Not the most enthralling film out there, but not bad either

Rating: 6/10 (7 January 2012)

I'm not really sure of what I make of this film. It is not a bad film, but it is not one that is absolutely fantastic either. It is not a boring film, but it is not riveting either. To me it seemed to be a standard Hollywood style good guy verse bad guy, with a few twists and turns thrown in. Maybe it is because it is a vampire vs werewolf film and that I have found very few such films out there that have been all that exciting. In another sense I must say that vampires and werewolves do bore me though.
The film is about a vampire warrior who is in the front line of a war between the vampires and the werewolves, however most of the vampires believe that the war is long over and have fallen into decadence in the decades since the final battle had been fought. However, our hero stumbles upon a plot which involves creating a hybrid vampire/werewolf, something that the vampires find rather offensive.
Vampires and werewolves have a long history in our culture. While we can point to Dracula as being the beginning of the modern vampire story, werewolves have no such starting point. Some have suggested that the idea goes back to the Greco-Roman world where people were turned into wolves, however this is not the modern concept of Lycanthropy (the mythical diseases that causes people to become werewolves) and further these metamorphoses were not limited to people turning into wolves (Ovid's Metamorphosis is the best ancient text for these myths as pretty much all of the main characters turn into something else). The other thing with Greco-roman metamorphosis is that they generally do not turn back to humans. Once they have changed, they have changed for good.
For some reason Vampires and Werewolves have always seemed to go together, but maybe because that has something to do with our legends. We do have ghosts and faeries, but they do not seem to come into the same category (though a horror film using faeries would be decent in my opinion, and I know that there is literature out there that uses this concept). I also notice that Vampires and Werewolves are one of the staples of modern horror films (but then again so are brain eating zombies).
Look, I did actually like this film, but it is not something that I would put into the category of films like Twelve Monkeys and Edward Scissorhands. This film is entertainment, though I would not consider it horror (mind you, I would not consider many films that use the title horror as actually being horror) because I doubt it is supposed to create fear in the eyes of the viewer. Gothic I would because it is set in a dark and grizzly world. Oh, I also liked the idea that the Vampires were very high-tech while the Werewolves tended to be a little more backward. I note that the vampires' lair had a lot of high tech gadgetry, but the werewolves' lair seemed to be something that hearkens back to the 60s.