SF and Fantasy Movie Reviews Starting With U
UFOria (1985) 
Genres: SF Com Rom
There's no Hollywood nonsense here, boy! It's all good old country. And let me tell you, those country folks are no fools. This movie has some of the best music.
I sure as all heck hope Fred Ward's chest comes that smooth by its own natural self -- I jest get all creeped out thinking he might be messing with God's natural design of that fine-proportioned lean hard manly body for the sake of some darn Hollywood sissy notion . . . I tell you what.
Ulysses (1955 Italy) NR
Genres: Adv F
Watched: 40 min
Crude, boring dialogue, unjustified plot modifications, at no point to the better, and bizarre costumes. It stinks, despite the vibrancy of Kirk Douglas and Anthony Quinn. Strange . . . Italy made all these sword and sandal epics, and for this pathetic one they imported American stars whom they presumably had to pay more. They are so scatter-brained.
Underworld (2003)
Genres: F Hor Act
Vampires vs. werewolves! It's fun. The plot is good but everything else is at best adequate. Like the dialogue and the acting. They have that frozen-faced acting a lot here to make sure you know they're all very cool. But sometimes they break down and have some better acting and sometimes the dialogue is pretty good. But there's no jokes, which is bad. The heroine is pretty but she apparently doesn't do facial expressions. Her boyfriend is even worse. The young vampire bad guy's acting is just a bunch of scowling.
Man that's like the most useless boyfriend ever. He's like a damsel-in-distress boyfriend but he's not tied up or wearing lace. Pshaw. Man, when you play damsel in distress you should wear lace and be tied up. Pshaw.
The opening scene is so scary. The heroine is perched in an old ruined building saying, "We are hunting lichens and they are very evil," how there was this war with the evil lichens, and then the camera pans back and the wall is full of them, lichens, all waiting to pounce on her from behind!
Also they have a good scene where the werewolves and vampires are shooting at each other and it's tragic because the war is pointless. It's shot like an action shot but they manage to convey the tragicness.
I learned how to tell a werewolf from normal people. Werewolves and vampires are too forceful and cool to use umbrellas when it rains.
Underworld: Evolution (2006)
Genres: F Hor Act
From the dawn of time, vampire door technology has far superseded stupid human door technology. In vampire door technology, it takes the door several minutes to open because of all the nifty clicky slidy bits! Thus vampires scorn to use pathetic human doors and just burst into the room through a wall if vampire doors are unavailable.
It's hard to conceive of the heroine liking her bland surfer boyfriend with all the eldritch dark scowling vamp boys about. But you know, some women are like that. They want a useless bland guy so they themselves can appear more powerful in comparison. Maybe that's her deal.
What a useless movie this is. It's like the first one but with a much dumber plot and crappier characters. And also with sex, but that fails to make up for the crappiness, and it's pretty crappy sex. Maybe it's not a matter of crappy exactly; it's specialized. They're shooting at angles from which you'd think you'd be able to see more, but you can't, because of the R rating. Exactly the opposite of how it works in X-rated movies where the actors are turned in specific little unnatural ways so that you see more than you would expect in those positions under normal circumstances. Neither treatment is graceful.
When you're short on plot ideas you can have your heroes go here to get X, then to the next place to get Y, etc. until they have all the junk they need to complete their quest. That's the structure of this story. The premise is even worse. Apparently there is a bond between these two evil immortal brothers and the vampire one wants to free the werewolf one, and their immortal father figures that this will destroy the world and the only way to stop them would be to kill the vampire one, but he won't do it because "he's still my son," however probably no-one else can kill him, so the father will lend a hand to anyone who will try . . . and also this bond we keep hearing about turns out to be kinda a let-down as the werewolf just jumps around and doesn't say anything. Hey, maybe that's why movie vampires have such portentous looks and line deliveries: it's a defense mechanism against the lines' idiocy. They read the humans right on that one, we do respond more to looks and manner of speech than the actual words said . . .
Please note that all material on this page is Copyright © 2005 by D. Aline Lurie.
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