There’s something poetic about the fact that Underworld was originally titled Transmutations. Because about halfway through watching it, your brain begins its own transmutation—from curious to confused, from bored to bitter, and finally into something resembling existential nausea. This isn’t the kind of movie you watch. It’s the kind you survive. Preferably with medication and a tetanus shot.
Released in 1985, Underworld was co-written by Clive Barker—the same Clive Barker who gave us Hellraiser, Nightbreed, and a whole new generation of people who are sexually confused about leather and chains. You’d think that name on the box would promise something dark, weird, and perversely elegant. Instead, we get Underworld, a rancid cocktail of mutant prosthetics, neon club scenes, and a plot that feels like it was written during a gas leak.
This was Hooper’s swan song as a feature filmmaker. That’s right — the guy who gave us The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Poltergeist, and Lifeforce (yes, even Lifeforce has its defenders) went out not with a bang, but with a low-budget gurgle of black slime and cringe-inducing performances. Watching Mortuary is like watching a legendary rock guitarist try to play a solo with mittens on. You want to look away, but your childhood memories of Salem’s Lot keep whispering, “Maybe there’s a good scene in here somewhere…”
There isn’t.
The Premise: Confusion in a Trench Coat
The film follows a low-rent private investigator named Roy Bain, a man whose name sounds like a cologne and whose personality resembles expired toast. He’s hired by a wealthy businessman to track down his missing daughter, Nicole, who may or may not be involved with a mutant drug cult living in the London underground. Yes, really.
What begins as a detective thriller quickly spirals into body horror, punk aesthetics, and a dose of incoherent science fiction so baffling it makes Prometheus look like a TED Talk. It’s not a movie with “layers,” it’s a movie with clumps—like something dredged from a clogged drain.
There’s a drug called “White Man,” a mad doctor named Savary, and a group of mutants who dress like extras from a Duran Duran music video directed by David Cronenberg’s unpaid intern. It wants to be gritty and gothic, but comes off like a bad LARP session in a condemned sewer.
The Direction: Shot Through a Tube Sock
Director George Pavlou takes Barker’s already unhinged script and manages to suck out every last ounce of menace or tension, leaving behind a cinematic corpse dressed in fog machines and wet brick. Every scene is bathed in that sleazy neon glow unique to the mid-’80s, like a porno trying to win a BAFTA.
Close-ups are used with the subtlety of a jackhammer, and dialogue scenes are blocked like everyone is trying not to bump into the furniture—possibly because the furniture is made of cardboard and regret.
One gets the feeling Pavlou’s direction notes were just photocopies of other people’s movies stapled together in a damp pub. “Give me Blade Runner but cheap, The Howling but with jazz flute, The Elephant Man but make it fashion.” The result? Visual whiplash and a headache that smells faintly of wet leather.
The Cast: God Bless Them for Trying
Denholm Elliott plays the villainous Dr. Savary, and you can see in his eyes that he once studied Shakespeare but now finds himself explaining mutant skin disease to a man in eyeliner. He brings a certain mad scientist flair, but it’s like watching a Michelin-star chef try to cook with roadkill and vending machine cheese.
Nicola Cowper, as Nicole, spends most of the movie looking confused and slightly embarrassed—same as the audience. Her lines feel like they were written by someone whose only reference for human behavior was a phone sex commercial.
Then there’s Roy Bain (Larry Lamb), the detective hero. He delivers every line like he’s reading from a teleprompter held by someone he owes money to. His trench coat gets more character development than he does.
The real stars of the movie, however, are the mutants—grotesque and crusty, like the barflies of a horror convention restroom. One looks like he lost a fight with a microwave. Another has skin so flaky you want to hand him some lotion and a prayer.
The Effects: Crusty, Mucky, and Highly Infectious
It’s clear the makeup effects team was told to make “mutants,” but were given only papier-mâché, latex, and a vague sketch on a napkin. The creatures are impressive in that “please kill me” sort of way. They lumber around in bad lighting, mutter cryptic nonsense, and occasionally burst into meaningless violence.
If you’re into people who look like they were dipped in melted crayons and shame, Underworld is your jam. If you’re looking for subtle body horror or tension-building grotesquery, you’re in the wrong back alley.
The Dialogue: Like Snorting Glue Off a VHS Tape
Barker’s script—which he later disowned like a father pretending not to recognize his kid shoplifting—is full of pseudo-philosophical nonsense and groan-inducing attempts at noir cool. Lines like “She’s been touched by the White Man” land with the grace of a dead bird on a wedding cake.
Characters say things that sound vaguely threatening but mean absolutely nothing. “The transmutation is irreversible now,” someone says, while another character stares blankly, as if hoping someone on set will call lunch and end the scene.
The dialogue tries to wax poetic about transformation, identity, addiction… but ends up sounding like a goth teenager’s diary read aloud during an earthquake.
The Pacing: Stop, Go, Trip Over a Corpse
The movie starts slow, builds to something approaching a climax, then forgets what it was doing and stumbles into a final act that feels stapled together by desperation and cocaine. The big confrontation at the end? Mutants yelling, guns waving, and a final shot so anticlimactic it may actually subtract meaning from the previous hour.
No catharsis, no revelations, just the director and cast quietly walking away from the smoldering wreckage of their dignity.
Final Verdict: Less Hellraiser, More Hellish
Underworld is a movie made by people who had some ideas, none of the money, and absolutely zero sense of structure. It’s a mutant stew of horror tropes, club kid aesthetics, and leftover sci-fi bits from films that had actual budgets and functional scripts.
Clive Barker fans expecting grim beauty, psychological depth, or even narrative clarity will find only disappointment smeared across a grainy frame. For everyone else, it’s a curious disaster worth watching only as a dare or a drinking game.
Rating: 1.5 out of 5 Crusty Sewer Mutants
If Underworld was a meal, it would be a half-eaten burrito found in a haunted nightclub toilet—colorful, vaguely mysterious, and guaranteed to cause regret. Watch it if you hate yourself or just really want to see what happens when someone lets a British horror legend down in the worst way possible.
