Director Uwe Boll specializes in ultra-cheesy video game adaptations, and his latest opus, BloodRayne, is his third one to date -- with a handful of other awful flicks in the pipeline. It's also possibly Boll's most tolerable movie yet, although that's a lot like getting hit with a few baseball bats and picking out which one hurt least. After tackling zombies in House of the Dead and otherworldly monsters in Alone in the Dark, Herr Boll now turns his attention to vampires in this filmic version of the popular horror game "BloodRayne."

Our heroine is Rayne (Kristanna Loken, best known as the TX in Terminator 3), a "dhamphir" (half-human, half-vampire) living life as a circus freak in medieval Europe. After  escaping from her cruel captors in a fit of "blood rage" (a film term meaning "flashback scene with goofy acting and even goofier gore effects"), Rayne sets out to complete her life-long goal: destroy Kagan (Ben Kingsley), the most powerful of all vampires -- who's also her own father. However, as Catherine Zeta-Jones sang in Chicago, she simply cannot do it alone, so Rayne turns to the Brimstone Society, a crumbling organization dedicated to wiping vampires off the face of the earth, for help.

With the assistance of such warriors as the noble Vladimir (Michael Madsen) and rebellious Katarin (Michelle Rodriguez), Rayne trains and embarks on a quest to keep Kagan from possessing three artifacts that would allow his power to grow even more, all the while plotting revenge for her mother's murder.

At first, BloodRayne comes off as a harmless, abeit cheesy, hybrid of a swashbuckling adventure and a gore-soaked horror tale. As it progresses, though, the movie becomes ever so lazier, dunderheaded, and laughable, before finally arriving at a point where all you can do as a moviegoer is just shake your head in puzzlement over how Uwe Boll keeps finding work. There's been more tactless directors behind even dumber movies, but something has to be said about a guy who doesn't think twice about plopping Meat Loaf with a powdered wig in the middle of a period horror/action movie. There are some goofball thrills to be had, and in replicating the game's fiery-haired protagonist, Boll did well in choosing Loken, who handles the part of Rayne pretty well -- until she starts speaking in her half-hearted attempt at an accent, at which point she joins the ranks of others in the cast who just give up attempting to turn BloodRayne into campy fun.

After getting only so far on ambition and gore-laced action sequences, BloodRayne slowly collapses under the weight of its own shoddy production values, cornball script (penned by, of all people, American Psycho scribe Guinevere Turner), and scattershot editing. It also doesn't help that Boll doesn't do much in offering up a story that engages the viewers at least a little bit, boiling the movie's point down to watching Loken slaughter vampires and look hot doing it (an approach also adopted by such recent features as Ultraviolet and Aeon Flux).

BloodRayne is at least more interesting than the muddled and overblown Underworld sequel released a few months ago, but it's not much help to be distracted by aimless subplots, randomly-cast actors who all look out of place and as bored as the viewers are (not even Kingsley tries injecting his part with a little campy oomph), and a director who, as evidenced by a random montage of gory scenes right before the final credits, has no clue what he's doing.

NOTE: My review refers to the unrated DVD edition of BloodRayne. The key difference between this and the R-rated, theatrical version is that on the unrated DVD, there's more bad movie to sit through.

MY RATING: * 1/2 (out of ****)

(Released by Universal Home Entertainment and rated "R" for strong bloody violence, some sexuality and nudity.)