Underworld: Rise of the Lycans

There’s a stolid integrity to the Underworldmovies, the goth-action series about a blood war between werewolves and vampires. Inspired as much by video games as by vampire-werewolf lore, the movies, starting in 2003, are in many ways the opposite of their contemporaries—solemn, serious-minded and insistently plot driven, to the point that it’s often difficult to sort through the rambling excess.

Release Date: Jan. 23

Director: Patrick Tatopoulos

Writer: Danny McBride, Dirk Blackman, Howard McCain

Cinematographer: Ross Emery

Starring: Michael Sheen, Bill Nighy, Rhona Mitra

Studio/Run Time: Screen Gems, 92 mins.

The first two movies aren’t successful, necessarily, but they’re honorable as the genre goes. The apparently downgraded prequel Underworld: Rise of the Lycans does us one better: A fidelity to the style of the originals without the tangled, overstuffed narrative. An origin story that swings back centuries, it adopts an elemental setup—werewolves, called lycans, rise up against their slave masters, the vampires—and forms into a pleasingly wonky brand of

tragedy. To that end the movie evokes franchise regular Lucian (a sublime Michael Sheen) as he leads the werewolves to revolution after his captors uncover his affair with a vampire princess (Rhona Mitra, born to star in movies like this).

Directed by Patrick Tatopoulos, who moves up from the special-effects team, Lycans also strikes a rare balance between real creatures and CG effects. Even when it flies off base—there are times when Lucian comes dangerously close to a Christ figure—the film offers a kick of zany comedy. And in what turns out to be the real feat, Tatopoulos brings his camp spectacle close to real, stirring melodrama, and that’s hard to beat.