I am legitimately a prude and have never bought into the MST3Kification of genre fandom, but the closest thing I have to a New Year's resolution is to finally work my way through my Mill Creek and Universal Horror boxsets or die trying, so starting 2025 with this is a statement of intent.

I've written with genuine earnestness before about the psychosexual impact broadcasts of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies had on me as a budding bisexual b-movie buff,…

Blood Wars is not nearly as bad as its reputation might suggest, at least for the target audience. It’s not a good film at all, but it’s certainly no worse than the others in the series. As with all the sequels, those who have made it this far in the saga will find moments (if only moments) to appreciate, while those who are coming to this without paying attention to the finer points of the lore likely will not. There…

There’s a reason that I liked this movie so much—I even bought the soundtrack—when I saw it in theatrical release: low expectations. I hadn’t seen the others, and assumed that they were all like this. Having now watched them all within a fairly short timespan, the earlier movies are generally ludicrous and frequently dumb, often confusing complexity with depth; but they are rarely quite this shallow. Awakening ditches much of the self-seriousness but also most of the charm and nearly…

Three linked animated shorts set in the Underworld universe, following the vampire Death Dealer Selene as she stalks three Lycan brothers in Paris across three distinct time periods.

Best viewed directly before the fourth film, Awakening, Endless War is pretty much the epitome of “for completists only.” In addition to telling a slender three-part story of its own, the first two parts bridge the gap between the prequel Rise of the Lycans and the original Underworld, while the third part…

A prequel which continues the franchise’s drift from unambitious Matrix knockoff into something resembling a second-tier Biblical epic: Demetrius and the Gladiators, but with werewolves.

Michael Sheen returns as Lucian, the werewolf who rejects the special treatment given him as house “Lycan” in servitude to his vampire overlords, and seeks to lead his people to freedom. Rhona Mitra co-stars as his star-crossed vampire lover Sonja, who checks her Death Dealer privilege just long enough to recognize that there no such…

Evolution is glossier, gorier, and even goofier than the first Underworld film. The improvements are almost entirely surface-level, but that’s all that one realistically hope for in a movie like this. This is the kind of franchise where switching from oppressive blue color grading to oppressive teal-and-orange color grading not only signifies an aesthetic improvement, but es for emotional resonance.

This flashback-heavy sequel jettisons or retcons many of the specific details of the Underworld mythology while going even deeper down…

I’d previously only watched a few minutes of Underworld a decade ago, on TV, with a friend who snarked that we should do a shot every time Kate Beckinsale sashayed into (or flounced out of) a room. That distant memory sprang to mind 12 minutes into the unrated extended cut on Blu-ray. And twice more at 14 minutes in. And again at 24 minutes in. And…yeah, that drinking game would probably make this movie increasingly more amusing, until it actually…