I have a habit after playing a game.  Once the ending credits roll and I’ve had a little time to reflect on how much fun or unfun it was, THEN I read reviews of it.

Some people would say that I should read reviews BEFORE buying games, but I prefer to make purchasing decisions based on the character designs and whether or not they have cool box art.

OK, that’s not ENTIRELY true.  The main reason I avoid reviews is that there are an awful lot of reviewers out there who don’t seem to care about spoiling major plot points, and I really hate being spoiled.  I recognize that my habit of playing games five or more years after release means that I really don’t get the right to complain when I DO get spoiled, mind you – I’m not THAT irrational.

Anyway, after finishing Bloodrayne, I went looking for reviews and ran into a bit of a problem – an awful lot of the search results that popped up in Google were reviews of the movie rather than the game.  One in particular caught my eye, because in addition to denouncing it as a horrible film, it took pains to point out that it was morally offensive in the extreme.

I’m not used to reviewers actually questioning the morality of a film, so I thought this was a particularly interesting perspective.  Unfortunately, it had an effect on me that was probably the exact opposite of that intended – I found myself actually curious as to what was so bad about the film, and I realized that I was in the position of being able to find out firsthand.

See, a few years back, I bought a copy of “Bloodrayne: The Movie”, because it came bundled with the second game and was actually cheaper than buying the game by itself.  I’d never actually intended to watch the movie, but I’d never gotten rid of it either.

So, I gave it a spin.

It’s not a great movie, or even a good movie.  It’s heavy on really unnecessary gore, the plot doesn’t really seem to follow from one scene to the next, and there’s a bit of gratuitous and uncomfortable sex thrown in.  In those regards, it was an awful lot like the game it was based on.

OK, I suppose that there’s no actual nudity in the game, just a bit of bounce and jiggle, but there IS an awful lot of over-the-top-gore, and the movie has that bit down.

Would I watch it again?  No.  I mean, if I was told that I had to watch one of, say, this movie, “Knowing”, or the second Aliens Vs Predator movie, I’d probably go for another round of Bloodrayne, but that’d be a pretty horrible choice to have to make.