This might be trollish to say, it might enrage some people, but if you hate the Underworld series and happily defend the Predator series then you madame or sir, might be a bit of a hypocrite.
Both series are an amalgam of clichés indicative of their respective decades. They’ve got some pretty great costuming and creatures designs (okay I’ll give you this, Predator‘s creature design is waaaay better), slick action and even slicker heroes.
With mud and pleather respectively.
Only the Predator films are about super muscled 80s guys hunting aliens and the Underworld series is about a rail thin centuries old vampire woman hunting werewolves and slurring all her lines because of fangs.
Also the Underworld series has made incredible bank. More so than the Predator series!
“But Predator is an ode to testosterone!”
And I ask you Predator fanboy, what of Predator 2 or the reboot? Or the shitty comics? Or the shittier crossover films and games? Yeah that’s what I thought, you go back to your corner.
Anyways, back to Underworld 4 and the series it continues. The first film was kind of fun. You had McDouchey from Felicity falling in love with Kate Beckinsale and there were lots of fights in water…because…water looks good on pleather corsets? I don’t know.
The second film is absolute garbage and easily one of my top ten bad movies ever. Derek Jacobi as the creator of all vampires and werewolves! Super vampires! Super werewolves! Kate Beckinsale just kind of moping after her one true love “dies!” Ill advised sex scenes! It is an unholy mess and I love every second of it.
The third film is like the first two mashed together with Rhona Mitra subbing for Kate Beckinsale. It is bizarre and more of the same. Really well shot action, really silly plots and characters and really great British actors collecting paychecks.
So what is Underworld: Awakening? More of the same, only with a ton of gore. You see werewolf brains people. Splattered on more wet scenery (they must just spray down each set with a hose before shooting on this series). You quite a bit of human brains splattered on things. You see heads smashed in by Kate Beckinsale’s vampire knee and you hear bones crunch with the gruesome satisfaction only earned from B-action and horror films.
I found myself giggling at all the cartoonishly over the top violence. Maybe I clapped. You don’t know. Underworld 4 Explodes With Gore And Riduculous B-Movie Fun
1 CommentPosted in ReviewsJan 23, 2012
By Alex Cranz
This might be trollish to say, it might enrage some people, but if you hate the Underworld series and happily defend the Predator series then you madame or sir, might be a bit of a hypocrite.
Both series are an amalgam of clichés indicative of their respective decades. They’ve got some pretty great costuming and creatures designs (okay I’ll give you this, Predator‘s creature design is waaaay better), slick action and even slicker heroes.
With mud and pleather respectively.
Only the Predator films are about super muscled 80s guys hunting aliens and the Underworld series is about a rail thin centuries old vampire woman hunting werewolves and slurring all her lines because of fangs.
Also the Underworld series has made incredible bank. More so than the Predator series!
“But Predator is an ode to testosterone!”
And I ask you Predator fanboy, what of Predator 2 or the reboot? Or the shitty comics? Or the shittier crossover films and games? Yeah that’s what I thought, you go back to your corner.
Anyways, back to Underworld 4 and the series it continues. The first film was kind of fun. You had McDouchey from Felicity falling in love with Kate Beckinsale and there were lots of fights in water…because…water looks good on pleather corsets? I don’t know.
The second film is absolute garbage and easily one of my top ten bad movies ever. Derek Jacobi as the creator of all vampires and werewolves! Super vampires! Super werewolves! Kate Beckinsale just kind of moping after her one true love “dies!” Ill advised sex scenes! It is an unholy mess and I love every second of it.
The third film is like the first two mashed together with Rhona Mitra subbing for Kate Beckinsale. It is bizarre and more of the same. Really well shot action, really silly plots and characters and really great British actors collecting paychecks.
So what is Underworld: Awakening? More of the same, only with a ton of gore. You see werewolf brains people. Splattered on more wet scenery (they must just spray down each set with a hose before shooting on this series). You quite a bit of human brains splattered on things. You see heads smashed in by Kate Beckinsale’s vampire knee and you hear bones crunch with the gruesome satisfaction only earned from B-action and horror films.
I found myself giggling at all the cartoonishly over the top violence. Maybe I clapped. You don’t know.
Woman gets her violence on.
Underneath all that gore and amped up violence is more of the same. Beckinsale in gorgeous coats and pleather. Older British actors collecting paychecks as villains and Scott Speedman–
Oh wait. Scott Speedman is not in this film. Apparently he refused to return. I guess he had to go practice his guitar or something because it isn’t like he’s making movies. Instead you get something better than Scott Speedman. You get some dude in a wig constantly shot so his face can’t be seen except for like two shots where they haphazardly CGI’d Speedman’s face onto the dude.
It. Is. Amazing. We’re talking ten times better than CGI Patrick Stewart in Wolverine which is pretty impressive because I laughed so hard at that particular gem I hit my head and gave myself some sort of concussion.
So CGI Scott and Kate Beckinsale are in love but they, and all vampires and werewolves have been outed. It is not the tongue and cheek gay parable that is True Blood. It is like if half the population of Nigeria came out as gay. We’re talking death squads and riots and things. It’s horrific (though not nearly as horrific as the actual anti-gay laws in Nigeria).
The Speedman and the Beckinsale opt to flee town instead of stay and fight even though they’re the most powerful supernatural creatures alive. Why? I guess they’re assholes? I don’t know. Before they can leave they get exploded by some sort of really pretty grenade.
Beckinsale wakes up naked and upside down ten years later. The person I was with and I spent five minutes of movie watching time trying to figure out why she was frozen upside down. The best we can figure is uh hot air rise so it would be easier to chill her brain? That doesn’t even make sense people because then they could just lie her flat and be done with it and also she is in a block of ice and so air isn’t even a part of the equation.
Anyways she breaks out and kills people and meets a really, really attractive vampire guy and they go looking for Scott Speedman and also her daughter with Scott Speedman who wears really heavy goth makeup and rips werewolves in half. Also Michael Ealy is there being all suspicious of vampires.
Through the course of all this fun they run into loads of werewolves. In one scene they have a car chase with werewolves. It isn’t as neat as it sounds and it highlights a major problem. The cinematography is awful in this film. Things are disjointed, the lighting is ugly and the action sequences are incredibly ugly. To the point that the person I was with was remarking on it, and this is a person who still regularly watches VHS tapes. If they’re noticing a lack of quality in what’s on-screen then you’ve got a problem.
Yet somehow this film manages to have some magic moments. It was shot in 3D and uses it creatively to give a sense of size to the monsters of the films. It ends up making those moments in the film legitimately hop out of your seat scary. I can’t wait until a really savvy horror filmmaker reuses that technique in a monster film. It will be an absolute treat.
Until then I will be satisfied with spending money on seeing sill B-movies like those of the Underworld series. Say what you will of the quality of the films, at least (unlike some aforementioned series) they’re consistent.
Now if you’ll excuse me I need to be happy because Underworld: Awakening was number one at the box office. That’s great, female starring action films doing well always are, but it thoroughly crushed Red Tails which is also bad, but needed to do well so Hollywood won’t blame black people for bad box office earnings. And it did significantly better than Haywire which also starred a woman, had better action and was just a better film but didn’t hypersexualize its heroine like the Underworld series has Kate Beckinsale.
From Fempop
