Blade II

Year 2, Day 288 - 10/15/10 - Movie #654

BEFORE: This is another series that I started up last October, but I didn't have the sequel films at the time - I bought them in the interim from the $5 DVD store. I could have watched these during my superhero chain, since Blade is a Marvel Comics character, but I decided to wait and count them as vampire films instead.

THE PLOT: Blade forms an uneasy alliance with the vampire council in order to combat the Reaper vampires who feed on vampires.

AFTER: Now, see, this movie illustrates very clearly the point I made about "Underworld". Blade is half-human, half-vampire. We, the audience can identify with him because of who he used to be - he's our entry point into the world of vampirism.

The movie follows up directly from the first film, as Blade has to track down his kidnapped mentor, Whistler - and then things get more interesting when he's contacted by the Vampire Council, who propose a team-up with the "Blood Pack" to take down a new type of vampire - one that only preys on other vampires. It's a meta-vampire! And it turns regular vampires into other meta-vampires! And they're resistant to the usual garlic, silver and holy water - so the majority of Blade's typical weapons are useless.

If there's any form of monster with more arcane "rules" than werewolves, it's got to be vampires. The meta-vampires seen here are game-changers, creepy freaks that even regular vamps are afraid of. It's nice to see something new brought to the table here - even if it results in more martial-arts fighting than one would normally expect in a vampire film.

Starring Wesley Snipes (last seen in "Passenger 57"), Kris Kristofferson (last seen in "Fast Food Nation"), Ron Perlman (last seen in "Alien: Resurrection") and Norman Reedus (last seen in "American Gangster"). Oh, and Tony Curran carries over from "Underworld: Evolution".

RATING: 7 out of 10 phosphorus bombs

SPOOK-O-METER: 8 out of 10. Those Reaper Vampires are seriously nasty.

Underworld: Rise of the Lycans

Year 2, Day 287 - 10/14/10 - Movie #653

BEFORE: At this point, I just want to wrap up this wretched franchise, finish werewolf week, and move on...

THE PLOT: An origins story centered on the centuries-old feud between the race of aristocratic vampires and their onetime slaves, the Lycans.

AFTER: Another failure - though again, I'm not 100% sure if it's the fault of the movie, or my own. Yes, I was tired tonight, and eventually I gave up trying to understand this mess of a plot, and I put my head down in frustration and fell asleep. Of course, this didn't help me understand the ending at all...I think I have to declare a mulligan on this film and just try to forget about it.

I think I've finally figured out what's wrong with these "Underworld" films - the basic premise of a werewolf film is that a "regular" person, like Lawrence Talbot, or the traveling college student in the "American Werewolf" films, gets bitten, which has a certin impact on the viewer. "Gee, I'm a regular person," thinks the viewer, "and if I were traveling in the moors of Europe, and I got bitten, I could turn into a werewolf myself!" In their own way, these movies become accessible - the viewer could just as easily imagine themselves camping at Crystal Lake, or having a Nightmare when on Elm St.

But the "Underworld" movies feature a social hierarchy where every important character is ALREADY a vampire or a werewolf (and those that aren't either are considered food...) and part of a complicated society with a council, a bunch of arcane rules, etc. I can't find an entry point into understanding, and therefore I don't much care.

Geez, even "Teen Wolf" and "Ginger Snaps" had fairly regular high-school students who were affected by the werewolf's bite (OK, so it was hereditary in "Teen Wolf"...) - then we end up caring about the infected characters, because we knew them before. Even the great George Lucas understood this, and this is part of what made "Star Wars" great. Despite the complicated rules of the Empire vs. the Rebellion, the Senate vs. the Trade Federation, the Jedi Council vs. the Sith, the audience was given an entry point. Luke Skywalker was a simple farmboy, and the audience sets out on the hero's journey with him - the concept was even repeated in Episode I with Anakin Skywalker as a simple slave, who gets a chance to explore the galaxy and eventually become a heroic figure.

So something is fundamentally missing here. Though I will give this third film in the series a bit of a break, for depicting something a little more Shakespearean - it's easy to compare a vampire and a werewolf falling in love to "Romeo & Juliet", for example. Still, I consider this to be overly complicated, and far from entertaining.

Starring Bill Nighy, Rhona Mitra (last seen in "The Number 23"), Michael Sheen and Steven Mackintosh (carrying over from last night's film, but big deal...)

RATING: 3 out of 10 crossbow bolts

SPOOK-O-METER: 5 out of 10. But not scary enough to make me lose sleep, or even keep me awake.

Underworld: Evolution

Year 2, Day 286 - 10/13/10 - Movie #652

BEFORE: I watched "Underworld" last October, and I wasn't too crazy about it - too many characters and too much long, convoluted history between the two clans - the werewolves and the vampires. But I feel the need to give the franchise another chance - maybe this one will explain something about what happened in the first film, since I'm still pretty confused. I will review the plot of the first film on IMDB first...

THE PLOT: Underworld: Evolution continues the saga of war between the vampires and the Lycans. The film goes back to the beginnings of the ancient feud between the two tribes.

AFTER: Nope, I'm still not feeling this franchise. At least there were fewer characters this time out, since so many died in the first film, so there was more of a focus on the two lead characters - the hot female vampire and the studly male werewolf - though now he's some kind of werewolf/vampire hybrid, hence the "evolution" in the title.

But still there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to anyone's actions - or maybe there is, but every time a character stopped to talk and explain something, my eyelids drooped and I drifted off. It happened way too many times tonight for me to salvage any kind of plot understanding. Yes, I had a rough day at work, and yes, I'm still tired from working Comic-Con and being loopy on painkillers, but still... You'd think the action sequences would be enough to keep me awake and interested, but they all just kind of flashed by and ran together to create a patchwork of men with batwings and people turning into wolves.

There's some kind of relationship between the werewolf clan and the vampire clan that stretches back centuries to a common origin, and there's some deception over who killed who 600 years ago, and there's betrayals and funky keys and hibernation machines, and you know what? I just don't care. I don't know if I failed to pay attention to this movie, or the movie failed to entertain me, but in the end the result was the same. Like the "Matrix" saga, I just want to get it out of the way and scratch it off my list.

Let me emphasize this, because it seems unusually significant - werewolves are fighting vampires, and somehow it's boring as dirt. It doesn't seem possible, but there it is.

Starring Kate Beckinsale (last seen in "Serendipity"), Scott Speedman (last seen in...um..."Underworld"), Tony Curran (last seen in "Miami Vice"), Derek Jacobi (last seen in "The Golden Compass"), and Steven Mackintosh (last seen in "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels")

RATING: 2 out of 10 pistols that somehow shoot like Uzis.

SPOOK-O-METER: 6 out of 10. I can't knock the quality of the effects, I just wish there was more of a story to go with them.

The Company of Wolves

Year 2, Day 285 - 10/12/10 - Movie #651

BEFORE: Also in the interest of completeness - I'll revisit this film, which I tried to watch years ago, but lost interest in - or found it hard to understand. Maybe I was having a bad day, so I feel I should give it another shot.

THE PLOT: Granny tells her granddaughter Rosaleen strange, disturbing tales about innocent maidens falling in love with handsome, heavily eyebrowed strangers with a smoldering look in their eyes.

AFTER: The main framing story here is like a kinky version of "Little Red Riding Hood", with the characters of the Big Bad Wolf and the Huntsman merged into the same character, and Li'l Red as an older teen named Rosaleen - coming to terms with her sexuality (as symbolized by the blood-red shawl) Having the older man attack Granny, then wait for the teenage girl to show up - it just points out how sexual the fairy tale has always been, which most people fail to realize. The male wolf wants to get into Red's "basket of goodies"... Gee, what big eyes you have...and big teeth...and, well, you can guess what comes next. Why didn't we realize as kids all the dirty implications of this story? It's like one step away from bestiality porn!

Before the kinky stuff, though, Granny tells Rosaleen a number of wolf-based stories (more tales-within-tales...) A woman's husband disappears, but returns years later to find that she's taken a new husband, and in his anger, transforms into a wolf. A serving maid gets revenge on the nobleman that impregnated her by turning his entire wedding party into wolves. It's like the same punchline, told over and over, to end different jokes.

The wolfen transformations are extremely fakey - some very obvious uses of puppetry. But they're also very graphic - in one case a man rips off all of the skin on his head, before the snout elongates and the fur grows to cover the muscles. Yuck.

And you know that a film is overly "arty" when someone's head gets lopped off, and it shatters on the floor like a porcelain doll's head. This is roughly equivalent to all those cheezy 80's music videos where they dipped roses in liquid nitrogen so they'd shatter on the floor in spectacular slow-motion fashion. It's a bad sign.

This is meant to be a non-linear storyline, and everything depicted may in fact be part of a teen girl's dream. So it's tough to say what actually "happened" and what is just symbolic. It seems like in the end Rosaleen defeated the Huntsman/Big Bad Wolf, then decided to become a werewolf herself, in order to become his mate. But that's just one possible interpretation, I suppose.

Starring Angela Lansbury (last seen in "Death on the Nile"), Stephen Rea (last seen in "V For Vendetta"), and another one of my fave actors, David Warner (last seen in "The Concorde: Airport '79", but he's another guy who's been in so much great stuff, from "Time Bandits" to "Star Trek V" AND VI, "Time After Time", "Twin Peaks", "Tron", etc.)

Oh, and an uncredited appearance by Terence Stamp (last seen in "Yes Man") as the devil (?)

RATING: 3 out of 10 unibrows. I do prefer it when stories make a little more sense.

SPOOK-O-METER: 4 out of 10. More psycho-sexual than scary. Upsetting in the way that foreign films are oblique.

The Wolfman (2010)

Year 2, Day 284 - 10/11/10 - Movie #650

BEFORE: I couldn't proceed without including this year's remake of the original 1941 film (though they deleted the space in the title between "Wolf" and "man"...hmmm...) even though it cost me $4.99 to Movies on Demand. I had figured this would hit the premium channels by now, but I guess I was wrong. Hey, I hope a lot of people get in the Halloween spirit and shell out the five bucks, assuming the film is worth it. If not now, then when?

This seems like good casting, with the occasionally bestial Benicio Del Toro (last seen in "21 Grams") stepping into the (furry) shoes of Lon Chaney Jr. Who can forget his role as the dog-faced boy in "Big Top Pee-Wee"? Not me, apparently.

It's also a great night to watch a spooky film, since we've got a nice lightning storm going on over Long Island. Too bad there's no full moon to go with...

THE PLOT: Upon his return to his ancestral homeland, an American man is bitten, and subsequently cursed by, a werewolf.

AFTER: In this updated version, Lawrence Talbot is an actor, not a telescope repairman. I still don't know why they took such pains to point that out in the original film, just to discard it as a plot point - was it just so he would see the pretty girl through the telescope? If so, that was lame! An actor just works better - they make a living through a form of deception, plus haven't they all got dark sides and evil cravings?

Note: it's strange to see "Hamlet" as the play-within-the-film, considering that "Hamlet" is so well known for its own play-within-the-play. End of note.

This film combines the set-up from the original "Wolf Man" with the concept of the "Hulk" film (the first one, not the 2nd), in the setting of Victorian (?) London (as seen in "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen"), with the transformation effects of "American Werewolf in London", and the four-legged bestial running effects from the "Planet of the Apes" remake. Somehow, it all fits together, right as rain.

Then there's a game-changing plot twist, and it's a good one. In the original, Talbot was bitten by a gypsy named Bela (as in Lugosi) who liked to party on all fours. There's got to be a werewolf already, to infect the main character. (2nd note: So who was the first werewolf? There's got to be an untold story there...) For a while it looked like it might be the mysterious stranger on the train - he did have the classic wolf-shaped walking stick, after all...

But no, the movie goes in a different direction, one that hearkens back to more classical fare, Shakespearean-style stuff and even a certain Greek tragedy of note. For me, this is the winner of the week, the movie gets everything mostly right - including the idea that when two werewolves fight, it's got to be shirts vs. skins so the audience can tell them apart.

There doesn't seem to be a way to tell this classic tale with an upbeat ending - it's just the nature of the beast. But they did find a way to leave room for a sequel - clever, clever. Now see if you can get Gary Oldman as Dracula and De Niro as Frankenstein's Monster, throw in Hugh Jackman as Van Helsing - oh, wait, that's all been done before, hasn't it?

Also starring Anthony Hopkins (last seen in "Mission: Impossible 2"), Emily Blunt, Hugo Weaving (last un-seen in "V For Vendetta") and one of my faves, Max Von Sydow (seriously, how many people have been in Bergman films, the "Exorcist" series, "Hannah and Her Sisters", James Bond films, "Flash Gordon", "Dune" AND "Strange Brew"? The guy can do it all...) as the mysterious stranger....ooohhh....

RATING: 8 out of 10 gypsy wagons. 1 point off for a slight cheeziness factor, and another for completely removing all pentagrams from the film - wazzup with that?

SPOOK-O-METER: 9 out of 10. Werewolves, insane asylums, psychological torture, and the creepy English moors - this one's got it all.

Silver Bullet

Year 2, Day 283 - 10/10/10 - Movie #649

BEFORE: Day 3 of New York Comic-Con, and I made it through the whole day, I even got a little time to walk around and see the booths - but there was nothing I wanted to buy, which is good news for my bank account. Maybe I'm jaded, maybe I've gone to too many comic-cons, but after a while it all just starts to look like the same stuff over and over.

Someone who stopped at our booth did tell me a good Corey Feldman story, so it's a little odd that tonight's film stars his late friend Corey Haim. Which reminds me, I should probably add "The Lost Boys" to my list and get around to watching that one of these days. This is also the 2nd movie based on a Stephen King story, with 9 more to follow later in the month. Note: I don't condone the practice of "name above the title", some might refer to this as "Stephen King's Silver Bullet", but I don't consider the author's name to be PART of the title - not for King, not for Walt Disney, and certainly not for Tyler-effin' Perry.

THE PLOT: A werewolf terrorizes a small town where lives Marty, a paralytic boy, his uncle and his sister.

AFTER: A rather basic werewolf film, with the best acting coming from Gary Busey (last seen in "Predator 2") as the drunk uncle (drunkle?) who doesn't want to believe in werewolves at first. It's funny how quick some people in these movies are to suggest werewolves as the cause of the strange mutilations in town - you'd think that regular wolves, or even "escaped tiger from the circus" would be a more logical conclusion.

But once you've settled on "werewolf" - how to determine which one of the town's citizens is the actual lycanthrope? There are a lot of creepy people in town, so that's no help... Is it the one who never shows up for the posse to track down the werewolf? Or the single most ironic person in town that it could be? Hmmm....

Does the title refer to the common werewolf-killing ammunition, or the main character's motorized wheelchair? Or both? Either way, that thing's not street-legal.

Also starring Terry O'Quinn (last seen in "Young Guns", but most famous for "Lost"), Everett McGill (last seen in "My Fellow Americans", but most famous for "Twin Peaks"), Bill Smitrovich (last seen in "Flash of Genius"), and Lawrence Tierney (last seen in "Prizzi's Honor"), plus a quick cameo from James Gammon (last seen in "Ironweed").

RATING: 5 out of 10 fireworks

SPOOK-O-METER: 6 out of 10. The werewolf's not on camera for very long, but the scenes where he's hunting the townspeople are pretty disturbing.