I was looking forward to seeing it in the theaters but didn’t catch it before it left. Since it wasn’t out in theatres very long I figured it must of sucked. So I rented it last night and it’s really good!
Why on earth wasn’t this movie more popular? I can’t wait for a sequel!
To be honest, I’d never seen it and I’d kill myself before I did.
If anything killed it, I’d say it was marketing. People are probably sick of the old “hey lets combine two popular films (in this case, it looks like the Matrix crossed with Blade, both crappy movies) and everyone will buy it.” Maybe people have better taste than I give them credit for…
Nah.
You must have been on drugs or watching a completely different movie called Underworld. The movie simply sucked, big time. Asinine dialog, nonsensical plot, silly cliched action scenes, and two hours of listening to rain and looking through a blue filter. Blegh.
Well, I saw it today and I liked it too. Nothing groundbreaking, but it was a fun movie.
And Kate Beckinsale was lookin’ FINE!
Hey, I saw the trailer for that the last time I was in Blockbuster.
Luckily, I had a bisected lemon on hand to squeeze into my eyes.
It is a fun movie, not a great movie. It is one of those movies that the farther away from it you get, the more problems keep cropping up. the “hey, waitaminute” effect.
Some people get if sooner than others – I thought it was a great candy bar, but a poor meal.
Q: how do you ruin something as cool as a vampire vs werewolves movie?
A: When they fight each other they should use guns! yeah thats the ticket!
I was pleasantly surprised by Underworld, as I expected it to be ‘Tomb Raider 2’ bad, but it turned out to be merely ‘Armageddon’ bad. Ms Beckinsale in tight leather pants. 'Nuff said.
Fun and trashy popcorn film, but still not worth the ticket price.
I enjoyed it. Fun but not great, as others noted.
And I have to agree that Kate B. in the tight leather pants was real nice to look at. REAL nice.
Anyone know what the outcome of the lawsuit was against this movie? I think it was the creators of the “White Wolf” company suing, IIRC.
To me movies like this are like comic books and I have no problem with crossovers if they’re done well. In fact, I love crossovers if done well. I wanna see Gandalf show up in the latest Harry Potter movie, smack Harry aside and kick the bad guy’s ass. Or something like that. Actually I’d rather Harry Potter showed up in LOTR, snatched that ring from wuss-boy and disposed of it in a much less snively way.
Anyway, we were discussing Alien vs. Predator recently and if AvP is as good as Underworld, I’ll be happy.
If you neither liked Matrix or Blade then you’re a pretty tough customer. I liked 'em both. Great eye candy, great action. The special effects were, I thought, right up there with Matrix and Blade. Perhaps on a bit tighter budget, but that makes me respect it more. As long as the acting and dialogue don’t make me winch or gag on my popcorn, I feel like I got my money’s worth. This was only a rental for me, but I wish I’d seen it on the big screen/sound system. At least a matinee, but I’d even pay full price.
Assuming Matrix, Blade and Underworld are all more or less in the same genre, then which films in this genre do you like?
Marketing probably killed it. I don’t remember seeing it advertised much, and I originally heard about it by watching the trailer at apple’s quicktime site. Hopefully as a rental it will do much better so I can get my sequel.
One of the few movies so bad I walked out. God, what a bad movie.
…the hell?
Underworld was mostly blah. Nothing was actually good or bad enough to stand out to me. I left the theatre with an overwhelming feeling that thousands of goths were near-giddy, but not much else.
I’ve never seen crappier fight scene premises, though.
I’ll wave whips around, then be eaten!
I’ll stand there and growl, and then get shot!
I’ll pull out very silly backup swords, then my head will bisect!
Blah.
Funny, I just started a thread last week in IMHO talking about how bad I thought this movie was 
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?postid=4457235#post4457235 (sorry, I don’t know how to dumb it down)
I didn’t mind the concept and storyline…werewolves fighting vampires is a cool idea and could be done really well, and the idea of what the werewolves were trying to do with Michael was pretty interesting as well, although I wasn’t quite sure what their motives were. Having played and enjoyed Vampire: the Masquerade, I thought it worked pretty well, but I didn’t like the weapons used by the werewolves…i thought that was a silly idea, and really much rather enjoyed watching the big galloots chomping and tearing their way threw the enemy.
What I really didn’t like about it was the science…(spoilers for anyone who hasn’t seen it). According to this, “on the cellular level”, vampires and werewolves can’t co-exist. I remember Selen mentioning to Michael that, seeing as how he was already bitten by a werewolf, if she were to bite him, he’d die. This means, any vampire who bites a werewolf would die because they’d ingest the werewolf’s blood, and the werewolf would die because of the “bacteria”, and vice versa. That’s just dumb. Also, apparently not everyone can be turned, because a simple bite infects, and the infection, as she says, is almost always fatal to a mortal. This bugged me because it seems like vampires are still able to sire whoever they want…but if the bite of an immortal kills a mortal, then how can you sire anyone?
The phosflorescient bullets were just silly, and the explaination was sillier. “It’s liquid sunlight.” WHAT?
A vampire vs werewolf movie is a great idea, this just wasn’t the best execution. Maybe the sequel will be better.
A question about the ending, for anyone who’s seen it…now, from what I got, the mixing of pure bloodlines can create a super werevampire. They used Michael to create the pure werewolf, and the elder vampire lady to get a blood sample pure enough to merge and create their “secret weapon”. At the end of the movie, you see the dead werewolf lying on the floor over Marcos’s tomb, the blood flowing down, then Marcos’s eyes opening. Then they turn black. Now, he was apparently a direct decendant from the original vampire, thus one of the “pure bloods.” Did his ingesting the werewolf blood simply wake him up, or turn him into an abomination as well?
Assuming the genre you mean is action, not big, loud and obnoxious films, I enjoy the following:
Hard Boiled - Guilty pleasure.
Commando - I’m embrassed to admit liking it. So bad it’s good.
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade - Switch off your brain stuff. Just a bit of fun.
Early James Bond flicks - Very funny with lots of great action.
Police Story - The first was very entertaining, then they took a nose-dive into shite town.
The Killer - More John Woo mass slaughter.
Gone in 60 Seconds - The 70s original, not Bruckheimer’s shit-pile.
They’re about the only all-action films I can think of, to be honest. A lot of the films I like involve action, but are not all-action (eg. Citizen Toxie: The Toxic Avenger 4).
My guess would be that the vamps can ensure that a mortal will live by giving them special care after they bite them. Without someone looking after them, the mortal’s death is likely.
The weapons master who examines the bullets says that they’re filled with an “irradiated fluid”. I can stretch my imagination far enough to encompass a fluid that can give off a dose of UV radiation. Now, whether the tiny amount of fluid in a bullet would be sufficient to kill a vampire, that’s another matter.
My money is on “abomination”, but I guess we’ll have to wait and see. Odds are he’ll become something different from Michael, since Michael was a hardy-gene werewolf who was bitten by a vampire to become an abomination, while Marcus was a hardy-gene vampire who drank the blood of a werewolf. Of course, the question arises: if vamps and lycans are so incompatible on the cellular level, and drinking lycan blood will turn Marcus into something else, why didn’t drinking Michael’s blood have any effect on Selene? Anyone wanna bet they’ll pull something out of their butts about how, since Michael was dying from the silver nitrate, there wasn’t enough lycan-ism in his blood to harm her, or something?
Blech, I thought it sucked, too.
Word of mouth, I hope.
He’ll be an abomination as well… direct descendant of Corvinus bitten by a bat (or was he the human descendant and was turned into a vamp?) so drinking lycan blood would change him to an abomination…
Probably just drinking the blood wouldn’t do anything to Selene but if not then Marcus wouldn’t become an abomination just from drinking lycan blood he’d have to be bitten. Maybe they will explain it as she didn’t actually swallow any blood just bit Michael to pass on the virus? But then why was she eaning over him so long if he just needed to be bitten?
Bah I try not to think too hard. It was fun as others said but doesn’t hold up. I’ll probably buy it because I liked it, not because it was a ‘good’ movie.
Saw this in the theater and enjoyed it, mostly because the girl I was with was so excited about it. I bought the DVD and realized that what I liked most about the movie was Kate Beckinsale sporting those tight leather pants all over the place. Yowza!!
But…was I the only one disappointed by what Michael turned into? Giant, American-Werewolf-In-London-type lycanthropes plus ancient, powerful vampires equals…some cheesy guy in black makeup with some chest enhancements? Jeez, he looked like a wimpy Lou Ferrigno dusted with my barbecue ash.
Weak.
Strong pants, but weak overall.
This movie inspired an interesting discussion. I didn’t like it but I can see how others would like it. The reasoning goes like this: in my book, bad acting spoils a movie. Others can overlook it. But from the first line of Kraven’s dialogue, spit out with that stupid grimace on his face and with the flow of a constipated stutterer, I knew the movie was gonna blow. Everytime I started getting more into it (read, Kate Beckinsale’s ass in tight leather), Kraven would come back in and ruin it with another stupid line. None of the other actors except Beckinsale were much better, but Kraven was just terrible. That and they did nothing to develop the characters at all: Selene fell in love with Michael awful easily, and turned against the vampires with little motivation; similarly she turned against Viktor very easily when she heard about his attack from Lucion, her arch-enemy to that point…
Others in the conversation said that the bad acting didn’t bother them so much. Others things ruined movies for them – stupid unbelievable misunderstandings forming the premise of the movie (like Anger Management), poor character development, manipulative score, extreme suspension of disbelief required. For those people, Underworld would probably be OK – it was a popcorn flick as others have said, and if you can get around the obvious flaws (IMHO bad acting and poor character development) then it is actually enjoyable.
It was no more improbable than Blade and was a similar movie on many levels. Improbable ways to kill (EDTA vs. “silver nitrate” and UV bullets). EDTA is a pretty harmless chemical we use all the time in the lab; silver nitrate is a clearish brown fluid not the mercury-like stuff they showed. Vampires going against their clans. Dark cinematography. Reasonable action scenes. Blade had better acting and character development, though.
This movie was all atmosphere, but damned did they do a good job with that. I’ve heard this was the maiden voyage for the team, and I think they have some talent and some future, so I’m willing to forgive them for making mistakes and stumbling over some of the subtler aspects of the movie. I was impressed that they managed to cram so much backstory into the flick and yet make it seem reasonably fitting.