan lacks passion as well!" And in this sense the film might be the first of its kind: something to bring Maxim subscribers, video gamers, and loyal Logo viewers together.
Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com. 
