Underworld: Evolution

The ball was rolling and now the 'conversations' were becoming my reviews.  This one came on January 21, 2006:

 

I saw Underworld: Evolution today. It picked up moments after the previous one concluded, which made for a bit of confusion if you didn't see the first one recently. Though far superior to BloodRayne, this only managed to achieve mediocre. The plot was sufficiently convoluted that it required many, MANY flashback scenes from the previous movie as well as some blurry I-remember-this-place-from-when-I-was-a-child scenes. And then there were the blurry scenes of vampires-read-minds-by-drinking-blood. All these blurry rapid fire flashbacks became tedious. Some of these flashback were interesting because they actually brought back characters who died in the last movie so they could appear (a la Uncle Ben in Spiderman 2).

The fighting is dramatically better than in BloodRayne (but that isn't saying much, is it) and Kate Beckinsale fills out her black jumpsuit rather nicely (probably the best thing about the movie).  The violence is pretty intense. We get to see impalings, hands burst through chests, heads ripped in half, jaws torn off, gallons of blood, and the like.

The movie opened with a group of mounted and armored vampires (circa 1200 AD) riding into a town that had been destroyed by werewolves. Like in some zombie movie, all the corpses rose while the vampires were there and became rabid werewolves. This was probably the most intriguing part and might have made for a more interesting movie. Vampire Knights hunting Werewolves in the dead of night is oddly appealing.

All in all, wait for the video.

 

Interestingly, the next movie - Rise of the Lycans - took place during the Dark Ages that I thought was more interesting.  It proved to be less worthwhile than I had hoped.  However, it was funny to see Bill Nighy once again despite having died in the first film.