UNDERWORLD - Shunned films are ignored but tend to stick in the memory. When I first turned to horror, 'Underworld' was roundly disliked, a fledgling Clive Barker project sidelined in the wake of Hellraiser's later success and all but forgotten by the time I got to hear about it. The Barker involvement alone made me want to dip my toes, but the right moment never came - "maybe someday, when they've invented 4K blu ray restorations that make it all look dead swish." So here we are. 'Underworld' feels a bit like a cheap dummy run of 'Nightbreed' (it wouldn't be long before Barker started on 'Cabal'), centring on a fringe community of potentially heroic mutant outcasts at loggerheads with a drug baron and his skeevy scientist sidekick. They are beholden to a substance that induces monstrosity and 'strange dreams' (or something), and hope to emancipate themselves by kidnapping an ethereal woman from Ingrid Pitt's brothel; an ex-mob enforcer arrives to throw knuckles and play Orpheus. 'Underworld' is split clean between strength and weakness. It looks lovely, all blue neon and mist, and it's weird how, here in the 21st century, we seem to have developed this twisted idea that everything from the eighties looked like it was part of a Cocteau Twins video directed by Michael Mann - the reality might've been closer to 'Howard's Way', but this kind of services the fantasy. Seeing the likes of Stephen Berkhoff, Miranda Richardson and Denholm Elliot in the company of cockney mutants does something for me, although the leads are flat and not very engaging. Offsetting and perhaps neutralising all the more interesting stuff is 'Underworld's draggy pace and strangely, considering the Barker script, its slightly conventional narrative. I imagine this was as much of a chore to sit through on VHS as everyone said back then, but for what it's worth, the high def era at least allows 'Underworld's visual virtues to stand and be counted. Directed by Georges Pavlou (I think I prefer the wonky charms of his other Barker adaption, 'Rawhead Rex'.)
 |