MOVIE REVIEW – Vampires against Werewolves: the old war continues between the creatures of the night. After a long maternal absence, Kate Beckinsale returns as the vampire Selene. Honestly, she shouldn’t bother…

For the record: I am a big fan of vampire books, movies, video games, and I kind of like the Underworld series as well. The first movie was rather good; the others were either passable or less good, but still enjoyable. Unfortunately, the best word to this episode is…

Abomination

I don’t even know where to start with this movie, which may be the worst film of the year. Underworld: Blood Wars begins with a story, which is building too much in the former episodes already, so if you skipped some of them, be sure to be lost entirely. That is just bad writing. Underworld is not a TV show in which every episode build on the former and where a knowledge of the whole is needed to fully understand and appreciate what’s going on.

But even if you have seen the former episodes, you will have trouble to relate to Selene and his friends. Bad acting is one of the main culprits: almost every actor are cringe-worthy in most of the scenes. Kate Beckinsale herself has perhaps like two expressions: the one looking confused and scared and another one looking mean and decided. In both cases, she seems to have no idea what the hell she is doing here.

Most of the other actors are even worse. Theo James, playing the main vampire hero lacks charisma and plays his role in a boring, unconvincing way, while on the other hand, Lara Pulver as the Grande vampire diva Semira is the queen of the overacting.

Of course, it doesn’t help either, that the dialogues, written by Cory Goodman are so full of cringe-worthy stereotypes, that sometimes it was almost painful not to run away from the movie theater. Everybody talks like he or she was reciting a cheap horror pulp fiction novel, it was next to unbearable to listen to it.

Looks dull too

Besides the story being uninteresting the overall acting bad and the dialogues next to horrible, surprisingly the visuals are cheap and washed out too. One would except, that after so many parts in the movie series, it would bring enough money to at least crank up the effects and visuals, but sadly there’s nothing special to see or even listen here.

Environments are rather bland and look dull, so does some of the effects, which made in the movie. Perhaps the only noticeable effect, which is indeed refreshing, the one when Selena teleports thanks to a newly found capability. It would perhaps be less exciting within a movie with richer effects, but here it actually shines

As a big fan of 3D movies, I was also pretty disappointed by the poor 3D effects. I could hardly discern any of them while this kind of movie would be a gold mine for such a technology. Some projectiles, which flies out from the screen, blades that point out in our face: is this too much to ask?!

Go back to slumber, vampire!

I think that it’s that producer let finally rest in peace this vampire vs. werewolf series which is gone from pretty promising and exciting to utter boredom and stupidity. Instead of the series going for the AAA category, the acting, the story and dialogues are worst then ever.

If you want to see a good vampire film, watch Interview with the vampire, or wait for the tv series from the franchise. As for Underworld: Blood Wars avoid it like the pest.

-BadSector-