When I first heard of Underworld I imagined it would be incredible. Vampires and werewolves engaged in a conflict that’s spanned ages!  A war that raged for the most part outside of human knowledge?

Yes, please!

Eventually I saw the movie and realized that vampires and werewolves go great together–that is till you shoehorn in elements of The Matrix, gun fetishism and skin-tight faux-leather costumes.

Both vampires and werewolves as traditionally depicted are supremely powerful beings.  In fact, outside their various weaknesses–the sun and various religious iconography for the former and silver, typically in the form of a bullet or a bladed weapon for the latter–they’re like minor deities with an appetite for destruction.

(The vampire may have more weaknesses, but unlike the werewolf don’t wage a regular war with their animalistic natures, so in their own way even they’re more dangerous.)

Then there are the creatures in the Underworld movies.  They don’t sparkle like those sacrilegious Twilight vampires, though in a way they’re worse because no horror fans take Stephenie Meyer‘s work seriously, while the creatures of Underworld make a pretense of following tradition, just before abandoning them in bullet-time.

Though now that I think about it, it’s even less about their over-reliance on handguns than the entire approach to the characters, which are way, way too indebted to the Wachowskis for inspiration.