Review: UNDERWORLD AWAKENING

           I couldn’t care less about the battle between vampires and werewolves in popular culture; to be honest I don’t quite understand why they would ever be at such odds against each other. Luckily, I guess, the Underworld franchise doesn’t care too much to explain either. In the first movie, the Lycans (as the werewolves are known in this universe) created a hybrid were-zombie-wolf-fang-boy who we are told fell in love with the vampiress Serena (Kate Beckinsale). Three movies later, the humans have gained the upper hand in this battle and capture Serena and the hybrid. All this happens in a “previously on…” style recap. And the rest of the movie, involving Serena’s escape from the humans and the werewolves, feels like a very bad TV episode on the SyFy Channel or a prolonged cut scene in a video game. 

Review: FRIGHT NIGHT

Fright Night is a classic horror B-movie done well that restores some much-deprived dignity to the vampire mythos. It might flight under the radar for most but any true horror fan will certainly appreciated.

Set in the outskirts of Vegas in a suburban development, which common sense would tell you shouldn’t live there. It is several square blocks of homes and streets entirely surrounded by desert. Cell phone signal is shoddy at best, and most of its residents work at night. Vegas and its suburbs are as unnatural as the vampires who live there. And because of this it is an ideal location.

Review: PRIEST

This a movie set in a steampunk/western/medieval post apocalyptic world; its main character is a vampire hunting, motorcycle riding, cowboy-ninja-priest played by Paul Bettany. And somehow… somehow it managed to be uncool. Somehow it managed to make such a setting feel dull, empty, and unworthy of all those adjectives. Somehow it managed to make its main character even more uninteresting than the setting he inhabits. And most surprising of all, Priest manages to be a movie without any stylistic sense, even when clearly this material would only work under heavy stylization and a very literal interpretation of “the rule of cool”