Talk about Talkies
Underworld: Rise of the Lycans
There is a real lowbrow pleasure to making movies that pit iconic monsters against each other, and Hollywood has been doing it for a long time, creating such inevitable clashes as Frankenstein's monster battling the wolf man in 1943, King Kong attacking Godzilla in 1962, and Mexican wrestling superstar Santo versus both Dracula and the Wolf Man in 1972. Heck, even Billy the Kid got in on the action, battling Dracula in 1966 in a particularly silly entry into the genre, although, admittedly, it is a bit of a stretch to think of Billy the Kid as a monster. The film works best when paired with its companion film, Jesse James meets Frankenstein's Daughter, in which we have a monster vs. monster film in which neither character is a monster.
It is possible to enjoy these movies as spectacles of outrageous filmmaking, even to this day, when films pitting child murderer Freddie Kruger against Jason Voorhees, who tends to prefer to slaughter teenagers, are greenlit by studios for reasons that can only be described as crassly commercial. Sometimes, fans of these movies flounder for the right word to describe their peculiar but genuine pleasures, and often settle on the word "kitsch." But they aren't using it quite right. If you know something is bad and enjoy it anyway, that's not kitsch. Kitsch is tasteless art that people nonetheless mistakenly think is excellent. Plaster replicas of ancient statues are kitsch. Gold-painted telephones are kitsch. Vladimir Tretchikoff's painting are kitsch. Movie monsters duking it out on the screen are not kitsch.
At least, not until the Underworld series. The first film in the trilogy, 2003's Underworld, was perplexingly stylish for a movie about a war between werewolves and vampires that has gone on, unnoticed by humanity, for thousand of years. But vampire movies are always perplexingly stylish. Ever since Bela Lugosi made the scene in tuxedo and opera cape, vampires have been known as much for their sartorial extravagance as for their bloodthirstiness. So Underworld clad its characters in black leather and latex that seemed more at home in a bondage video than a monster vs. monster flick, and that just seems to be the way vampires dress nowadays, for reasons they never bother to explain onscreen. But Underworld reached for more. Although vampire movies have a long history of plucking august performers to play their main characters, including such acting legends as Klaus Kinski and Gary Oldman, actors of their caliber have been in short supply when it came time for the vampires to bare their fangs at werewolves or gill men. Instead, those jobs have tended to go to older, out-of-work, and frequently alcoholic actors, usually either John Carradine or Lon Chaney Jr.
But Underworld smartly cast three English actors who were neither broken-down nor, as far as I know, alcoholic. First, it looked to Kate Beckinsale as its lead, a skilled killer of werewolves (in these moves called "lycans," short of "lycanthropes" but sounding, unintentionally, like "lichen," the fungus that clings to trees). Beckinsale looked great in the role, skulking around in skin-tight S&M gear and nonchalantly dispatching werewolves, who didn't look like wolves at all but, in the tradition of werewolf movies, looked like especially lean and toothy bears. The head of the lycans was played by Michael Sheen, who can currently be seen grilling Frank Langella in Frost/Nixon. (Come to think of it, Langella previously played Dracula, so maybe Ron Howard's political drama is also something of a werewolf vs. vampire movie). Sheen usually doesn't look especially lupine, but they gave him a lot of hair for the movie and he looked especially unhappy, and that's basically what a werewolf is in werewolf movies: an unhappy man with too much hair.
Best still, the series cast Bill Nighy as a sort of head vampire. Nighy is a puzzling actor, in that one is tempted to say he is campy, because he is always so funny even when he is being serious. But he isn't campy in the winking manner of, say, Adam west. He just seems to find oddly hilarious ways to play a character, and then goes for it, without any shame at all, because, one suspects, at the end of the day he finds it funny. And so his vampire elder statesman, Viktor, struts about in a sort of permanent snit, spitting out his dialogue in a clipped, choked manner that is accompanied by a thrust of the head, as though lunging and biting were so much second nature that he tries to do it even when delivering monologues.
What's past is prelude, as they say, and the latest film, Underworld: Rise of the Lycans, is that prelude. It is set at the start of the vampire/werewolf wars, sometime back in the past, which looks medieval in the way movies that have fussy set designers look medieval, instead of the way the medieval world actually looked, which was filthy. Beckinsdale has not returned for this third outing, perhaps deciding that two is enough, and she has been replaced by Rhona Mitra in a very similar role. Mitra looks a little like Beckinsdale and shares the gumption she brought to the role, but this film really belongs to Sheen and Nighy. It's a strange film to make, as the entire story of it was told in a very brief flashback in a previous movie: The werewolves were once slaves of the vampires, until sheen's character fell in love with the daughter of Nighy's character, which led to a brutal retaliation, which led to revolt and eventually war. There doesn't seem to be enough to add to this story to justify a full-length film, and there isn't. But that doesn't stop the filmmakers from treating it like Shakespeare, and that's where the film becomes kitsch. It's well made, but, then, a reproduction of the Last Supper on velvet may be well-made, but it will never be Da Vinci.
But there is a lot of pleasure in watching the film try to be something more than it is. There is some surprisingly snappy dialogue -- one line that particularly comes to mind come when a lesser vampire confronts Nighy about his less than spectacular success rate in keeping the villagers alive: "They are the grass upon which we graze." Sure, it's not the blinded Gloucester crying out "As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; They kill us for sport," but it's a cleverer phrasing than this film required. And the movie gives its characters a lot of impassioned dialogue, from Sheen rousing his fellow wolfmen with the inadvertently hilarious battle cry "We are lycans," (making me think, once again, of tree fungus) to Bill Nighy's intemperate declarations of betrayal. It's all quite listenable, which is rarely the case in these sort of films, where the dialogue generally slows the film, and, when especially bad, stops it altogether and tries to reverse it.
But we don't go to these movies for nicely written speeches. We go to watch one monster duke it out with another, and here is where the film decided to raise the stakes, if you will excuse the pun. In the earlier films in the series, we watched a few vampires shoot it out with a few werewolves using, for some reason, Mac-10s and other modern weapons. Rise of the Lycans gives us hundred of werewolves rushing at a fortress filled with hundred of vampires, all dressed in medieval armor, armed with a vast and surprising array of sharp weapons which they sometimes fire from giant crossbows and sometimes just use to poke each other. This is a battle royale, and, although it is obviously computer generated, it is nonetheless an astounding thing to see. As much as it might like to pretend to be art, there is no way this movie will ever be mistaken for being anything other than a lowbrow pleasure. Fortunately, it works as that.
