Bite me



Just been to see some movies over the weekend. Caught Cypher, the cyber-thriller, last night with some chums. After good reviews all round I expected something good from the maker of the excellent low-budget film Cube. Even Kim Newman gave it four stars in Empire, and Kim is normally a good barometer, especially of genre material. However, I have to say it was the biggest, most disappointing piece of unoriginal nonsense I've seen in ages. There simply wasn't an original thought in this film. The plot of constant conspiracy within conspiracy and what is real, who am I really, are these my memories or someone elses? Well, these are all cribbed wholesale from a variety of films and books - actually the estate of Philip K Dick should sue their arses off for rifling his back-catalogue ideas. Even the look of the film was weak - it was a cut and past of techniques; put in a web-cam style shot here, a weird angle here, an out-of-foucs one here, a pixellated shot here etc. This meant the film had no visual integrity or cohesion - it looked like a sequence of vidoes or ads strung together, each with competing visual styles which robbed the film of any feel. Actually this goes quite well with the wholesale cut and pasting of ideas for the narratives and characters. And if you can't spot the ending coming a mile off then you're legally brain dead. Still, it was nice for me to see Nigel Bennet of Forever Knight and Lexx in a big screen role, although playing a bad guy as ever...



Underworld was far more entertaining, although only marginally more original. Kate Beckinsale in a straight cross between Blade and the Crow, except with a kick-ass babe in Trinity style leather. Nice, dark, Gothic location shooting in Budapest, but nothing overly original. Vampires versus werewolves? Okay, mildly fun, but the fights came across like the fights between Blade and his vampire Bloodpack hunters and the Reapers in Blade II. And let's be honest, a werewolf is a mindless big dog once the human has changed. It might have big teeth and be immensely strong, but a vampire is even stronger, immortal and can also use weapons as well as teeth and strength, so obviously they should kick the wolf boy's ass. Still, mildly diverting pseudo Gothic nonsense, left well open for a potential franchise to be set up and Kate looked great in leather (see pic from the Internet Movie Database), even if her acting was actually called upon to do more than the terribly cloched vampire oh-its-scuh-a-bitch-being-immortal pout. She could learn something from Nigel Bennet's Lacroix character in Forever Knight.