There have been excellent vampire movies that reinvented the mythology and took the horror genre somewhere new. George Romero’s Martin and Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark spring to mind. Werewolf films, too, have made some decent contributions, such as Neil Jordan’s The Company of Wolves and John Fawcett’s Ginger Snaps.
So, you’d think that a modern day supernatural spectacle that combines vampires and werewolves in one storyline could not go wrong – but cinema history is littered with failed monster mashes, from the tired “X Meets Y” ventures that bulked up Universal’s library later in the 1930s and ’40s to Stephen Sommers’ 2004 Van Helsing and Len Wiseman’s Underworld a year earlier.
Apart from a gloriously over-the-top performance from Bill Nighy and Kate Beckinsale running around in tight rubber, little was memorable about Underworld but somehow it did well enough to spawn a 2006 follow-up, which reunites Beckinsale with co-stars Scott Speedman, Nighy and director Wiseman (also her husband).
The last 100 years have seen two world wars, two Gulf wars and, apparently in cinematic terms, two wars between vampires and werewolves. Underworld: Evolution is one of those sequels with a colon instead of a number, like Blade: Trinity. This also suggests that it won’t be any better than the original, which in the case of Underworld is probably not very good at all. However, it’s an ideal ‘wait for Sky’ movie and there is at least the promise that it will look stylish in HD.
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