GLENN KENNY'S REVIEW (posted 5/22/07)

In the seminal Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film, Michael Weldon describes Roger Corman's The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent as "66 minutes of 'huh?'" One could easily call Day Watch, the second part of the Russian horror/fantasy trilogy adapted by writer/director Bekmambetov from the novels of Sergei Lukyanenko, as 124 minutes of "huh?", but in this case one might mean a compliment of sorts. The "huh?" factor of Viking Women had to do with stupefaction, but the "huh?" factor here has to do with the oft-hilarious ridiculousness of a constantly head-spinning plot.

The English-language voiceover rehashes the whatchoo-talkin-bout premise of 2004's Night Watch — the battles between the ancient forces of good and evil, or light and darkness if you will, having ended in a truce which is maintained by good/evil-light/darkness police forces known as the Night Watch and the Day Watch. We're filled in about new recruits to each force. On the good side, there's Poroshina's Svetlana, whose psychic abilities enable her, for example, to enter Second Level Gloom with ease and emerge from it with nary a mosquito bite (Second Level Gloom being rife with mosquitoes). On the bad side, teen-not-quite angel Yegor (Martynov), who's been adopted by evil majordomo Zavulon (Verzhbitsky), even though his real dad is good guy Anton (Khabensky). If these two high-level reps of their respective moral positions meet, the truce is off, apocalypse is on, it'll be like matter colliding with anti-matter, etc. Add to this vampires, sports cars speeding along the facades of ultra-modern hotel buildings, a birthday party in hell (sort of), characters switching bodies and sexes and making declarations of love from the "wrong" corpora, and so on, and you see what I mean about the "huh?" factor.

While the grime and gloom of the first film suggested a nifty allegory of post-Soviet Russian life, the realm of this picture leaves any and all suggestions of reality behind. (Even the subtitles won't behave realistically; they're often animated and perform actions that emulate their particular word.) But I can't say that this dimension is missed, as the crazy fantasy world of this saga is plenty compelling and quirky on its own. While this picture doesn't have as many of the big scares that distinguished the first one, it has a disarming sense of humor about itself, every now and the acknowledging the hysterical absurdity that it's steeped in. I wouldn't necessarily be surprised if the final installment of the trilogy turns out to be a full-blown comedy of sorts.

— Glenn Kenny