Underworld: Awakening opens in theatres today, so as a release day treat, here is part two the Dark Lord Bunnykins’ chat with lead actress Kate Beckinsale:

Regarding Selene, what is about her that you like and does she serve any particular function for you as an actress, like getting out your aggression for instance?

No, not really. I do think I’m attracted to female roles that are kind of empowering and interesting and complicated, in whatever kind of movie, whether it’s a comedy… I think it’s important to have those criteria to make it interesting for yourself, or drama or whatever. It just happens to be in a genre movie. But that genre tends to also be one of the few that really does celebrate an empowered woman. So it’s not necessarily something that I want to only do, and I wouldn’t only want to do a comedy for the rest of my life either, but the fact that I get to play these kind of women I think is very attractive.

Selene has become an iconic action and horror character. To what do you attribute her ongoing popularity?

It’s hard to say. I’m playing her, but I think she’s quite wounded. She’s a very vulnerable soul, actually. But certainly in the first movie she was so frozen emotionally that she was almost like a machine, and one of the things that’s been interesting about doing sequels is that we’ve been able to expand that and dig into what’s underneath that. It makes for a more rounded character.

For an action hero, she’s actually quite emotional, quite vulnerable, but she also has these kind of extremely efficient capabilities with killing people and defending herself! I’m not sure. It’s hard for me because I’m analyzing what I’m feeling about a character that I’m playing to other people. I can only really say what’s interesting to me.

Your directors have left the door open for more Underworld films. At this point how do you feel about the possibility of playing Selene in a fourth film?

I guess it depends on the same things as before. Is it a story that’s really worth telling? Is it a story that’s interesting to people? I’m not completely closed to it by any means, but I don’t tend to think about it until it comes up as a real possibility

Finally, you also have Total Recall coming out this year. What can audiences expect in terms of tone from that film, and describe your character Lori a bit?

Obviously they’ve used the original film version as a kind of jumping-off point as much as they’ve used the short story ["We Can Remember It For You Wholesale"] as a jumping-off point. The short story and the original film are very different in tone actually, so I think that the particular tone of the first movie was very much specific to the filmmaker [Paul Verhoeven] rather than to the writer of the story [Philip K. Dick]. So it certainly isn’t that tone, and I think that’s a little bit more of tone that was reflective of the period of time in which the film was made. This time it’s a little bit more realistic, a little bit more gritty, a little bit less tongue-in-cheek, I think. And yet it’s very much a fun movie, but I think the interesting thing about it is it does deal with that question of ‘who am I?’ and ‘what is reality anyway?’ which I do think is very fascinating. And my character is an amalgamation of Sharon Stone’s part and the part as written. She’s not exactly the same. Yes, barebones I’m playing Quaid’s wife who turns out to be a little bit more than meets the eye, but it is quite different.

Frontiere(s) director Xavier Gens’ apocalyptic thriller The Divide gets a release today in Toronto and Winnipeg, the city in which it was filmed. Genre stalwart Michael Biehn (Aliens, The Terminator) stars as the caretaker of an apartment building who takes several residents into the building’s basement shelter when nuclear war devastates the outside world. But dwindling supplies and hope leads to a breakdown of both civility and civilization.

The DLB recently spoke to Gens from Morocco where he was filming a commercial.

Milto Ventimiglia in The Divide

The behaviour of the characters suggests that civilization is only skin deep, that it does not take much to push people over the edge. Do you believe that?

This theory, people have made experiment on it, and I really believe in that. As soon as you put people stuck together in something there is always somebody who wants to take over the other. It’s a bit what happened in fascist, in the Nazis, and it turns into a metaphor for the rise of the fascism because the character of Milo Ventimiglia and Michael Eklund become a couple of fascists into that basement.

The film’s violence is disturbing. How conscious are you in your films of making sure the violence is repulsive and not attractive?

Because of the real violence, when the violence is real, for me it was important to do violence in that direction and not and not the fun, gory violence, because the movie is not a comedy. For me it was interesting to push the violence to something very disturbing.

You had a bad experience working on Hitman which was a big-budget film. Do you now prefer working on smaller budget films where you have more control?

For sure, yes. It’s more interesting to work on a movie where you have comfort than on a movie where you don’t have comfort.

The DLB recently spoke to Underworld Evolution star Kate Beckinsale about the fourth entry in the ongoing werewolf/vampire franchise. Here are a few excerpts:

After you made Underworld Evolution, how did you feel about the possibility of making another Underworld film, and at what point did playing Selene again start to seem like a good idea?

Well, I didn’t think I was going to. I was told that the plan was to do a trilogy. I knew that the third one was a prequel and my character wasn’t around for that. I honestly didn’t think about it at all apart from occasionally when I was promoting another movie somebody would ask me about it, and I’d constantly say, ‘No, no, no. That’s it,’ because I thought it was! So it was only a little before we shot the movie that they came and asked, ‘Would you think about it?’ And I thought, well, okay, but it would have to be quite a different journey for the character to go on to make it interesting for people to watch and also to play the part.

Where is Selene at in Underworld Awakening? What are the challenges she is facing both dramatically and personally?

Well, she wakes up after being in this coma-like for twelve years or so to find that the world is completely different. I thought that was an interesting concept that as far as you are concerned it was yesterday but actually twelve years have passed. And during that time I guess humans have become very much aware of humans and vampires, and obviously before it was “underworld” and it was a rather well-kept secret, and she also finds that she somehow has a daughter as well. So that was certainly a different angle for the character to have that experience. I thought it was interesting to explore it.

Underworld Awakening opens this Friday, Jan. 20.

THE DEVIL INSIDE

Starring Fernanda Andrade, Suzan Crowley and Simon Quarterman

Directed by William Brent Bell

Written by William Brent Bell & Matthew Peterman

Paramount

It’s not that The Devil Inside could not have been an entertaining film. The idea of a young woman (Andrade) traveling to Rome to find out the truth about why her mother was committed to a mental hospital in Rome after killing three people twenty years earlier in what appears to be an exorcism gone wrong holds promise. But coming as it does thirteen years after The Blair Witch Project, two years after Paranormal Activity, and one year after The Rite, the idea of a found footage exorcism movie seems about as fresh as the pea green puke Reagan projectile vomited onto Father Karras in The Exorcist back in 1973.

Blame much of the film’s failure on its form. Yes, cameras are ubiquitous nowadays, but being a slave to the found footage conceit means that there is no opportunity to explore interesting back stories, flesh out characters, or build suspense. Instead, director William Brent Bell rushes the story along to a conclusion which is not only wholly unsatisfying but feels like a failure of imagination. At some 85 minutes, The Devil Inside seems like it was made for an ADD-afflicted generation. Heaven (or hell) forbid that an audience be made to sit still for two hours as a filmmaker sets up a story, develops his characters, and creates tension through sharp editing, atmosphere, music and strong scripting. Can an audience demand its money back for a film being too short? We’ll see this weekend.

The Devil Inside has its fair share of creepy imagery, including a supposedly possessed woman twisting her limbs into unnatural positions, and the ever-moving, low-res cameras only glimpsing certain horrific events, leaving our brains to fill in the awful gaps. But there is nothing here we have not seen in a dozen recent films. Indeed, The Devil Inside seems like the reductive answer to a moviemaking formula concocted in a Hollywood boardroom; in this case, Paranormal Activity + The Last Exorcism x The Rite = The Devil Inside. That equation may equal big box office this weekend, but look for this devilish bomb to produce diminishing returns.

Rating: 2/5

FINAL DESTINATION 5

Starring Nicholas D’Agosto, Miles Fisher and Emma Bell

Directed by Steven Quayle

Written by Eric Heisserer

New Line/Warner Home Entertainment

Let’s face it: you pretty much know what you are going to get with Final Destination 5. But the filmmakers have been clever enough (and respectful enough of the audience) to come up with another sequel which, while not strictly necessary, is a huge improvement over the last instalment, 2009’s execrable The Final Destination.

Again, we have a young man (Nicholas D’Agosto as Sam) who has a vision of him and his friends perishing in a spectacular and fatal opening set piece (this time, the collapse of a bridge). Sam manages to save himself and a few friends, but, as they perish one by one, they soon figure out that Death itself is stalking them.

Tony Todd returns as the knowing coroner

Most importantly to a large segment of the series’ fan base, the murder set pieces of FD5 are uniformly spectacular, including laser eye surgery run amuck, a gruesome gymnastics accident, and an awful workplace incident. Steven Quayle, graduating to the director’s chair after much second unit work, including on Avatar, has fun with the 3D, creating a mildly immersive environment in addition to sticking weapons and body parts in our faces.

But FD5 is the best of the franchise since the original film because of a spunky young cast (P.J. Byrne is especially hilarious as a nerdish pussyhound), Eric Heisserer’s passable dialogue, and Quayle’s willingness and ability to create actual suspense instead of simply shovelling gore into our laps. The ending provides a nice twist which I did not see coming.

Jacqueline MacInnes Wood gets an eyeful

Warner’s two-disc release includes a DVD with a digital copy, in addition to the separate Blu-ray disc. Extras are adequate if somewhat paltry, including a brief making-of doc (“Circle of Death”), alternate death scenes, and split-screen comparisons of two visual effects sequences.

Fortunately, Warner decided not to try to release the film in 3D, something they did to disastrous effect with The Final Destination, provoking massive headaches in the process.

Movie rating: 3.5/5

Blu-ray rating: 3/5

THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO

Starring Rooney Mara, Daniel Craig and Christopher Plummer

Directed by David Fincher

Written by Steve Zaillian from the novel by Stieg Larsson

Columbia Pictures

First of all, macabre movie fans, yes, we do get to hear Karen O, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s version of Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song,” in a stunning opening credits sequence that rivals anything Maurice Binder ever created for the early Bonds and makes me want to get in line to watch this film again.

That aside, there are many reasons for horror fans to want to see this film: David Fincher’s dark, edgy aesthetic is in full effect; Rooney Mara is a Goth goddess, more frail physically than Noomi Rapace, the original Lisbeth Salander, but still tough as nails; and Reznor and Ross’s score walks the line between eerie and ambient.

You likely know the story: this American remake of the Swedish film of late author Stieg Larsson’s best-seller stars Daniel Craig (Casino Royale) as Mikael Blomkvist, a disgraced magazine publisher hired by wealthy industrialist Henrik Vanger (Christopher Plummer) to investigate the disappearance 40 years earlier of his niece Harriet whom he believes was murdered by a member of his own family. To that end Blomkvist hires Salander (Mara: The Social Network), an antisocial but genius hacker, as his assistant. Together they uncover old secrets and form an odd bond in their pursuit of solving the mystery.

As you had hoped, Dragon Tattoo is pretty much brilliant, and even at around 160 minutes, I was never tempted to glance at my watch. Screenwriter Steven Zaillian (Moneyball) apparently mostly sticks to his source material (I have not read the novel and have some only seen bits of the Swedish film), and Craig’s Blomkvist and Mara’s Salander make a wonderfully odd team. Fincher’s high style, meanwhile, is in full effect, but it is always in service to the story; I never felt he was showing off for the sake of it.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a truly adult film for this time of year which goes to some awful, dark places but ends on a note so melancholy that it had me thinking about it long after I left the theatre. It’s also a massively complex film which I suspect will yield its own mysteries by way of a second viewing which may soon be necessary.

Rating: 4/5

SAINT

Starring Egbert Jan Weeber, Bert Luppes and Huub Stapel

Written and directed by Dick Maas

eOne Entertainment

The recent angry Facebook status updates I have noticed from those looking to reclaim their right to wish people “Merry Christmas” instead of “Happy Holidays” speaks to just how protective some people get about Christmas… sorry, the holiday season. Similarly, the Dutch take their equivalent, Sinterklaas, very seriously, to the point where poet and artist Quinsy Gario was pepper sprayed and arrested in Dordrecht, Holland, last month for wearing a  homemade T-shirt that read “Zwarte Piet is Racism.” (Zwarte Piet — or Black Pete — is Sinterklaas’s Sambo-like servant.)

So I was primed to watch Saint (Sint in Dutch), Dutch director Dick Maas’s return to scary movies, and to see another culture’s take on holiday horror. A prologue set in 1492 shows us how the former bishop Niklas (Stapel) and his gang of rogues was burned alive by villagers tired of their murderous rampages. But Niklas’s dying curse brings him and his blackened brigands (thus mistaken for Zwarte Piets) back to life every time there is a full moon on December 5. Flash forward to 1968, the last time Niklas and his undead crew were able to terrorize the Netherlands. Among those killed are the entire family of young Goert, who grows up to be a police detective (Luppes) obsessed with destroying Niklas

Cut to the present-day and teenager Frank (Weeber) is preparing for a drunken Sinterklaas party with his buds. Unfortunately their plans are interrupted by the arrival of St. Niklas riding a white horse and his gang of Black Petes as they murder their way across the country. Soon enough Frank is charged with the murders, and only Goert believes him when Frank blames the deaths on Sinterklaas.

Many of Saint‘s flaws — wooden acting, dodgy CG, and logical flaws — are forgiveable because of the film’s exotic nature: Sinterklaas is kind of like Santa Claus but different enough to put a welcome spin on a well-worn genre.

Maas is also generous with the gore, and has a knack for creating some great imagery, like Niklas riding his white steed through creeping tendrils of fog, bringing to mind Amando de Ossorio’s Tombs of the Blind Dead. There’s also a strong element of John Carpenter’s The Fog, with mysterious figures returning from the dead.

Those looking for some viewing slightly more sinister this holiday season than A Christmas Story may want to put Saint on a double bill with Black Christmas to satisfy your ho-ho-horror needs.

Rating: 3.5/5

Martin Gore (l) and Vince Clarke. Photo: Travis Shinn

This was unexpected. It seems that Depeche Mode co-founder Vince Clare, who left the band 30 years ago to for Yazoo and then Erasure, phone fellow DM compatriot Martin Gore earlier this year to form the project VCMG. A new EP is imminent, with an album to follow

From the press release:

Skinny Puppy vocalist Ogre has announced West Coast North American tour dates for his ohGr project with Mark Walk. The tour is in support of the band’s latest album unDeveloped.

Pennsylvania-based horror rock band Motionless In White recently debuted the video for their new single “Immaculate Misconception” on FearNet. Directed by Twisted Sister singer Dee Snider’s son Cody Blue Snider, the clip features MIW singer Chris Motionless channeling his idol Marilyn Manson in a conceptual clip that sees him attacked by religious protestors and fighting back. Dee himself even shows up as a Roman soldier tasked with whipping Chris prior to his crucifixion.