I must confess that I’ve only seen two of Underworld: Blood Wars’ four predecessors. One I had the displeasure of watching in the cinema, and the other I caught in pieces on television. OK, so that’s one-and-a-half.

So when I walked into the fifth volume of this action/horror series starring Kate Beckinsale (Selene) as the ‘Vampire-Corvinus Strain Hybrid’ I knew that I was probably in for a bad film. But what I was hoping for was a film that falls into the so-bad-it’s-good category. Unfortunately, the badness of Underworld: Blood Wars is not entertaining in the least. In fact, it’s so mind-numbing that the short runtime of 91 minutes felt like three hours.

To start with, the dialogue is terrible. When our hero says she is ‘finished with this war,’ she is told, ‘well, this war isn’t finished with you.’ Underworld: Blood Wars is filled back-to-back with such narrative gems, which seem to be straight out of a 12-year-old’s screenplay. The storyline is regulation vampire film rubbish. It is yet another chapter in the war between vampires and werewolves, where the latter are referred to as Lycans. Both, of course, are after Selene and her pure-bred daughter Eve for her powerful blood, which has the ability to evolve them into powerful hybrids like the hero. But while the villains are able to track Selene, the whereabouts of her daughter are unknown, even to Selene herself. An interesting fact is that Eve only shows up in Underworld: Blood Wars through footage shot for the previous film. Yes, the producers were so cheap, they couldn’t cut India Eisley a pay cheque.

The badness of Underworld: Blood Wars is not entertaining in the least

The two friends Selene has are David (Theo James), another hybrid who functions as Selene’s sidekick, and Thomas (Charles Dance), a vampire elder who happens to be David’s father and also supports Selene. Her enemies are aplenty, and include Semira (Lara Pulver), a vicious vampire who hates Selene’s guts and Varga, a vampire who is a ‘Death Dealer’ and happens to be Semira’s lover. Varga though, is loyal to the Eastern Coven, which David is the heir of.

There is also Marius (Tobias Menzies), who is the leader of the werewolves and wants to capture the powerful hybrid. Serene runs into him and his powerful army after evading the vampires. Save for Varga, the characterisation of all these characters is one-dimensional and not interesting in the least.

To make matters worse, action scenes are quite dull and the martial arts sequences are uninspired in terms of choreography and style. It doesn’t help that the CGI is poor, with some cringe-worthy graphics that make the terrible looking Doomsday character from Batman v Superman look like an exceptional achievement in special effects.

Here is a hint to cinematographer Karl Walter Lindenlaub and director Anna Foerster: colours other than black and blue do exist, so please use them. All the gorgeous locations in Europe are for naught if everything looks the same.

Rated R for strong bloody violence and some explicit sexual content

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, December 18th, 2016