A sudden medical emergency forces an evacuation of all personel from an Antarctic research base. Space limitations require that the team of eight brave, clever and adorable sled dogs be left behind… for the time being. But when “the biggest storm on record” hits the area hard, “for the time being” becomes “for good.” The dog team must survive on their own, braving the harsh environment, while their devoted human master tries to find a way, any way, to get back to them.

It’d be easy to make a bad movie from such a premise, and Disney especially is notorious for making maudlin, moronic films from such a premise on numerous occasions. But you can believe the hype on this one: “Eight Below” isn’t just good, it’s damn good.

Here’s how it works: Once the plot is in motion, the film turns almost totally observational in it’s approach to the paralell human and animal stories. The lead hero (Paul Walker, who MIGHT just be morphing into some kind of decent actor) isn’t “man on a mission” to get the animals back, he’s determined but also realistic, and his story tracks his slow withdrawal from life over guilt at leaving his team behind.

Likewise, the dogs (six Siberian Huskies and two Malamutes) aren’t “questing” for anything other than basic food and shelter, and their “adventure” is presented both from a dog’s-eye-view of the action and also from (as much as possible) a dog’s “perspective.” There’s no speaking animals, no “Babe” CGI-tweaking or even monologue. The dogs “act like dogs,” in as much as they really do appear to be thinking whatever we’re projecting onto them. As a man of science, naturally, I’m aware that there’s little chance that dogs are actually “sad” or “happy” when they make what we see as a “sad” or “happy” face, but animal-“acting” like this makes it awfully easy to forget that.

The dogs get the bulk of the screen time, in fact. There’s several terrific rescue scenes, of humans by dogs and dogs by dogs, amazing sequences of “tactical” hunting; and a scene of pure comic-tragic poetry where the dogs find themselves enraptured by the Northern Lights. But the “money” moment is an extended, genuinely thrilling action scene featuring a battle for control of a killer whale carcass against a fearsome Leopard Seal, which the dog’s-eye-view filmming and note-perfect staging effectively transform into a more-than-suitable doppleganger for a rampaging T-Rex… or more appropriately one of the “Aliens.”

This is a good adventure movie and a great dog movie. Reccomended.

FINAL RATING: 9/10

Just big “pretty please” to check out MovieBob’s new sister-blog, “Geek Speak,” at the following link:

http://moviebob-geekspeak.blogspot.com/

“Geek Speak” will be an updated-when-necessary showcase for detailed columns intended as a public service. Namely, the public service of explaining the intricacies of Geek Culture trends to all the sometime-geeks and non-geeks out there.

Do you have friends, relatives or aquaintances who are geeks? Cinephiles? Trekkies? LARPers? Role-Players? MiSTies? Comic Book junkies? Gamers? Retro Gamers? Do you feel left out of the conversation sometimes? Want to know what the HELL they’re talking about? Is there some big movie that seems to have people ALREADY jazzed up, and you want to know why? You need “GEEK SPEAK,” where each column will cover a currently newsworthy aspect of Geek Culture and lay it out in plain english for YOUR benefit.

The innaugural column has just today gone up, with a detailed rundown of the all the terminology and hype in the rumors about the currently in-production film “Spider-Man 3.” Why is the Spidey-fan in your life so invested? Who’s this “Venom” they keep talking about? Why were people so excited when they saw Dylan Baker in #2? What’s to become of the love story that won over the mainstream audience? Wonder no longer, friend…

That link again is:

http://moviebob-geekspeak.blogspot.com/

If you’ve enjoyed MovieBob, I hope you’ll enjoy this as well!

All in fun, of course. And we’re all glad the guy apparently wasn’t seriously injured, but seriously… this is with Cheney for a LONG TIME now. This is one of those lasting go-to politician punchlines. This is Ford stumbling. This is Carter getting attacked by the rabbit.

If nothing else, the moneymaking “Final Destination” series sports one of the all-time best premises for a horror franchise. Each film is nearly-identitcal in structure: Prior to engaging in some everyday activity, a character is seized by a vision of a horrible accident that causes the deaths of multiple people, themselves included. As a result of this character’s subsequent “freaking out,” they and several others exit said situation and thusly are spared when the horrible accident actually happens! However, the “force” of Death (or fate, or whatever) isn’t about to take such “hiccups” in it’s “who-goes-when-and-how” plan in stride, and the survivors find the universe bending over backwards to wipe them out anyway through ever-more elaborate “accidents.”

Call it John Calvin meets Jason Vorhees, or the ultimate abstraction of the “Black Christmas” unknown-killer phenomenon, but you can’t say it isn’t clever. It’s broad enough to be reworked to infinity with new casts and settings, since the only recurring character is a “force;” but specific enough that it can honestly call itself a functional series. The setup just BEGS for a succession of ante-upping FX-aided “kills;” and while the series has so far avoided the mistake of delving into it directly, there does appear to be some real subtext to the theme of the disaffected youth of a post-Christian America running in terror from… what, exactly? “Death?” Fate? Innevitability? Spirituality itself? I mean, if the object of fear is an all-powerful supernatural force that decides who lives and who dies… has the “Final Destination” series essentially replaced Michael Meyers with God?

Bigger issues aside, this has now led to three watchable, well-made teen-targeted horror films. This go-round, the setting is a rural town, the victims to be are high school seniors just about to graduate and the big accident is a massively-malfunctioning roller coaster. Some new elements crop up, with varying success, like digital photographs that seem to contain clues as to the when and/or why of various deaths, and the usefulness of Google searches in determining whether strange occurances have occured strangely before.

The kill scenes, which is what you’re really paying for in this series, are generally fun. To rattle off highlights would kind of spoil the fun, but machinery and electricity are the favored playthings this time around. And not only this installment, but perhaps the whole series, reaches a kind of ultimate “thats just asking for it” crescendo when our heroes rush to meet the next expected victims and we see that they are… employees at a giant hardware store!

This is fun for the right kind of mood, and reccomended. And while the series presumably could go on forever, it might be best to let it conclude sooner than later. In the first film, the characters were survivors of a massive plane explosion. In the second, it was a highway pileup. Now, we’re down to a rollercoaster flipping over. If they keep this pattern up, the audiences for “Final Destination 4” may have to settle for a guy falling off his bike.

FINAL RATING: 7/10

Note: The film, as I saw it, included a scene involving “clues” to disasters in photographs. Among the evidence offered was an eerie snapshot of the World Trade Center with an airplane shadow (reflection?) appearing on it’s side. The jury’s out on whether this is “too soon” still or not, but the audience I saw with gasped at this more than they did at some of the death scenes.

“Home invasion” movies are a subgenre of suspense unto themselves, one of those curious, rigidly-rulebound mutations branching off from it’s mother genre they way “slashers” grew out of horror, “Die Hard but in a _____” grew out of action and “umitigated crap” grew out of romantic comedy.

The “modern” home invasion movie can be traced at least as far back as “Lady in A Cage” (and undoutedly even further,) but the two prime models for the theme as we know it today are 1967’s “Wait Until Dark” and Sam Peckinpah’s “Straw Dogs” in 1971. “Dark” featured an ultra-vulnerable (itty-bitty Audrey Hepburn… blind, even!) female lead set upon unknowingly by crooks, while “Dogs” had Dustin Hoffman as a thoroughly-pacifist cityboy forced to revert (or rise?) to raw caveman machismo during an assault on his home by brutish, uber-masculine thugs. Every home invasion yarn spun since essentially retells one or the other, thusly “Firewall” can be aptly described as a techy-take on “Straw Dogs,” with Harrison Ford in the Hoffman role.

This is about more than just setup. “Straw Dogs” and it’s progeny are all powerful and explicitly-masculine nightmares AND fantasies: The nightmare of having the sanctity of the home violated, the family imperiled, etc… but also the fantasy of rescuing said family from peril and restoring said sanctity to the home. The hero MUST be a loving family man, altogether decent but “robbed” by modern technological civilization of opportunities (or day-to-day reasons) to indulge his inner alpha-male. The bad guys MUST be slimier, more-animalistic than the hero to keep the “city versus the jungle” strain going, save for the leader who MUST be in some way similar to the hero so that the conflict can exist on two planes. Attractive wives/daughters MUST be leered at and in imminent threat of sexual-assault, so as the crystalize the territorial core of the conflict.

Here, Ford is head of security for a major bank, and Paul Bettany is the super-slick leader of a high-tech theivery gang who takes the family hostage. He needs Ford’s character’s help to siphon millions in “virtual money” out of the bank’s database, or the family will die. Tick tick tick tick tick tick…

That’s enough to make a servicable thriller out of, and “Firewall” manages this and only this. The most memorable home invasion stories have added elements of intrigue or plumb darker depths of subtext, as “Fight For Your Life!” where the captive family is black and the bad guys are violent racists or “Straw Dogs'” pitch-dark rape subplot. Bettany, certainly, has a great “oh, you BASTARD!” moment toward the middle that’ll have every parent in the audience ready to beat his skull in themselves, but the rest of the film isn’t really interested in attaining a unique, lasting status. It wants to be a functional techno-thriller, a decent “I still kick ass” star-vehicle for Ford destined for a comfy immortality as a basic cable mainstay (“movies for guys who like movies,” as TBS used to call them) and it achieves this.

We know, going in, that most of the film will be marking time in between the initial kidnapping and the 3rd act wherein the bad guys painfully learn what we already know: It’s a bad idea to pick a fight with Indiana Solo. Until then, it’s fun-with-gadgets, as the story has it’s fun coming up with fun ways to build suspense sequences out of webcams, cell-phones and iPods. One “MacGuyver”-ish device the hero rigs up in particular seems like it was a lot of fun to come up with, but also has the whiff of something that’ll have tech-saavy viewers tearing their hair out.

There’s a few more rules to this genre than mentioned above, like that trappings of everday home life such as, say, children’s scattered toys MUST eventually be employed as anti-baddie tools, and that dogs MUST perform, directly or indirectly, key day-saving actions and, most importantly: No matter what the setting of the movie-proper, the final confrontation between would-be alpha males MUST take the form of a punishing slugfest to prove once and for all who’s the real man. Whether “Firewall” adheres as close to these as it does to the others I’ll let you find out on your own.

FINAL RATING: 6/10

EVERYONE has already seen this by now, I’m sure, but it makes my oldschool Nintendo fanboy heart race so I’m posting it just in case it needs any MORE help spreading around.

CLICK THIS:
http://www.ifilm.com/ifilmdetail/2686716

You KNOW you’re a geek for life when something like this, ostensibly framed as a parody, nonetheless puts a lump in your throat. And yeah, I teared-up a little.

Sing it if ya’ know it: A teenaged babysitter, all alone at night, is harassed by spooky phone calls from an unknown source. She calls the cops, who agree to put a trace on the calls just in case. It’s only heavy-breathing at first, then direct threats, and then… the cops call back, frantic: Get out! The calls are coming from INSIDE THE HOUSE!!!

I’m not 100% sure whether or not the above urban leged existed or not, or if so in what form, before it was immortalized in the original “When a Stranger Calls” in 1979, but surely it must have, no? It seems too good of a flashlight-under-the-chin slumber party chiller to have originated entirely from a mostly-average late-70s teen horror offering, most notable historically for being the 2nd moneymaking genre-pic to have originally begun production as a sequel to the seminal “Black Christmas” (the first, as any horrorphile worth his weight in karo syrup can tell you, was “Halloween.”)

Make no mistake, the original film’s first act, which contains the actual “babysitter calling” portion, deserves it’s high rank among horror movie moments. Then it becomes a drawn-out detective story, capped by a final round of stalking for the climax. Much of it feels like padding, and it is, a logical corrective to a basic problem with the material: The main setup works as a minimalist campfire tale, but it’s not going to work as a feature.

So guess what the new 2006 remake decides to try and do?

Yes, the new “When a Stranger Calls” opts to make a go for spreading the original film’s first 20 minutes over the length of a whole movie. With no significant additions to the goings-on. That’s right, 90 minutes and change of a high school aged babysitter getting scary phonecalls. On the plus side, NONE of these 90 minutes is ever visualized via a camcorder, which in modern “horror” is a welcome respite.

Give director Simon West (or, rather, his art department) credit, though, for at least attempting a practical solution to the problem of stretching such a bare-bones story to proper length: Faced with having only one main character in one location, they try and turn the location into a co-star in it’s own right. This time around the “action” takes place in an ultra-expensive, ultra-custom house all alone on the shore of a wooded lake; boasting not only motion-sensing lights, conveniently-spooky sculptures and remote-controlled everything… but also a huge, glass-enclosed atrium/coy-pond/parakeet-sanctuary at it’s center. Really. What’s more, it’s layout and lighting-scheme look as though the owners walked into an architecture firm and specifically requested a home as condusive as possible to the requirements of a PG-13 “horror” movie’s heroine/stalker showdown.

Also, we’re informed early on that said stalker’s “M.O.” is to tear victims apart with his bare hands, suggesting (at least) that he’s on the same fitness regimen as Michael Meyers and Jason Vorhees. As expected, guess who will none the less find himself unable to successfully overpower a teenaged girl who appears to weigh maybe 100 lbs soaking-wet?

Y’wanna know what’s REALLY scary? This totally-disposable waste of screentime cost next to nothing (in studio terms) to make, it’s going to make back it’s money and be the #1 film in America this weekend thanks to the PG-13 rating and lack of competition, and the original film got at least one sequel. Brrrr!

FINAL RATING: 2/10

“Brokeback Mountain” leads. “Cinderella Man” predictably forgotten. “Chocolat II: Pride & Prejudice.” Actor-centric filmmaking dominates the major categories. “Sin City” completely shut-out. More, you want? Let’s get to it…

BEST PICTURE:
Brokeback Mountain
Capote
Crash
Goodnight & Good Luck
Munich

Hey, look! “Munich” actually made it in! Cool, a couple people owe me some money now. That, “Crash” and especially “Goodnight & Good Luck,” would be worthy, honorable wins. “Capote” is kind of iffy… it’s less a movie and more transportation for Hoffman’s grand lead performance. Further analysis is pretty futile, of course, because “Brokeback” is winning. Never underestimate The Academy’s fondness for a weepy, melodramatic cheeseball dipped in a yummy coating of Social Importance.
Winner: “Brokeback Mountain.”
Should win: “Goodnight & Good Luck” or “Munich.”
Missing: “Sin City.”

BEST ACTOR:
Philip Seymour Hoffman
Heath Ledger
Terrance Howard
Joaquin Pheonix
David Strathairn

Overall good category, but one dripping with Oscar politics: Hoffman and Strathairn are “due.” They really want to hear Ledger’s teary-eyed speech about leading in such an “important” film. Howard is the “shiny new guy” on the brink of stardom. Pheonix is the immediate audience fave. I’m betting safe on Hoffman, but if Ledger wins you can write off all chances of a Best Picture upset.
Winner: Hoffman.
Should win: David Strathairn.
Missing: Robert Downey Jr. (“Kiss Kiss Bang Bang”)

BEST ACTRESS:
Judi Dench
Reese Witherspoon
Felicity Huffman
Keira Knightley
Charlize Theron

Every year the Oscar handicappers seem to forget The Academy’s raging fetish for all things Judi Dench, and every year they act shocked that she’s up for another innocuous lil’ English comedy. It’ll be fun to watch Knightley’s inexplicably-virulent detractors here on the interweb have a cow over this. Theron has no reason to be here for the awful “North Country.” Witherspoon will win, giving “Walk the Line” it’s Oscar.
Winner: Reese Witherspoon
Should Win: Reese Witherspoon
Missing: Naomi Watts (“King Kong.”)

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR:
George Clooney
Matt Dillon
Paul Giamatti
Jake Gyllenhaal
William Hurt

Hurt for “History of Violence!?” KICK ASS! Giamatti is the favorite and safe-bet. Gyllenhaal was better than Ledger in their film, but gimme a break. Clooney is the dark horse.
Winner: Giamatti
Should Win: Hurt
Missing: Mickey Rourke (“Sin City”)

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS:
Amy Adams
Catherine Keener
Frances McDormand
Rachel Weisz
Michelle Williams

Hey, super. Now we get to see the “You don’t up there to FISH!!!!!!!!!” clip ad-naseum on all the news shows for the next month and a half. And watch all the critics bust a nut over Adams actually getting “Junebug” into the running. Put the cash on Rachel Weisz… but not too much of it.
Winner: Rachel Weisz
Missing: Georgie Henley (“Narnia“), Tilda Swinton (“Narnia.”)

BEST DIRECTOR:
George Clooney (“Goodnight & Good Luck”)
Paul Haggis (“Crash”)
Ang Lee (“Brokeback Mountain”)
Bennett Miller (“Capote”)
Steven Spielberg (“Munich”)

I’m going to break stride and take a risk here: I’m gonna say this is a “split” year and Ang Lee will lose director to Steven Spielberg or Clooney. Preferably Spielberg. Don’t be too mad at me if you lose the bet, just a hunch.
Winner: Spielberg
Missing: Robert Rodriguez (“Sin City,”) Andrew Adamson (“Narnia,”) Christopher Nolan (“Batman Begins.”)

ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY:
Crash
Goodnight & Good Luck
Match Point
Squid & The Whale
Syriana

“Crash” has the most heat. “Goodnight” is #2. “Match Point” is Woody’s welcome-back nod. “Syriana” is the political pick. Bet accordingly.
Winner: “Crash”

ADAPTED SCREENPLAY:
Brokeback Mountain
Capote
History of Violence
Constant Gardner
Munich

Guess who’s probably gonna take it?
Winner: “Brokeback Mountain”
Should Win: “History of Violence”
Missing: “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang”

CINEMATOGRAPHY:
Brokeback Mountain
Batman Begins
Goodnight & Good Luck
Memoirs of a Geisha
New World

“Brokeback” will rob another one, it’s very postcard-pretty but totally generic. Nice surprise to see “Batman” get a nod.
Winner: “Brokeback Mountain”
Should Win: “Batman Begins”
Missing: “King Kong,” “Narnia,” “Sin City.”

EDITING:
Cinderella Man
Constant Gardner
Crash
Munich
Walk the Line

Finally, a category without the obligatory “Brokeback” nod, (it’s dead weight 2nd act would disqualify it here, anyway.) “Crash” probably has this one for the paralell-story difficulty, and on that line where is “Sin City.”
Winner: “Crash”
Should Win: “Crash” or “Munich”
Missing: “Sin City,” “Narnia”

ART DIRECTION:
Goodnight & Good Luck
Harry Potter
King Kong
Memoirs of a Geisha
Pride & Prejudice

Hm. Okay, “Pride” looks like every other Victorian movie, no big thing. No “Narnia,” really?
Winner: Too close right now.
Should Win: “King Kong”
Missing: *sigh* “Sin City,” “Narnia,” “Batman Begins”

COSTUME DESIGN:
Charlie and The Chocolate Factory
Memoirs of a Geisha
Ms. Henderson Presents
Pride & Prejudice
Walk the Line

The costume biz here declares a symbolic putting-in-their-place of the scifi/fantasy genres that the traditionalists are so sick of winning all the time. They’ve even hopped “King Kong,” at least as good at it’s period costumes as the other three historical pics here.
Winner: “Geisha” (yuck)
Missing: Echo? What echo? “Kong,” “Sin City,” “Narnia,” “Batman”

SCORE:
Brokeback Mountain
Constant Gardner
Memoirs of a Geisha
Munich
Pride and Prejudice

Y’know what? Not even going to pretend this is a good list this year. “Brokeback” wins.
Winner: “Brokeback Mountain”
Missing: “Kong,” “Narnia,” “Batman”

SONG:
Hustle & Flow
Transamerica
Crash

Oooooh! Look how with it we are! We nominated a rap about pimping!

MAKEUP:
Chronicles of Narnia
Cinderella Man
Star Wars Episode III

“Narnia” wins.

VISUAL EFFECTS:
Chronicles of Narnia
King Kong
War of The Worlds

“Kong” wins based on the monkey alone.

So thats my list this year, let’s just get on with it…

P.S. Memo to Hollywood: We get it. Robert Rodriguez does most of his own work and that hacks off the Unions. Y’know what? This isn’t a struggling Midwestern factory, and none of you are Norma Rae. Get over it and stop stiffing this guy. The total passing over of “Sin City” is UNFORGIVABLE.

The trailers for “Annapolis” are promoting a straight-up “boot camp” military picture, with the hook of being set at the famous Maryland naval academy of the title. This is only partly true, as the film is actually a combination boot camp movie and boxing movie; (“An Officer & a Cinderella Man?;) which makes the promoting fairly puzzling: The trailers showing make the film out to be utterly generic, with no hint of the “twist” that it turns into a boxing flick at midpoint and thus becomes sort-of unique.

Unfortunately, sort-of unique doesn’t make it sort-of good.

James Franco leads as the angry, authority-phobic blue-collar kid who wills his way into a plebe year at Annapolis. Yup, he’s got daddy issues: His dissaproving-papa is a hard-bitten shipyard worker toiling at the very dock across the bay from the academy. Really. Along with his standard-issue uniform, the Academy helpfully provides standard-issue army movie buddies: Philosophizing Black Guy, Slick Hispanic Guy and, my favorite, Straight Arrow Asian Guy. What’s more, the new gender-neutral Navy affords the opportunity to drag Jordana Brewster in as a drill sergeant spin on the “hot teacher” cliche’. Tyrese Gibson rounds out the gang, flexing and glowering in the R. Lee Ermey “uber-mean drill instructor” part.

So here we go: Franco’s Cadet Huard is an “I don’t need no help from nobody!” sulking-Brando type who’s mainly at Annapolis to fulfill a promise to his dead mom that he go there. He predictably butts heads with Gibson’s hard-ass instructor, here presented (in the film’s only real inspiration) not as the typical snarling, crusty sadist but as a 30-ish Marine Corps. vet who aims to be EXTRA hard on his Annapolis cadets because “he’s seen what good and bad officers can do.” Not much, but it’s a start.

Oddly missing from the film is Gibson’s line from the trailer about being so hard on Franco’s character “because he believes in him,” odd because it leaves no real rationale for their conflict until the story is more than half-over, when they clash over a fellow cadet’s suicide attempt that Huard blames on his instructor. And at that point, their macho antler-locking has driven Huard to throw himself into The Brigades, an Academy-wide boxing tournament where (of course) Gibson’s character awaits as the Final Combatant.

The film isn’t so much bad as it is uninspired. Nothing happens that most won’t see coming, and the meshing of two well-worn genres doesn’t yield much new energy. Think of a scene you’ve seen too often in too many boxing films or too many boot camp films, and it’s gotta be in here. Director Justin Lin, late of “Better Luck Tommorrow,” knows his way around scene construction but can’t really invigorate stale material.

Most dissapointingly, given the title and promotion, the film doesn’t really give any sense of the actual Annapolis, it’s culture or even it’s atmosphere. The Navy apparently did not grant much access to the site, and has not endorsed the film based on misleading details it contains about the actual training regimen at the school. Frankly, I’m with the Navy on this one: This may not be a bad or offensive film, but it’s a boring one and Annapolis deserves better.

FINAL RATING: 3/10

The original “Underworld” looked like a loser almost right from the get-go when it was released back in 2003. A goth/metal-infused action/horror hybrid popping up out of nowhere special in the post-“Blade” period when goth/metal-infused action/horror hybrids were getting nearly as numerous as romantic comedies. It looked to have bitten off even more of “The Matrix’s” style than every other action film had, and the notion of itty-bitty British cutie Kate Beckinsale as an S&M-costumed, badass vampire-gunslinger sounded eye-rollingly silly (her similar turn in “Van Helsing” hadn’t yet occured, either.)

Genre fans dutifully lined up and braced for the predictable dissapointment, only to find that “Underworld” was an out-of-left-field surprise; a solid, inventive and (most importantly) intelligent and serious offering that quickly jumped to the head of the action/horror pack. It had it’s problems, including a sketchy first act and some truly guffaw-worthy bad supporting performances, but these were outweighed by it’s greater goods: A smart, detail-rich script that took the genre seriously, an action-star-making turn by Beckinsale in the lead and (crucially) a self-created universe with a backstory that just begged for further exploration.

Y’see, while the studio and most critics can be forgiven for being unaware of it, any quick browse through a Role Playing convention can tell one there was a HUGE audience waiting in the wings for a serious, hard-edged action/romance/mystery/thriller about a covert world-war between Vampires and Werewolves. And when “Underworld” turned out to be that film and then some, a continuation was innevitable.

Whereas the first film was mildly hard to follow unless one had at least a sophmore-level familiarity with vampire, werewolf and fantasy/scifi lore, this direct-sequel will be nearly impossible to follow unless one is familiar with film #1. So, then, here’s where we are so far: Sometime around the 11th Century, alchemist(?) Corvinus cured himself of the plague and became immortal, a genetic abnormality which he passed to his twin sons Markus and William, who were then further mutated after being bitten by a wolf (William) and a bat (Markus), and thus “fathered” the henceforth-warring races of Vampires and Werewolves (also called “Lycans,” because it sounds niftier.) In the modern era, Lycan-exterminating vampiress Selene (Beckinsale) learned that the blood-feud had been predicated on lies, turned on her traitorous vampire clansmen and fell in love with Michael (Scott Speedman) a human descendant of Corvinus who wound up transformed into a super-strong half-vampire/half-werewolf hybrid.

Film #2 picks up literally right where that leaves off: Selene and Michael are on the run from both sides, seeking out anymore mistruths or surprise revelations about their respective pasts (hint: there’s a lot of `em.) Things get immediately worse when some leftover messiness from movie #1 serves to wake up the hibernating Markus, who embarks on a mass-mudering quest to locate and free his imprisoned brother William. Which would be bad.

Whats impressive and admirable about both films is how well they actually manage to work given such complex goings-on amid material which, less face it, is just this side of silly to begin with. Writer/Director Len Wiseman (aka Mr. Kate Beckinsale) has a clear, complete vision for his creation in tone and visual execution, and his wrangling of a cast of character-acting stalwarts into serious, straight-faced embodiments of teched-up Universal Monsters is a feat of some accomplishment. Laced among all the backstory, revelation and deepening mystery are a collection of creative, first-rate action beats; including some gorgeous gunfights, a great use of Lycan “guard dogs” and a moment of pure “comic-book” perfection where a super-strong baddie pulls a helicopter out of the sky by a rope!

The cast performs great (better than in the first) and looks even better, with Beckinsale once again the last word in bloodsucker fetishism. The monsters, too, are really just spectacular looking: Markus flies and fights by way of huge leathery bat wings, and William is probably the best-looking Werewolf to appear on film in over a decade.

Here’s the rub: The “Underworld” flicks are gory, blood-drenched showcases for a gorgeous actress in (and now occasionally out of) form-fitting leather unloading magazine after magazine of heavy ammo into scores of henchmen and big, scary monsters all well five TSR manuals-worth of backstory and exposition unfold for your absorbing pleasure. Your inner twelve year-old boy really wants to see this movie, I reccomend you let him.

FINAL RATING: 7/10