Film

Boob Snuff

Underwear Models Must Die!

by John Tynes

It's difFIcult to even think about this game without also being aware of its hucksterish, grasping status as a franchise property in the making. You probably haven't heard about the BloodRayne movie, but it's coming next year and stars Michael Madsen, Meat Loaf, Udo Kier, Billy Zane, Ben Kingsley, and that robot chick from Terminator 3. Then there's the BloodRayne comic book, and the BloodRayne music videos on MTV2's Video Mods show, and the nude pinup in Playboy. If you're asking yourself, "Hey, now I'm curious--just who is this BloodRayne anyway?" then you're a pathetic drone and I may have to kill you by stomping you in half.

Sorry, that's the game talking. Because there is a game in all of this cultural vomit, and it's the least-interesting aspect of the whole BloodRayne juggernaut. You play the excessively marketable BloodRayne, a half vampire with a porn-star body who murders her enemies with a pair of blades. Ads in vidiot stroke-mags focused on the porn-star body aspect even more than Playboy did; they featured close-up shots of her ass and tits and nothing else. Welcome to brand building in the new millennium.

(At this point it may have dawned on you that, yes, Playboy featured a pinup of an entirely fictitious, computer-generated video-game character. I guess it's a slippery slope from boob jobs.)

But back to the stomping-in-half thing. As BloodRayne, you cavort in fetish outfits and eviscerate everyone you meet. Geysers of blood accompany these kills, as do repetitious cries of, "My arm!" The amount of bloodshed is so excessive that it becomes visual hyperbole, as if one of the game designers was standing in your living room screaming, "Can you fucking believe how much blood we put in this game?"

You know how some dogs will eat as much food as you put in front of them until they puke? That is the entire game-design philosophy of BloodRayne. The early levels are filled with endless Victoria's Secret models: scrawny, long-legged young women in French maid outfits. You kill dozens of them, their heads flying, bodies splitting in half, arms dropping off, often purring dialogue such as, "I like it when you play rough!" Feeding on them, as BloodRayne must do to keep her vampiric abilities powered, results in your character leaping on a victim and mounting them, her nude legs wrapped around them like a praying mantis as she makes slurping noises and moans with pleasure while she drinks their blood.

This is, of course, a "mature" rated game, which is like saying that porn is for grownups. It is a technical definition, not a tonal one. BloodRayne 2 is nothing but noisy, gory, booby junk with a steely lizard's eye on the prize of a mass media franchise. Pray it goes down in flames.