Vamps in the Future?!!?

I confess that when I saw the trailer for Ultraviolet I said to myself, "wow, that looks so bad I have to see it". I had no idea what it was about, in fact based on the early part of the trailer I was almost sure it was Resident Evil 3, but then I remembered that Milla Jovovich's name in Resident Evil was Alice not Violet. As it turns out Ultraviolet is about supernatural creatures, but not zombies, vampires.

As I watched the opening scene, one of the characters calls some recently killed men, "hemophages" and being the Classics dork that I am, I said to myself "blood eaters? so, they are vampires?" And sure enough not much later someone calls them vampires. Now these aren't your typical vampires, these are vampires that are caused by a virus and who can run around in daylight. What is the deal in cinema today that all the supernatural creatures have to be explained by a virus? Zombies are a virus (ala Resident Evil (2002)) and even Vampires are a virus (ala Blade (1998)).

I guess in a futuristic sci-fi film, you can't have ultimate evil. Still the film does combine two genres that I wasn't expecting, vampires and science fiction. Oh and did I mention it combines them badly. This movie is awful. It's so bad that it almost transcends it being terrible and becomes good, but it doesn't. There is technology in this world that is never explained, nor is the chronology of when this is taking place firmly set down. In some ways, mostly the bad ones, it reminded me of last year's Aeon Flux (2005).

That movie too was a ridiculous action fest centered around a disease and an oppressive dictatorial regime. To the credit of Ultraviolet it was actually more entertaining and less annoyingly pseudo-philosophic than Aeon Flux. It provided plenty of fight scenes and gun duels and neat special effects. Some of the special effects however, were horribly bad giving the impression of a mid 90s video game with block figures and all.

In the end all the bad acting, bad f/x, bad storyline and just general awfulness add up to a real winner of a film. It's like a comic book/supernatural/sci-fi geeks wet dream. Which is to say if you aren't all three of those to an extreme, you'll find this movie boring and indulgent.