Eye Candy #227 - "Underworld - Rise of the Lycans"

Underworld-Rise of the Lycans: A prequel to the first two “Underworld” movies, involving Vampires and werewolfy Lycans.  This time around, we get more of the history of Lucian, leader of the present day Lycans from the first film.  It’s 15th Century Europe.  The Vampires live in a giant mountain fortress, enslaving Lycans to do their bidding, while contending with wild Lycans outside their walls.  Bill Nighy is back again as Viktor, vampire a-hole, and Michael Sheen is back as Lucian (he acquits himself the best of the cast).  In fact, they’ve made a good effort to bring back several actors who appeared in the previous films in the same roles including Kevin Grievoux (who also wrote the original story concept for the series; he also writes comics for Marvel right now, too) and Steven Mackintosh, so appreciate the continuity.  No Kate Beckinsale this time around, unfortunately, but we do get Rhona Mitra as Sonya and she does a passable job.  The plot seems to be cribbed mostly from “Romeo and Juliet” (as were the first 2 movies) and “Spartacus”, with all that forbidden love, rebellion, and such.  Not scary, but certainly violent and gory with lots of CGI blood, and random repeated shots of 3 Vampire soldiers running down a hallway (it happens so often, it’s absurd). I thought it was a better entry that the 2nd film.  If you ejected all the backstory, most of it would work fine as a stand-alone.  Woodchuck sez, “Completists will want to see this.”