I’ve read so many criticisms of Uwe Boll on this board, and I’ve always been kinda puzzled by them because I kinda liked Dungeon Seige. It was not a great film, not even a good one, really, but it kinda worked after a fashion, like a lot of SyFy Channel original fantasy films.
And that’s when it hit me. It WAS an awful lot like a SyFy Channel original movie. Only it had topnotch stars acting in it: Jason Statham, Lelee Sobieliski, Ray Liotta, Burt Reynolds, Claire Forlani, Kristinna Lokken, Ron Perlman, and John Rhys-Davies, among others, anyone ONE of whom would be THE name star in your average SyFy Channel original, if there were any stars of that magnitude (and these are not A-list stars I know). And generally SyFy Channel movies don’t have stars of any magnitude.
So in the case of Dungeon Seige, a movie whose catering budget was probably bigger than the entire budget of many SyFy Channel movies, Boll was able to produce only the equivalent of a mediocre SyFy Channel movie. It’s like having an Industrial Light and Magic budget and getting pie plates bobbling around on string with jaggy white lines shooting from them.
That’s bad. That’s really, really bad. I get it now. Boll is a man you give gold to and he spins straw from it.
Still, I’d have to say that Bloodrayne is a cut above your average SyFy Channel movie, maybe not a huge cut, but it can’t have cost too mu … (looks at the cast list, mutters, "Ben Kingsley, Kristinna Lokken, Geraldine Chapman, Billy Zane, Meat Loaf, Michael Pare, Michelle Rodriguez, Udo Kier … good lord, he did it again!) … never mind …