Soon after humans discover the existence of both species and try to eradicate them, Beckinsale’s vamp is captured and cryogenically preserved. Many years later, she thaws out and sets about trying to thwart the genetic machinations of a ruthless scientist (Stephen Rea), receiving help from a pretty-boy vampire (Theo James) and a helpful detective (Michael Ealy).

On a positive note, the plot is relatively straightforward and easier to follow compared to the convoluted mythology storylines of the first three films, and Swedish directors Mans Marlind and Bjorn Stein both give the film a pleasingly sleek and slick look and ensure you can actually make out what’s happening during the plentiful, relentless and extremely bloody action sequences.

Beckinsale herself remains a striking figure as Selene, breathtakingly cool and confident as she struts around in her sleek leather outfits, blasts away with machine pistols and evades danger by running up walls and flipping back over the bad guys. She even bodily broadsides a van at one point, sending it flipping and flying. And her character’s graceful landings after jumping from very high places are a thing of elegance amid all the mayhem.

But the action scenes, while blessedly coherent, generally lack energy and style. You first notice this as Beckinsale, James and Beckinsale’s genetically unusual tween daughter (India Eisley) flee in a van from a pack of Lycans, and then later in Beckinsale’s initial tussle with a colossal über-Lycan, a sequence that also serves to remind us what second-rate CGI creations the werewolves are here. Paul Haslinger’s pounding score attempts to make these scenes exciting, but to no avail.

The only sequence that’s even kind of visually interesting is when Beckinsale saunters in slo-mo out of an elevator she’s just blown open, silver nitrate particles drifting down around her like snow. Otherwise, the film has little personality, and gets no help from the too low-key Rea. Its biggest flaw is how it ends so abruptly at the 78-minute mark, leaving you unsatisfied and screaming for blood. – [DVD] [Blu-Ray]

Action/Fantasy/Horror

Rated R

DVD Release Date: 5/8/12

It features Hayden Christensen, Thandie Newton and John Leguizamo as a trio of people who, along with a young boy (Jacob Latimore), struggle to survive a freaky end-of-the-world scenario in which shadows seemingly come alive and cause people to vanish into thin air, leaving behind their clothes. As long as the group is bathed in some kind of illumination, the shadows can’t get them.

As he did in Session 9 and The Machinist, Anderson eschews gore in favor of mood, effectively creating a surreal sense of dread, from Christensen discovering empty city streets and watching a passenger jet crash to the ground, to the way the shadows whisper as they slither about or close in on a survivor. Not to mention the anxiety you feel every time the lights flicker, which is a lot. The only instance of actual gore is when Newton happens upon a man who was in the middle of being operated on.

It helps that the characters aren’t as irritating as they usually are in apocalyptic thrillers, though they’re also not that well-defined. They each have their traits–Christensen’s selfish but has a heart; Leguizamo’s a shy conspiracy nut–and I suppose that’s enough to make us root for their survival. Newton makes the best impression, I think, as a woman who lost her baby to the writhing darkness.

I imagine it will irk some that we never get a real explanation as to what’s going on, just various theories (one emphasized a little more than the others) bandied about by the characters, as well as Christensen’s ominous observation that each day the sun rises a little later and sets a little earlier. I myself didn’t quite understand the part where Leguizamo walks down an underground tunnel. Nonetheless, if you’re not already afraid of the dark, you probably will be after watching this. – [DVD]

Horror/Mystery/Thriller

Rated R

DVD Release Date: 5/17/11

This is a broad attack to take in reviewing a horror film, but since Bram Stoker’s Dracula was published in 1897 and ushered into popular ken a soulless creature who lived forever, consumed human beings then turned them into more monsters like itself, well, the vampire seemed to fit the bill as the epitome of evil. At least as far as the go-to villain in film and fiction.

As time passed and the vampire became a little “been-there-done-that”, Anne Rice’s 1976 novel Interview with the Vampire reconfigured undead life as antebellum romance laced with the ennui of the grave and ushered in the premillennial permutations of the vampire as a tragic figure (Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula (1992), the Twilight series, Abel Ferrara’s downtown hipster metaphor for aids and addiction, The Addiction (1995)). Evil got soul.

In Let Me In, directed by Matt Reeves (Cloverfield (2008)), evil comes to a teenager named Owen (Kodi Smit-McPhee) living in Los Alamos, New Mexico during the Reagan era 80’s. His parents are divorcing, so he’s shunted to one side in their attentions. Small, bullied by his peers, spying on his neighbors and daydreaming of candy and revenge in equal measure, he’s befriended by a strange girl, Abby (Chloe Moretz), who moves into the apartment next door. She’s impervious to cold, lost and sad, then oddly calculating and predatory in her demeanor. She lives with her “father” and has something to hide as a detective investigating “Satanic” killings in the area closes in. She’s Owen’s savior who will be true to her nature, doing so much bad to be good to him.

Let Me In has things standing in its way. According to director Reeves, his movie is a direct adaptation of the 2004 novel Let the Right One In by Swedish author John Ajvide Lindquist, but the looming roadblock to this claim is the 2008 Swedish version directed by Tomas Alfredson and for which Lindquist himself penned the screenplay. The film Let the Right One In made its way onto many end of the year top ten lists, and was acknowledged as a modern classic. Reeves is a fan of both book and film and has said his version is not just an Americanized take on the original film, but elements he’s said to have reworked don’t make any real improvements.

Let the Right One In, even as a horror film, is distilled to its right and true melancholic adolescent essence and jettisoned the baroque plot contrivances of Lindquist’s book. Reeves gives his actors more to work with but it feels like an obligation just to change things up and comes not from inspiration or even homage. The film works on its own only because Reeves does a one eighty from Let the Right One In in the overall tone of the movie.

Let the Right One In was elegiac, minimalist, lyrical. Reeves successfully moves his film into darker realms with Moretz’s Abby carrying the weight of that darkness. You see the manipulations behind her eyes and you know there’s no real hope in what Owen and her have together. Abby may have been helpless in the face of whatever evil caused her creation, but she’s assimilated some of it to survive, if not gathered it in a full embrace.

So Let Me In is a solid film. It has concessions to horror movie special effects 101, but the genuine terror that adolescence is a locked down cage where nobody really listens to you is acutely felt. This isn’t a harlequin romance with fangs in the high desert of New Mexico.

But was this film a shameless dart toss at moneymaking while riding the critical cachet and genuine excellence of its predecessor? Was it a little bit of I-can-do-better egoism mixed with fanboy ardor?

Are we damning by faint praise?

Now that’s evil. – [DVD] [Blu-Ray]

Drama/Fantasy/Horror

Rated R

DVD Release Date: 2/1/11

Someone once said, “The difference between good pornography and bad pornography is the addition of plot.” I think it might have been Gandhi.

The allegory works here because the most recent, and hopefully titled Saw: The Final Chapter is the archetype of the adult film: horrible acting followed by what I will cautiously dub “the payoff.” Only in this case the payoff is blood spattering gore.

I originally was going to explain the story, but I can’t, I really wish I could. I have no idea what was going on for the first 10 minutes, some sort of back story that I’m betting would make a little sense if I had seen the previous film. While I was trying to figure it out, someone had strapped two men to crazy electric saws with the girl who had been cheating on both of them in the middle. One of them had to die in 60 seconds. The plot instantly took a back seat to the payoff.

The thing I did like, and there really was just the one thing, was the gore. Where many more recent horror films rely heavily on digital effects, the blood in Saw: The Final Chapter is pure corn syrup and food coloring. Latex intestines and mildly comical limbs highlight what is essentially a badly acted soap opera of death.

I’m not saying don’t see it, I’m just saying feel a little bad about it when you do. – [DVD]

Crime/Horror/Mystery

Rated R

DVD Release Date: 1/25/11

The bloody action–I can’t in good conscience call it a plot–occurs in and around Lake Victoria, where a tremor unleashes scores of the razor-toothed critters who proceed to chow down on the numerous nubile college kids in town for Spring Break.

There’s no question this is C-level trash. It lacks structure, character development and any sort of meaningful dialogue. The semi-known stars (Elisabeth Shue, Ving Rhames, Adam Scott) that populate it don’t act so much as react or scream things like “get out of the water!” I wouldn’t blame anyone for thinking it aired on the SyFy Channel.

But it’s fun because it knows it’s junk. Pure, shameless, gratuitous cheese. We get throngs of hot college girls in skimpy suits or baring their wares, naked British women swimming underwater as opera plays on the soundtrack and a perfectly cast Jerry O’Connell pouring on the smooth sleaze as a giddy director of the Girls-Gone-Wild variety.

Aja also mines plenty of laughs from the grisly makeup effects. One girl gets scalped (and then some) when her hair gets tangled in a boat’s propeller, another literally breaks in half as she’s being carried to shore and, in what passes for a memorable moment (one I’d like to forget), a pair of piranha fight over a certain male body part before one of them eats it and then spits it out.

The piranha themselves are truly frightening-looking little CGI monsters, especially in close-up, and some of the underwater photography is actually kind of beautiful. But it really is kind of a bummer seeing Richard Dreyfuss appear in this thing’s opening credits in an obvious nod to Jaws. The man’s career, it seems, is sleeping with the fishes. – [DVD]

Comedy/Horror/Thriller

Rated R

DVD Release Date: 1/11/2011

Milla Jovovich

It opens with a bang, as Jovovich’s genetically enhanced superbabe and her clones breach the Tokyo headquarters of the evil Umbrella Corporation (which created the virus that zombified most of the world population), before eventually settling in Los Angeles, where Jovovich helps a group of survivors holed up in a former prison surrounded by zombies find a way to a supposed safe haven.

For me, a big part of what makes this entry better is the return of Paul W.S. Anderson (Death Race) as director. Not because he helmed the first film and wrote every installment and is therefore an expert on the franchise. But because he is, plain and simple, one of my favorite auteurs of slick action entertainment, a man who energetically and expertly puts style over substance.

He proves it right from the start with this one, too, stuffing said prologue with a level of mayhem one would expect to find in a finale. Jovovich and her doppelgangers brandish swords, machine guns, grenades and telekinesis as they flip, slice and blaze their way past hordes of guards. And the explosion that ultimately consumes the underground HQ is, literally and figuratively, awesome.

After that, Anderson basically tweaks zombie abilities (they swim! they dig tunnels!) and finds new ways for his characters to kill the things beyond just a bullet to the head. Like how Jovovich, cable tied around her, jumps off the zombie-filled prison roof just as it explodes, swings down to the ground and smoothly starts blowing away flesh-eaters, using quarters as ammunition.

There are, somewhat disappointingly, no zombie crows in this one, but Anderson does offer up a giant hooded zombie for Jovovich and fellow female survivor Ali Larter to battle (while soaking wet, natch), as well as yet another appearance by those nasty zombie Doberman Pinschers. In perhaps the film’s most creative moment, Jovovich dispatches one of them by kicking a falling piece of glass at it.

On the slight downside, the characters are a fairly colorless bunch (save for Wentworth Miller’s soldier) and the film blatantly apes The Matrix, partly in how the main villain is a super-powered being who looks and sounds like an FBI agent and can bend around bullets, but mostly in Anderson’s somewhat tiresome tendency to freeze scenes mid-action and slowly swirl around them.

But I digress. The film is a rousing good time, and demonstrates once again that you don’t have to be a guy to successfully headline an action franchise. Granted, Jovovich isn’t quite as good an actress as Sigourney Weaver, but she sure looks good performing gravity-defying somersaults. – [DVD] [Blu-Ray]

Action/Adventure/Horror

Rated R

DVD Release Date: 12/28/10

The only face I recognized in the film was the “snazberry” kid from Super Troopers (Geoffrey Arend). The director, John Erick Dowdle, hasn’t directed much (Quarantine). If there’s any notable appeal to this film, it’s Shyamalan. And that doesn’t say much as he has regressed from being a master of suspense (with films like The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable) to an unbearable bedtime storyteller (with films like Signs, The Village, Lady in the Water, The Happening, and The Last Airbender). There’s not much depth to Devil. The film ends as quickly as it begins, not leaving much closure, but not needing much either. - [DVD]

Horror/Mystery/Thriller

Rated PG-13

DVD Release Date: 12/21/10

Jackie Earle Haley takes over for role-originator Robert Englund in donning the familiar fedora and red and green sweater of the horribly disfigured Krueger, reconfigured here as a child molester burned alive by a pack of understandably upset parents who exacts revenge by killing the parents’ kids via their dreams.

The wisecracking killer that Krueger became in the later films is gone, replaced by the deadly serious demon of the first two entries. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing in terms of restarting the franchise, but the script is so lacking in any real wit or creativity that the film threatens to become as rote as the recent redos of Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees and Leatherface.

What saves it is Haley. He makes Krueger truly scary, with a raspy rumble of a voice and a hair-raising chuckle, and gets a first-rate makeup job that makes him look all the more terrifying. He easily outshines the other actors, be it the ones playing the teens (Kyle Gallner, Rooney Mara, Thomas Dekker) or the seemingly idiotic adults (Clancy Brown, Connie Britton).

The film looks great, too, and director Samuel Bayer proves more or less adept at fashioning frightening moments. This includes the creepy opening scenes and the anxious trip blonde hottie Katie Cassidy makes to her attic, as well as the sequence in which a sleep-deprived Mara crawls backwards on a drug store floor as the real world and her dream state start to overlap.

It helps that composer Steve Jablonsky incorporates Charles Bernstein’s original theme into his score for the film, as the theme is one of horror cinema’s best, save for Psycho and Halloween. One more reason that, while this Nightmare won’t exactly keep you up at night, it is worth staying up to watch. – [DVD]

Horror/Mystery/Thriller

Rated R

DVD Release Date: 10/5/10

Del Toro assumes the role of Lawrence Talbot (originally played by Lon Chaney, Jr.), a renowned Shakespearean actor who, upon hearing from his brother’s fiancée (Emily Blunt) that his brother has vanished, returns home to his family’s English estate where he gets attacked by a werewolf, sprouts fur and starts ripping the local citizenry to shreds.

The main problem with Del Toro here is that he lacks energy. He talks in a low voice and just plain looks like he’s half asleep. He may be able to get away with such things in lower-profile flicks, but this is an $85 million Hollywood movie, one that needs an actor who can stand out from all the sturm and drang. Mumbling simply won’t cut it.

As such it falls to Anthony Hopkins, as Del Toro’s crazy pop, to make things interesting, which he does with effortless, scenery-chewing finesse. Especially good is the scene with Del Toro in which Hopkins explains at length how he feels about the death of Del Toro’s mother. “I’m quite dead,” he tells his son, waving a lit candle between them and exuding quiet menace.

The film around him isn’t nearly as scary as he is–or scary, period–but it sure does look good, boasting finely-tailored costumes, lavish sets, horse-drawn carriages, constantly grey skies and lots of shots of mist-shrouded forests. The score by Danny Elfman isn’t too bad, either, though at times it tends to sound like the music from 1992’s Dracula (which also featured Hopkins).

Johnston (Jumanji, The Rocketeer) seemingly compensates for the scarce scares by going all out on the gore, and that’s not a complaint. Courtesy of makeup master Rick Baker, we see entrails littering the ground, heads getting lopped off and arms torn off. And Johnston excels at the action stuff, particularly the fiery finale between Del Toro’s werewolf and the beast that bit him.

So you can forget about nuance with this one, despite the presence of Blunt, who mainly looks concerned a lot. There is a bit of humor, though, when Hugo Weaving (excellent as a Scotland Yard inspector) sternly explains to a lady in a tavern–to the sound of a man suddenly spitting out his ale–why he’s there instead of out arresting Del Toro. You might just howl with laughter. – [DVD] [Blu-Ray]

Horror/Thriller

Rated R

DVD Release Date: 6/1/10

Set in a near future where most of the population are vampires with only a handful of humans to feed off, similar to the ratio of monkeys to humans in Planet of the Apes. A scientist at a giant corporation who operates “blood farms” is working on a blood substitute to meet the growing needs of the vampire population. There are two thinly veiled and mildly lame metaphors here: a giant corporation is literally sucking the blood from people; and if you live in Boulder, replace every instance of the word blood with the word oil. It’s like a party game for those in the know.

Anyhow, a small group of wily humans led by Willem Dafoe, who has been cured of his vampirism, recruits the vampire’s version of a vegan, Ethan Hawke, the aforementioned scientist who only drinks pig’s blood, to help them turn Dafoe’s odd transformation into their secret weapon.

It’s a decent sci-fi/action flick. Visually it’s stark and well composed, the story makes sense most of the time, and the action is full of bullets and stakes. Vamps explode like an amped-up episode of Buffy, and there’s a lot of cool semi- futuristic tech, like cars with cameras on top so that the undead can drive around during the day. It’s a lot of fun, and best of all, there’s not that pesky Edward/Jacob debate. – [DVD] [Blu-Ray]

Action/Drama/Horror/Sci-Fi/Thriller

Rated R

DVD Release Date: 5/11/10