Underworld

I'm not UNDERWORLD's target audience, really. I'm not a gun, leather, or goth fetishist. In my action pictures, I like to know who's shooting whom, and why. And I hate having to constantly adjust the volume on my headphones so I can hear the dialogue one minute without blasting out my eardrums through gunfire and explosion the next. But I liked it anyway.

I mean, c'mon, Bill Nighy and Michael Sheen hamming it up in a vampires vs. werewolves movie? Y'know, the kind of movie in which everyone has machine guns but the big battles are all hand to hand? The kind where the bad guy is named Kraven and everyone's a fashion model who spends a minimum of three hours in the gym every single day? How can that not, at least at some level, speak to you? What, you don't like wirework? You don't like contact lenses? You don't like extremely loud and extremely bad rock music? You must like it when the good guy gets thrown through a wall and falls to a puddle below, and the masonry that hits the water with him floats. No? What's wrong with you?

Well, I thought it was silly fun, just the thing to pass the time while stuck in an airport lounge waiting for the weather to clear. Sometimes, that's all that's required.

Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein

While ABBOT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN has some clever lines for the grownups (Chaney: "You don't understand! When the full moon rises, I turn into a wolf!" Costello: "You and forty million other guys.") and some effective physical comedy for the kids (the bits in the House of Horrors and the Landing), it's a singularly unambitious picture that cheapens Universal's classic monsters.

I understand why Karloff passed on the chance to reprise his role as the Monster in this feature. This movie takes Universal's monsters and makes a mockery of them, reducing any sense of pathos or horror they may once have had and mining them for cheap laughs. One can almost see the paychecks dangling offscreen whenever Chaney's Wolfman and/or Lugosi's Dracula are around, and one has to wonder what went through their minds as they enacted their climactic battle.

Nevertheless, my 6-year-old liked it, and the grownups did chuckle now and again. When you fire up ABBOT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN, rest assured that you're going to get what you expect.

House of Frankenstein

Clocking in at just over an hour, HOUSE OF FRANKENSTEIN is a rather anemic finale to the Frankenstein films. It's a combination Dracula / Werewolf / Frankenstein movie, and it does a singularly clumsy job of weaving its threads into a coherent whole. If this is the best Universal could do with its monsters, the studio chose well in giving them a rest.