Can you believe that Underworld: Awakening (Sony) is the fourth film in the cyberpunk horror film / action movie hybrid of vampires, werewolves, and the humans caught in crossfire of their underworld war?

Following a flashback installment, where Rhona Mitri slipped into Kate Beckinsale’s leather girdle, this chapter jumps years into the future, where Beckinsale’s vampire assassin Selena wakes up from suspended animation to find that her kind has been hunted to extinction by a new breed of human / werewolf genetic cocktail. Oh, and she now has a child, thanks to experiments conducted during her frozen layover.

The awakening of the title refers to her revival in the future (which, thanks to the continued bleak tech noir look of drizzly nights, rain slicked streets, and neon blue and cold white lighting, looks just the same as when she left), but you wonder if maybe the filmmakers have finally awakened to the diminishing returns of the series. This chapter, directed by the Swedish team of Måns Mårlind and Björn Stein, is still pretty much dedicated to celebrating Beckinsale running up walls, firing guns, and kicking CGI beastie butt while dressed in black fetish gear. The rest is a blur of generic exposition, random plot twists, vaguely maternal instincts, sloppy CGI animation, and Stephen Rea looking like a waxwork as a genetic scientist dipping into the monster pool to create a new master race.

It all feels very second hand, right down to Charles Dance leaving his dignity behind to play the king-in-exile of the vampire nation and India Eisley playing Beckinsale’s test-tube daughter Eve as a B-movie Chloë Grace Moretz, getting the ferocious adolescent action figure part down pat but struggling to provide a modicum of personality to the role.

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Torchwood: Miracle Day (BBC) – The spin-off of the Russell T. Davies “Doctor Who” reboot (note the title is an anagram of the original series) began life as a lively British show for a more adult science fiction audience. More recently, however, it has become darker and more novelistic. In place of seasons, it has turned out separate mini-series of self-contained stories with continuing characters, and its most recent incarnation sends the last surviving members of the Torchwood team — Captain Jack Harkness (John Barrowman) and Gwen Cooper (Eve Myles) — to the United States to track the “miracle” of the title.

One day, people suddenly stop dying, and it very quickly transforms from miracle to curse, as the diseased, the dying, the critically injured, and others are forced to endure the pain of living through death. In fact, the only person left mortal is the formerly immortal Captain Jack. Mekhi Phifer and Alexa Havins play American agents who team up with the Torchwood duo when they discover that the conspiracy reaches into the upper echelon of American Intelligence.

The ten-episode series, co-produced by the BBC and the Starz Channel, which broadcast the show stateside, is a superb story with some brilliant turns and some very pessimistic predictions of how the world faces a health crisis of overwhelming dimension, but it also feels stretched out beyond its natural length. It would pack more punch at a swifter, tighter six episodes. Given that, it is still some of the most daring science fiction on TV. Bill Pullman and Lauren Ambrose guest star in vivid roles (he’s a murderer on Death Row when such a thing no longer has meaning, she’s in image management and signs on to the highest bidder) and familiar genre faces such as Wayne Knight, Dichen Lachman, Nana Visitor, and John de Lancie make appearances.

On Blu-ray and DVD, with commentary, deleted scenes, character profiles, featurettes and a motion comic.

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“Eureka: Season 4.5” (Universal) – The whimsical SyFy original series about a secret government think-tank town start the second half of its fourth season back in the present but in a parallel timeline, thanks to a time travel mishap, before launching two characters into space with an unplanned lift-off and an unexpected reboot to the American space program, thanks to Eureka-developed technology. The rest of the season is space camp, Eureka style, with training, tests, and a healthy competitive spirit as they all vie for the 20 spots on the mission. Next stop: Titan. (That’s one of the moons of Jupiter, in case you’re not as astronomically well informed as the characters of the show.) Fear not: the grueling testing and training regimen provides for plenty of scientific disasters in need of solving.

The cast continues to expand along with the show’s alternate timelines, and this half-season brings in Felicia Day as a consulting scientist on the mission to Titan, Wil Wheaton as an arrogant young physicist, and Ming-Na as a science-savvy Senator, all as continuing characters through the story arc, brings back Matt Frewer (and his overworked Aussie accent) and Deborah Fiorentino (who is, of course, up to no good) for a few episodes, and welcomes guest star Wallace Shawn as psychiatrist for employee evaluations.

10 regular season episodes, plus the 2010 Christmas special (with guest star Chris Parnell as the physicist who may be Santa Claua) and the “Warehouse 13″ crossover, on three discs.  DVD only.

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Battle Royale (Anchor Bay), the gleefully gruesome splatter satire of teenage nihilism, adult paranoia, and social sadism, was released in Japan in 2000 to big success and instant cult status. It was a 21st century version of a fifties youth gang drama, rooted in the adult panic at the sudden rise of youth violence in Japanese society, but was too close to the real-life events of Columbine High School for American tastes. Now, with The Hunger Games arriving in theaters on March 23, this high-school-kids-fig​ht-to-the-death thriller it finally gets its American debut.

Directed by Kinji Fukasaku, the madman of Japanese yakuza cinema, from a novel by Koushun Takami, you could call it “Rebel Without a Chance”: a wicked social satire that blends “Lord of the Flies,” “Massacre at Central High,” Peter Watkins social commentary, Japanese manga, and nihilistic video game. Beat Takeshi takes on the adult role, a bullied high schoolteacher who takes his revenge by overseeing the bout between his own 9th grade class, and takes a little too much pleasure in demonstrating the effectiveness off the bombs strapped to their necks.

This film’s similarities to The Hunger Games, which plays the gladiator games as a form of punishment, repression, and control by a tyrannical dictator, begins and ends with the premise. This savage social satire revels in the brutality and gore and plays it for dark comedy and gallows humor, a teen melodrama gone feral, and it’s now a good bet for cult status stateside as well.

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Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s World on a Wire, a TV mini-series shot during a break on Fassbinder’s biggest and most prestigious project to date, Effie Briest, and broadcast on German television in 1973, begins as a corporate conspiracy thriller by way of a psychodrama, a stylized piece of pulp fiction in a near-future world. Fred Stiller (Klaus Löwitsch), a computer engineer working on the prize project of the Institute for Cybernetics and Futurology (IKZ), is suddenly put in charge when his boss and mentor (Adrian Hoven) dies in a freak accident, right after confessing to Fred that he has come into information too fantastic to believe. It’s alarming enough that a scientific genius electrocutes himself on his own equipment in an act that is appears to be either suicide or assassination, but when Lause (Ivan Desny), Fred’s confidante and the company’s head of security, disappears without a trace days later, Fred’s world is all but turned inside out. And “without a trace” is an understatement: it’s as if he’s been erased (or, dare I say it, deleted?) from the records and memories of the entire company.

That’s when this corporate conspiracy thriller — complete with a CEO shadowed by silent bodyguards dressed like movie gangsters, a buxom secretary (Barbara Valentin) personally sent by the front office to “help out” the hero, and the gorgeous daughter (Mascha Rabben) of the dead inventor who slips into Fred’s life and takes on femme fatale dimensions — tips into something more cerebral.

World on a Wire is (to the best of knowledge) the first feature to take on the concept of virtual reality, an idea rare enough in science fiction literature in 1973. Scripted by Fritz Müller-Scherz and Fassbinder, from a novel by Daniel F. Galouye called “Simulacron-3″ (which later became the basis for the 1999 American film The Thirteenth Floor), it traffics in the same paranoid anxieties and questions of identity and reality and perception that Philip K. Dick was exploring in his work since the 1950s (albeit with hardboiled attitude and Fassbinder’s satirical perspective). It anticipates films as diverse as Videodrome, Tron and The Matrix, to name just a few, only Fassbinder does it without special effects or cyber imagery. You might say that he does it all with mirrors.

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World on a Wire (Criterion), made by Rainer Werner Fassbinder in 1973 for German television, is to the best of my knowledge the first film to explore virtual reality. And this from a director who never made a science film before or since. There are no “Matrix” visuals here—you might say that Fassbinder suggests his levels of reality and identity with mirrors—but conceptually it anticipates a new genre of science fiction by at least a decade (“Tron,” which takes on a simplified version of the ideas, was 1982). And though based on the novel “Simulacron-3″ by Daniel F. Galouye (which also became the basis for “The Thirteenth Floor”), it takes on the paranoid anxieties and questions of identity, reality, and perception that Philip K. Dick explored in is books and later found expression in films like “Blade Runner” and “Videodrome.”

It begins as a corporate conspiracy thriller by way of a psychodrama: computer engineer Fred Stiller (Klaus Löwitsch) takes over his company’s most delicate project—a virtual world created entirely within a computer—when his boss is killed in a freak accident and the head of security disappears. In fact, he disappears so completely that no one even remembers he ever existed, and the more Fred digs into the phenomenon, the more “glitches” he finds in his reality.

Fassbinder and production designer Kurt Raab create a near future out of modern architecture (some of it still under construction), gangster-movie fashions, futuristic bric-a-brac, and more glass and mirrors than a carnival funhouse, and his camera is constantly reframing, moving around for a better look, or simply tracking through the increasingly alienated world of his reluctant hero. Though made for television, it has visual density of Fassbinder’s theatrical films, and though the film features little physical action and no flashy special effects (slipping into the virtual world is a matter of close-circuit video, space-age helmets, and a woozy first-person POV camera), the mystery and the power struggles and the conspiratorial overtones gives the film a narrative dynamism that Fassbinder drives with his direction. Even at 3 ½ hours, this film seems to race.

On Blu-ray and DVD, mastered from the original 16mm A/B reversal roles in a transfer supervised by director of photography Michael Ballhaus, with the 50-minute documentary “Fassbinder’s World on a Wire: Looking Ahead to Today,” a look back at the making of the film directed by Juliane Lorenz, and a new interview with German-film scholar Gerd Gemünden, plus a booklet with an essay by film critic Ed Halter.

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Michael Bay’s third rock ‘em sock ‘em giant robot spectacular was shot and designed for 3D, which forced the director to slow his chaotic editing down and create a coherent action canvas.

Transformers: Dark of the Moon – Blu-ray 3D Combo (Universal) marks the film’s home video debut in 3D, albeit on for consumers who own Blu-ray compatible monitors and Blu-ray players. For the rest of us — or at least the rest of us with Blu-ray players — this four-disc set includes a standard Blu-ray edition, which benefits from the restraint in as much as you can actually see the transformations unfold and the action play out. It’s just the story that makes no sense. But then again, it’s a movie about giant alien robots who go to war in the city of Chicago and destroy half the city along the way, so who needs a story? Videodrone reviewed the original Blu-ray and DVD release here.

Apart from 3D, the draw of this new set is the collection of extras. The original release featured no supplements on either the Blu-ray or the DVD edition. This set features Blu-ray 3D and standard editions, a bonus DVD, a digital download, and an Ultraviolet digital copy for download and instant streaming, and all the supplements one could want from a Michael Bay extravaganza in high definition.

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Distill The Champ and Rocky, add a dash of The Rumble in the Jungle, shake well and serve in larger-than-life rock ‘em sock ‘em robots. That’s basically what you get with Real Steel‘ and somehow all those second-hand pieces come together in a rousing (if awfully inevitable) underdog story.

Ostensibly based on the same short story that spawned the original Twilight Zone episode “Steel,” it takes no more than the basic premise (a future where human boxing has been replaced with robots, a down-at-heels former boxer trying to get by with failing equipment) and spins a story of father/son bonding and a real jerk of a would-be dad getting a shot at redemption.

Hugh Jackman really plays up the “jerk” part of his character in the opening scenes, ducking creditors, welching on bad bets and in general letting his arrogance get in the way of his shots at success. That is, until he’s force to be a father to the son he gave up long ago (Dakota Goyo), a kid whose justified anger at all his surviving parental figures makes him a force to be reckoned. And when the kid rescues an old model ‘bot that has just as much pluck as the humans, Dad slowly takes is place in his son’s corner as advisor, inspiration and even robot trainer.

Somehow director Shawn Levy, leaving the familiar waters of high-concept comedy for family drama set against a vaguely futuristic backdrop of robot action from the dregs of fleapits to the main event of a championship bout, makes it all work as a satisfying experience. For all the dazzle of the mechanical dance, Levy commits himself to the human drama and delivers an old-fashioned piece of storytelling.

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For more releases, see Hot Tips and Top Picks: DVDs, Blu-rays and streaming video for January 24

Cornel Wilde’s grim, fatalistic end-of-the-world thriller No Blade of Grass is a forgotten dystopian classic of its time. Gritty and brutal, built on fears of ecological devastation through pollution and overcrowding (with hints of genetic manipulation gone bad), this 1970 eco-apocalypse thriller seems to have gotten lost in the overcrowded apocalypse now science fiction cinema of the era.

Adapted from the novel The Death of Grass by John Christopher, it has vague resemblances to the nuclear holocaust thriller Panic in Year Zero in its basic premise of a man hardening to deal with the brutal new world order to save his family. But in place of nuclear war (the favored device of most apocalyptic films of the era) is ecological collapse: a virus poisons the world’s grass and cereal crops and causes a dire food shortage. As panic spreads across the globe, John Custance (Nigel Davenport), a former military officer and an affluent husband and father in London, makes plans to take his family north to his brother’s fortified compound, prepared for just such an emergency. But he puts off leaving until it is almost too late: mobs start looting, riots break out and London is put under martial law with roadblocks posted to prevent a flight from the city. To save his family, John becomes as hard and as ruthless as the looters, the rogue militias and the roving gangs preying upon the citizens fleeing the cities.

Cornel Wilde is not the most subtle of directors. Here he’s a provocateur, favoring primal images to make his points. A montage of scenes of nuclear tests, overcrowding, and pollution poured into the waters, pumped into the skies and spread over crops in the form of pesticide opens the film as Wilde’s narration sets the stage of environmental devastation. Early in the film, as John meets with his brother in a city pub, images of famine and starvation and long lines for food rations play on TV news while customers gorge on the lavish buffet spread out in the bar. Wilde hammers the point home in blunt terms until the irony and social commentary shifts from a statement decadence to the willful ignorance of a population that still believes it can hold out. Flashforwards hint at the horrors to come while flashbacks recall a time before such threats were even imaginable. It’s a rather clumsy and unwieldy tactic as executed by Wilde, and it tends to confuse the narrative until the audience gets used to his style, but it’s all part of his rabbit-punch assault on our sensibilities.

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Primeval: Volume Three (BBC) features the fourth and fifth series of the British series about a covert team that tracks temporal anomolies — time cracks between the present and the prehistoric era — and the creatures (mostly dinosaurs) that wander through them. The third series ended with junior team members Connor and Abby (Andrew-Lee Potts and Hannah Spearritt) trapped in the Cretaceous Period and this collection begins with their return to a whole new ARC team, now led by Matt Anderson (Ciarán McMenamin), and a new set of mysteries and conspiracies.

That makes Connor and Abby the squad veterans, not that their sardonic boss (Ben Miller) gives them any such respect, and Connor almost immediately falls under the sway of private sector entrepreneur and inventor Philip Burton (Alexander Siddig) who has his own plans for manipulating the time-travel technology with the top-secret New Dawn project. That puts Connor is a very awkward position, forced to choose between Abby, who he’s been madly in love with since the first episode, and his hero-worship of Philip. And to add spice to the mix, Matt falls in love with a 19th century time-traveler (Ruth Bradley) and third-season star Jason Flemyng (still the liveliest and most entertaining of the show’s actors) makes a memorable return appearance.

The budget-minded CGI creatures are good enough for the pulp premise of the show and if the plotting gets a little contrived (how many times can you bend a character’s personality to make a plot twist work?), it still hold its own with the average SyFy Channel original. Which is just where this show finds its fan base. 13 episodes on four discs on DVD and Blu-ray, plus the two-part making-of featurette “New Dawn” and prequel webisodes.

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Part prequel, part reboot and part reimagined origin story, The Rise of the Planet of the Apes (Fox) is not simply a revival of a beloved seventies series that took a serious dive into high kitsch. It’s a terrific character piece, a gripping prison break thriller with a wicked high-concept twist and the smartest action movie of 2011.

Andy Serkis will probably once again be ignored come Academy Award time, but his incarnation of Caesar, an ape with boosted intelligence (thanks to an experimental drug) raised as a member of the scientist’s family, is one of the top performances of the year. The fur and the primate musculature is all computer animation but the body language and facial expressions and personality is all Serkis, the man in the motion capture suit, and he gives us an evolution of character worthy of Spartacus or Moses: He leads his people to freedom, and he does so by watching, learning, understanding and taking command as a compassionate leader.

Simply put, Caesar is more dense and complex than any of his human co-stars (including James Franco as the revolutionary — or is that evolutionary? — scientist, Freida Pinto and John Lithgow) and grounds the high-concept idea in a character you can’t help but root for.

For such a clever and satisfying piece of science fiction writing (don’t blame apes for the rise, it’s all due to human hubris and recklessness) it has its logical gaps (how can a high-tech lab of animal testing and trials miss a pregnant test subject or let a human exposed to an experimental drug walk out of the facility with dangerous symptoms without even a check-up?), but they get forgotten in the thrill of the story.

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Written and directed by TV wunderkind turned megamovie director J.J. Abrams, Super 8 (Paramount) has the DNA of a Steven Spielberg tale. Set in 1979, before the home video revolution put video cameras in the hands of movie-mad kids, this is a monster movie adventure powered by creative kids, a love of movies, and an authentic foundation of mystery and wonder as seen from the perspective of schoolkids old enough to make their own zombie movie on super 8 film and young enough to get so excited by it.

Too bad that director J.J. Abrams pays more attention to the pyrotechnics than to the kids in the middle of it. When the kids sneak out to film their big scene at a train station at night and the train derails, it kind of derails the film as well. Sure, it unleashes the monster and subsequent military conspiracy that drives the rest of the movie, but instead of putting us into the shoes of the kids, it piles on the CGI overkill, turning it into just another Hollywood explosion fantasy. The rest of the big spectacle scenes follows suit, going big rather than going intimate, and Abrams doesn’t have Spielberg’s understanding of suburbia, of kid and of family. It hits all the right notes, but Abrams isn’t playing with feeling.

He does, however, get a lot right, from the model building and pre-teen monster movie fandom and the often argumentative and contentious chemistry of groups of boys to the rickety emotional world of kids still reeling from loss and trying to take the first steps as their own people. And Abrams gets performances from his young cast, especially Elle Fanning as the well-possessed young woman they cast in their film, but also first-timer Joel Courtney as the boy still recovering from the loss of his mother months before. These two kids connect in an authentic and convincing way that the rest of the film never quite manages.

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