Bloodrayne (2005)

After I was pleasantly surprised by the general enjoyability of In The Name Of The King - A Dungeon Siege Tale, I thought I'd brave another of Uwe Boll's infamous video game adaptations to see if I could scrape up some more morsels for recycling into Dungeons & Dragons inspiration.

I went for BloodRayne as it featured vampires, swords and the mega-hotness of Kristanna 'Terminator 3' Loken in the lead role.

Some films are renowned for being 'so bad' they are 'good' - BloodRayne isn't one of them.

Loken is Rayne, a half-human/half-vampire sired by Ben Kingsley's Kagan, lord of all vampires.

Escaping from the circus that was somehow holding her as a performing freak, she is tracked down by a band of vampire hunters - Vladimir (Michael Madsen), Sebastian (Matt Davis) and Katarin (Michelle Rodriguez).

Despite being members of a vampire hunting order called The Brimstone Society (in fact Vlaidmir might be the leader, it's never really made clear), they team up with Rayne and go looking for some payback against Kagan.

There are some powerful vampire relics thrown in as a scavenger hunt (although why the humans holding them didn't just destroy them is, again, never explained) and a slightly-confusing sub-plot with rebellious vampire Billy Zane, who also happens to be Katarin's father (I think).

Zane only appears in two scenes, but they are certainly the funniest - and not just because of the awful wig he is wearing.

Meanwhile Rayne is training with the Brimstone Society in their top secret island lair and has a random sex moment with Sebastian - who seems as shocked as the audience, as none of us had seen that coming.

All this nonsense is supposedly taking place in 18th Century Romania, but it could be Greyhawk, Ravenloft or countless other pseudo-medieval Dungeons & Dragons realms for all the verisimilitude or attention to detail.

The plot stumbles towards a final confrontation between father and daughter, in which we quickly realise that a lot of the brouhaha around the relics was just a red herring and finally Loken shows us some half-decent fight moves (having looked rather uncomfortable up until this point).

Lifeless fight sequences, uninspired performances and a confusing - possibly incomplete - storyline, can be blamed on the director.

However, Mr Boll can't be blamed for everything: Guinevere Turner's script has more info dumps of exposition than actual dialogue, for instance. When actual dialogue is allowed to sneak in - barring Billy Zane's couple of deadpan comedy zingers - it is of the lowest calibre, not helped by the top-flight stars delivering their lines in varying degrees of mumbling or monotone.

The only role-playing game moment that is possibly salvageable from all this is the near-Total Party Kill the script delivers quite spectacularly at its climax. 

However, BloodRayne doesn't so much end as just run out of script with a blank-faced Loken slumping down into her father's throne and staring forlornly into the camera.

In The Name of The King - The Last Mission (2014)

Dominic Purcell (from The Arrow'verse shows and Prison Break) is Hazen Kaine, a burned-out, no-nonsense American hitman working in Bulgaria. His "last" job - before retirement - is to kidnap the two daughters of the Bulgarian royal family, so his paymasters can demand an enormous ransom.

Although he's having doubts about his latest assignment, he hides the girls in the nominated shipping container anyway, then notices that one is wearing a pendant that matches the tattoo on his arm (which his late wife chose for him).

The girl tells Hazen the medallion, a family heirloom and talisman of protection against things he wouldn't understand, is magical. He takes it outside for a closer look... and causes a rift in time and space to materialise and drag him through.

Hazen finds himself in a mysterious land - which, he later learns is also called Bulgaria, but clearly is a fantastical, pseudo-Medieval version - and stumbles into a nearby village which is being attacked by a dragon!

He uses the last bullets in his gun to drive off the dragon, in the process befriending a pair of warrior princesses, Arabella (Ralitsa Paskaleva), and Emeline (Daria Simeonova).

They're living in this village because of Game of Thrones-style violent machinations which saw one of their uncles, Tervon (Marian Valev), usurp their father and steal his throne.

They are now part of a rebellion led by their other uncle, Tybalt (Nikolai Sotirov).

Eventually, Hazen comes to accept his position in this new world - his tattoo marks him out for a special destiny - and hatches a plan that will allow him to slay Tervon and steal the king's magical medallion, which will send Hazen back to our world.

During all this he develops a rather cute and chaste romantic relationship with Arabella; the hitman's flirting technique seems to be telling her about the horrific fiery death of his wife at the hands of other gangsters.

Hazen's big plan comes to nowt, as the rebels are ambushed in a forest by Tervon and his men.

However, the fight goes surprisingly well in favour of the rebels, even though Tervon has been controlling the dragon this whole time.

The evil king flees back his castle... followed by Hazen and Arabella.

The castle is remarkably easy to access and our heroes fight their way through Tervon's goons to confront the Big Bad on the roof of the castle, where Hazen dispatches him, causing the time rift to reopen.

This time, not only does Hazen travel back to our world, but also the dragon. Not entirely sure why Arabella didn't go with him.

Hazen then races to where the kidnapped girls have been hidden and fights the mobsters who have come to collect him... at which point you realise that the head gangster Ayavlo is also played by Marian Valev.

Does this mean that Hazen's whole isekai adventures in In The Name of The King - The Last Mission were a dream? Or a metaphor? He does kidnap two young princesses in our world and then become entangled with two princesses in the fantasy world. But then how do explain the dragon now loose in the skies over Sofia? 

There's a lot that's handwaved in Joel Ross's 85-minute script and under Uwe Boll's taut - let's get things done - direction. As an example, I particularly loved the blasé attitude of, I guess, the king of Bulgaria to having his daughters kidnapped and then returned by the same person. It rather implies that this happens all the time!

Honestly, for my money, too much time is spent in modern day Sofia and I'd have preferred Hazen to stay in mythical Bulgaria with his new love... but then that would have left the kids in the shipping container and at the mercy of the gangsters.

In D&D terms, I reckon it's a young black dragon (although it breathes fire)

For a decade-old, low budget , direct-to-video sword-and-sorcery flick, all the special effects, including those that bring the dragon to life, are pretty decent. Of course, the beast is obviously CGI, but I've seen far worse in this calibre of movie (yes, Asylum, I'm looking at you).

On the other hand, the fact that the rebellion relies on caves so much - despite having several villages to call their own - is a real throwback to '80s sword-and-sorcery films that also often operated on similar microbudgets and had to make do with what nature provided.

Director Uwe Boll certainly makes great use of the beautiful Bulgarian landscape and the film was largely filmed at Nu Boyana Film Studios where, co-incidentally, the new Red Sonja movie was shot as well as Jason Momoa's Conan The Barbarian and the excellent last Hellboy movie, The Crooked Man, and many other great films.

Dominic Purcell and pretty much the entire Bulgarian cast of In The Name of The King 3 are all great and clearly invested in their roles, but they're not always best served by a script which barrels along at such speed that a lot of plot threads are just left dangling.

It's also a shame that In The Name of The King - The Last Mission appears to be totally disconnected from either the first or second films in the franchise.

I'd rather hoped that Hazen was actually in the Kingdom of Ehb (where the previous films took place) and that Arabella and Emeline were the daughters of Dolph Lundgren's Granger, to continue the generational narrative of the two earlier movies.

I guess there's always headcanon. 

In The Name Of The King 2 - Two Worlds (2011)

After the gonzo epicness of Uwe Boll's first In The Name Of The King movie, the sequel, Two Worlds, is a strangely low-key affair (presumably for budgetary reasons).

Ex-special forces officer Granger (Dolph Lundgren) is whisked away from our world to the war-torn Kingdom of Ehb (where the original film took place) by the sorceress Elianna (Natalia Guslistaya).

Time has moved on since the first movie, Farmer is dead and a new king sits on the throne, Raven (Lochlyn Munro). He needs Granger to fulfil his role in a prophecy and slay the leader of his enemies, The Dark Ones.

Accompanied by the court physician, Manhatten (Natassia Malthe) and a small detachment of soldiers, Granger heads off into the wilderness to assassinate The Holy Mother (Christina Jastrzembska) - belatedly finding out everything isn't quite what it seems.

Two Worlds is an enjoyable, if not wholly original, romp that doesn't overdo the "fish-out-of-water" shtick (Granger actually adapts to his new situation very quickly, although never makes any effort to blend in with the locals).

Hampered by an unnecessary, and thankfully infrequently used, voice-over from Lundgren (which I mistakenly took at first as the 'audio description track' as it was just telling me what I was seeing on the screen) and odd lines of clunky dialogue, Two Worlds nevertheless reinforces my belief that the fantasy genre is the much maligned Uwe Boll's strongest.

There's also a sad lack of monsters (only one - a CGI dragon - makes an appearance) and The Dark One's costumes are remarkably unremarkable, little more than fancy dress ninja suits.

While the "earth-man saves alien world" aspect works surprisingly well with the clever plot twists sown into the story, and the ending is clearly left open for a sequel (it was very John Carter-esque in that sense), I hope that when Uwe returned to this well for a third time in 2014 the next In The Name Of The King movie - this time with Dominic Purcell headlining - would be more akin to the original.

Two Worlds is fun but reminiscent of so many other low-budget fantasy flicks, while the first film at least had a flair of eccentric exuberance about it.

In The Name Of The King - A Dungeon Siege Tale (2007)

Forget whatever prejudices you may have against Uwe Boll for his previous crimes against cinema, forget whatever you've read about his eccentricities and conviction that he was the world's greatest film maker.

If you approach In The Name Of The King: A Dungeon Siege Tale with an open mind, you might actually realise that it's a cracking swords and sorcery romp.

Sure, it lifts a lot from Peter Jackson's Lord Of The Rings, but films and books have been ripping off Tolkien for years, even before Jackson's sublime films.

However, despite running about a half-hour too long and having a dialogue quota of two cheesey lines for every decent one, In The Name Of The King certainly ranks as one of my favourite "Dungeons & Dragons" films of the Noughties.

Based on a video game I was totally unaware of, the film has Jason Statham as a lowly farmer (with the required "secret destiny") - called Farmer, for reasons too dull to go into - whose village is attacked by the Krugs, a race of cut-price orc wannabes controlled by the wonderfully evil sorcerer Gallian (Ray Liotta).

Gallian has also seduced Muriella (Leelee Sobieski), the young fighter/magic-user daughter of the King's advisor, the magus Merick (John Rhys-Davies), and has convinced the king's foppish nephew Duke Fallow (Matthew Lillard) that his Krugs will aid him in a coup.

The King, by the way, is Burt Reynolds.

The Krugs carry off Farmer's wife, Solana (Claire Forlani) and so aided by his old friend Norick (Ron Perlman) and Solana's brother he sets off in pursuit.

Meanwhile King Burt gets poisoned and a civil war breaks out.

On his travels Farmer meets some rather naff, bungee-vine-swinging "wood elves" (led by the gorgeous Kristanna Loken), who seem one of the more unnecessary elements in the film, gets captured by the Krug and meets up with Merick - who reveals that Farmer is, in fact, King Burt's son.

With Reynolds, Liotta, Lillard and Rhys-Davies all vying for a piece of scenery to chew, the film reeks of ham, but this adds to its harmless charm.

However, whenever Doug Taylor's script tries to tug at the heartstrings (such as the King's death scene) it is at its weakest, but luckily there's plenty of action and fighting to paper over these cracks. For instance, the climatic wizardly duel between Merick and Gallian, I would say, is less risible than the break-dancing challenge between Saruman and Gandalf in Fellowship Of The Ring.

The big battle scenes between Burt's boys and the Krug probably could have been trimmed and odd gimmicks, such as the burrowing Krug and the King's unit of Chinese wuxia skirmishers, are never really developed or even explained, but, for the most part, at least this film is never dull.

Great CGI scenery and pretty classy special effects help to elevate this above the normal straight-to-video swords and sorcery fare of yesteryear. 

It may not be 100 per cent original, and despite the title there are no "dungeons" and no "sieges", but I really enjoyed it and could happily see myself watching it again.

Although there were no large monsters in it, it certainly felt more Dungeons & Dragons-y than either of the first two 'official' Dungeons & Dragons films, from around the time this was made.

As a gamer I always look at this genre of film to see what I can take away from it. As Taylor and Boll have lifted from Tolkien and Jackson (and probably countless other sources), I reckon I can lift ideas from In The Name Of The King. I don't think I could ask for much more from such pulp fare.