Predators (2010)

2010
Directd by Nimrod Antal
Starring Adrien Brody, Topher Grace, Alice Braga, Walton Goggins, Laurence Fishburne and Danny Trejo

Now we're talking.  We're away from Joss Whedon, away from Paul W.S. Anderson and away from whatever the f**k that last movie that I reviewed was, and right back into my wheelhouse - more pure Predator action.  Released in 2010 and with the backing of Robert Rodriguez' production company, Predators was exactly what we needed from this whole subsection of the horror/sci-fi genre.  At the time, anyway.

I remember absolutely loving this flick when I saw it in theaters back then.  It had been such a long time since I'd seen a good Predator movie, and this one had everything going for it.  It also had a director with the single greatest name I've ever seen - Nimrod.  I'm sure that it's not pronounced how it's spelled, but man, that is awesome.  So, I watched this movie, adored it...and then never watched it again until just a few days ago for the extensive amount of homework that goes into these reviews for YOU PEOPLE (pro wrestling heel mode).  What that means, good folks, is that I didn't like this movie quite as much as I thought if I could go three-quarters of a decade without watching it a second time.  It's got some flaws, yes, but overall it's still a fun little movie that once again managed to make a pretty nice profit off of a modest-by-2010-standards budget.  Introductory paragraph designed to make me sound like some sort of actual reviewer completed.  On with the plot.

There's a pretty big cast of characters in Predators, and the thing that I remembered really well about the movie from that initial viewing was that we needed to get to the action.  Thus, everyone essentially gets introduced in just a scene or two, but amazingly the script manages to pull it off pretty well.  Our main character is Royce, and I swear to you that Adrien Brody actually managed to pull off a badass role.  They say that acting ability > looks the part, and this performance is the f**kin' truth.  Our other star is Alice Braga as Isabelle, a sniper from the Israeli Defense Forces who has the added emotional layer of believing that a big mistake she made in the field is resulting in her punishment in the movie.  There's also Danny Trejo playing Danny Trejo (read: a beast), Topher Grace as a seemingly innocent medic, Oleg Taktarov as a Spetsnaz agent, and, amazingly, several others.  So how are all these characters together?

Well, as the flick opens, all of them have just been parachuted down into a jungle that none of them recognize.  All of them are armed, all of them are dangerous, and all of them have no earthly idea how they got into this predicament.  Good ol' director Nimrod does a great job setting up the atmosphere in the early goings here, but the movie spends little time giving us hidden character depth or dwelling on the cinematography before someone gets killed.  From there, we get a great sequence as said person who just GOT killed appears later on calling for help in a scene that goes on JUST long enough to clue us in that not all is as it seems with the situation.  This is what I came for with a brand-new Predator movie, as the familiar score, setting, creature and gut-wrenching sense of tension were well on display from the word-go.

I figured out pretty quickly what the gist of this whole plot was, so I don't think it's spoilerish to spell it out for 'ya (/Enzo Amore).  The jungle that all of these characters are on is, of course, another planet, and all of them were abducted from their lives in order to serve as new prey for this particular round of Predator-a-Go-Go.  There's four of them this time (although only three of them are actually out hunting for reasons that I won't get into in this review), with Derek Mears, Carey Jones and Brian Steele being the guys behind the alien suits.  There's also a curious subplot involving Laurence Fishburne's character Noland, a survivor of a previous edition of Predator Running Man.  I remember not finding Noland particularly captivating then, and time has not done this aspect of the movie any favors.  Not because of Fishburne; the dude was appropriately warped and crazy considering who Noland is, but it gives us this forced plot twist that anyone can see coming a mile away.  I think the script could have done without it and just stuck with the cat-and-mouse game.

Fortunately, that's an aspect of the movie that works really well.  In a decision that was nothing short of glorious, Predators was rated R, and the movie doesn't wuss out with its violent quota.  A lot of the stuff people dug about the original movie were here, with those slasher-movie-esque "slow pursuit" scenes being perfectly effective.  We get ANOTHER plot twist involving one of the hunted characters that actually managed to shock me the first time I saw this movie and that, weirdly enough, I completely forgot about until re-watching it.  We've actually gotten a few scenes of character development with Brody and Braga that manage to get a genuine emotional investment, so that when the ending comes with Brody showing up covered in mud holding a machete it manages to not be laughable.  I mean...Adrien Brody covered in mud holding a machete.  I just typed that sentence, and I just saw it in a film, and it actually WORKED.  Think about that for a second.

According to the ever-accurate Wikipedia, Topher Grace was reluctant to appear in this movie because he felt that none of the Predator sequels had done the original justice but reading this script changed his mind.  I concur with his assessment, but I will also levy that not EVERYTHING in this movie is good.  While the movie works extraordinarily well with the bread-and-butter stuff, it's also a pretty good case of "more is not always better."  The movie seemed like it was about 15 minutes longer than it should have been, mainly because of two subplots that could have been scrapped - the aforementioned story of Noland and the sad tale of the bullied Predator being held captive by the three skilled hunters that Brody and crew try to cut loose from its makeshift prison.  Longtime readers know that I'm all about "less is more," and I'm nothing if not consistent.  Probably to the point of being mind-numbingly boring.

Fortunately, what this movie does well, it does really well.  Brody, Braga, Trejo and Grace were all simply aces in their roles.  The concept of the movie could not have been better, giving us the logical next step in terms of how this society of hunters carries out their designated purpose in life.  Good sequels find ways to tell us a similar story in a different way, and much like James Cameron did with Aliens, that's what we get here.

Rating time.  Predators gets a good solid *** out of ****.  Yes, that's the same rating as Predator 2, and while I acknowledge that this movie is technically way better, this one doesn't have Bill Paxton acting like a douche.  Nobody said these reviews followed the scientific method.  At any rate, check this one out...and I can't wait for the upcoming prequel!

Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem (2007)

2007
Directed by The Brothers Strause
Starring Steven Pasquale, Reiko Aylesworth, John Ortiz, Johnny Lewis, Ariel Gade and Kristen Hager

If there is ever a film that would make one appreciate the glory that is Paul W.S. Anderson, you're looking at it.  Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem, henceforth known in this review as AVPR, has already reached legendary status as one of the worst movies of the 21st century in the great Sight and Sound poll that exists only in my own mind.  I also have no personal history to cull from when it comes to this flick, because I watched it only in preparation for this review.  The experience gave me some severe flashbacks to the Leprechaun reviews that made my blog hit the pause button for almost a full calendar year.

The brain trust at 20th Century Fox turned away from Paul "Holy Shit" Anderson this time around, turning to a couple of brothers who had been running a visual effects company for something like a decade when they were given this assignment.  Colin and Greg Strause have said in interviews that the instructions were simple - more violence and more creature effects, since those were the primary fan criticisms of the first movie.  They succeeded on that account, but boy, did they ever do it in a smash-you-over-the-head way.  The back-of-the-DVD "More guts! More gore!" promise is the proof of that.  The movie was swept into theaters on Christmas day of 2007, which ranks it right up there with Gangs of New York in terms of all-time least appropriate yuletide films.  It was a complete failure with critics, but as crappy as it was, it still pulled in the dough.  $130 million on a $40 million production budget is hard to argue with.  Damn that worldwide theatrical audience.  With that, let's get on the truly epic story that you're about to see unfold.

I will give the flick this; it spends a decent amount of time building up its creature story.  The main Predator from the last film is being Jetsoned back into space on a ship, only for a chestburster to emerge from its...chest.  Truly Shakespearian writing right there.  This is an area where one of the conventions of the Alien series actually comes out pretty cool, as we get a pretty nifty looking creature that the ever-accurate Wikipedia refers to as the "Predalien."  And it's pretty badass.  The xenomorphs take over the ship, which promptly crash lands in the small town of Gunnison, Colorado.  That is our setup, ladies and gentlemen.  The intro sequences also sound awesome on paper, with one big problem that I'll be getting to later on.

It's time for one of the up-and-coming midcarders in the Lick Ness Monster cliche book.  Sport fans...it's time to meet the characters of AVPR.  Boy, what a bunch this is.  Your two main stars are Steven Pasquale and Reiko Aylesworth, and I was very familiar with the latter having been a big fan of 24.  Pencil her into my unofficial "why didn't this person get a bigger shot?" rolodex, because she's both talented and hot enough to get the shot that, say, Carey Mulligan did.  She plays Kelly O'Brien, just coming back to Gunnison after a long stint in the military to reconnect with her husband and young daughter.  Pasquale is ex-con Dallas Howard who has a semi-redemptive story arc to him that unfortunately isn't played out, like, at all.  On paper, these two are sympathetic and endearing, and it's a shame that the movie never slows down to develop them beyond that paper-thin establishment.  The rest of the characters are your average 21st century horror movie vaguely hatable chucklefucks, complete with the totally original plot of some emo dweeb pining for a hot girl who has a douchebag boyfriend.  Now, I don't mind this plot in, say, an actual teen comedy film.  But in action or horror films, I DESPISE this story arc.  It doesn't make the character any more heroic, it just makes them a whiny little bitch. 

What ensues?  Surely you don't need me to spell it out, but I will anyway.  What you might NOT expect is this extended action sequence that takes place in the sewers underneath the town, with the lone-wolf Predator taking on a bunch of aliens.  Yeah.  Sewers.  Remember how I said I had something to get to earlier?  Well, here it goes: the DARKNESS.  Almost all of the action sequences in this film are shot in pitch-black, with only things like flickering light bulbs and the flash from weapon fire lighting the scene.  I didn't think it was possible to come up with something worse than the Michael Bay shakicam, but this is pushing it.  It's a recurring theme that haunts the rest of the movie, as the aliens begin taking over the town and killing off all of the secondary characters.  Time for another Lick Ness cliche: that previous sentence was something like 30 minutes of this movie.  Over this series of reviews, it really has become apparent to me that the Alien movies and the things connected to them really were slasher flicks who wore hardened exoskeletons instead of masks, and that description certainly applies to this movie as well.

Amazingly, the movie's finale culls from not just one but two classic zombie movies for inspiration/ripoff material.  By this point, the small group of remaining characters (if you want to keep score, it's Dallas, Kelly, her daughter, and emo dweeb guy) make their way to the town hospital in order to escape by helicopter.  George Romero, your lawsuit is ready.  It should surprise nobody reading this that they actually make it away, but during the course of this escape, the military launches a tactical nuke at the town.  Maybe this was an homage of sorts to Dan O'Bannon, the creator of the xenomorphs in the first place who later directed the movie that used this trope (Return of the Living Dead)?  Or maybe i'm overthinking it.

That should about fulfull my four-paragraph "story description" template.  This is some bad movie, but it's bad in a way that's hard to explain if you're not watching it.  It had the right idea to set its action someplace where audiences would be able to connect to it instead of, say, the goddamn continent of Antarctica.  I think a bigger city would have worked better, but maybe the budget wouldn't allow it.  Unfortunately, that world gets populated by a bunch of annoying kids that we beg the warring alien species to make their collective bitches.  I actually think the script would have been better had it just focused on the Dallas and O'Brien characters.  With more time to warm up to them, I think both Pasquale and Aylesworth would have had the acting chops to get us on their side.  But that's just me trying to snipe in with my pesky constructive thoughts.

This is one of those rare movies where the execution is where it fails, and I put the checkmark right next to the Brothers Strause on that one.  On the advice of a friend, I actually watched this movie with director commentary shortly after watching it, and it's very telling.  These guys are special effects whores through and through, and this is very apparent as they pretty much do nothing but talk up visuals all throughout the track.  I highly recommend that anyone reading this review give it a listen, because it's a pretty good lesson in "substance is more important than style."  And it does lead to one extremely hilarious moment during one of the fight scenes as they talk up the "amazing creature effects" in this particular scene...that we can't even see, because said scene looks like it was lit with an itty bitty book light.

I was ready to give this flick a mere 1/2 * out of ****, but I'll bump it up to an even * just because I actually liked what little we got of Pasquale and Aylesworth in this movie.  All of the other characters, and even the action, are something like that 1991 Clash of the Champions Van Hammer match that you skipped over as a kid.

Alien vs. Predator (2004)

2004
Directed by Paul W.S. Anderson
Starring Sanaa Lathan, Lance Henriksen, Raoul Bova, Ewen Bremner and Colin Salmon

And so it has come to this.  Let's flash back to 2004, back when I was 21 years old and had just moved away for my last couple years of college.  So young, so vibrant, so full of life...and the first movie I saw in my college town was Alien vs. Predator, a.k.a. AvP.  Words cannot express just how much I was anticipating this flick.  Hell, it was the only Atari Jaguar game I ever bothered to play.  Lo and behold, I get unpacked, spend a few days finding a job, walk around the campus for a little while, and then take this movie in as my reward at the end of a long first week in central Minnesota.  And I hated it.

Yeah, at the time I thought this movie was a big steaming pile.  Loud, overbearing and completely devoid of anything resembling the awesomeness of the story I had envisioned in my head, it didn't take long for me to swear this thing off and vow never to watch it again.  Well, upon re-watching it again for this review, I can report that the movie is still pretty bad.  However, it's that rare kind of bad that's actually kinda fun to watch at times.  Call it the Paul W.S. Anderson charm.  Yeah, his movies tend to be pretty unwatchable on the whole, but you can't say that the guy doesn't at least have a zeal and fighting spirit for his stuff.  This one included.  That kind of moxie is definitely needed when your acting brigade consists of Lance Henriksen and a bunch of no-names, but we'll get to them in due time.  The movie was meant to be the springboard for a new side franchise that both the Alien and Predator series could vault from, but alas, all we got was one more film from that concept before it was sayonara, suckas.  Again, more on that in due time (like, next week).  With all of that said, let's go about exploring the epic scope of the film I saw on some dingy mall theater screen right around the time I was sweating Business Statistics 301.

Amazingly, the movie takes place in the present day.  Or, at least, the present day of 2004 that makes me feel older every type I type that year.  You know EvilCo, that long-running corporation that has been the human no-gooders for the entirety of the Alien series?  Well, this is the ORIGIN STORY, baby.  Meet Charles Bishop Weyland, head guy of Weyland Industries, placed by Lance Henriksen in all of his slimy no-gooding glory.  It seems as if the company has detected a massive heat signature way below the Antarctic ice, and Weyland wants to claim the pyramid that the satellite finds at this site all to himself because reasons.  I'll admit that I wasn't paying a whole lot of attention when I first popped in this DVD, so bare with me.  Again, what I love about movies like this is that they almost always assemble a team of experts who universally hate each other, and this one is no exception.  Of them, the only one who doesn't immediately stand out as future intergalactic creature fodder is Alexa Woods (Sanaa Lathan), the overall guide of the whole mission who is actually pretty likable in addition to being pretty damn hot.  And this is where I will cut off the Skeevy Paragraph before it starts.

From here, a whole bunch of convoluted stuff happens that get us on the way to what we came for.  See, a Predator ship is lurking in space waiting for something.  If this were an episode of Star Trek, this would be the part where Captain Kirk hit the "f**k it, shoot 'em down" button, but alas we don't have William Shatner in sight here.  The pyramid contains all kinds of clues that shock no one who has seen even one of the previous films, gradually cluing us in that this is some sort of ancient civilization where humans co-existed with both alien species and that the xenomorphs are there to serve as the ultimate prey for the Predators.  They even have their own queen ready to go at the site to start pumping out those almighty facehuggers just for this purpose.  See those last two sentences?  It's rapidly becoming one of my favorite review cliches, but it's something like 30 minutes of this movie condensed.  What you need to know is that the Predators soon arrive and kill off all of the secondary characters, which is then immediately followed by two of them (dubbed Celtic Predator and Ensign Ricky Predator by yours truly) immediately get dusted off by one of the freshly-hatched xenomorphs.  Derp.

If you can't tell, the story of this movie is all over the place, but no theater audience was there in 2004 to see the epic scope of the story that this film had to offer.  We wanted the showdown, and fortunately that's what we get from here on out.  It should go without saying that the only human survivor is Alexa, and now she's caught in the crossfire of the Predators and their deadly prey (but not one that demands that you take off your shirt or else he'll cut you out from under it - and if you get that reference, you get 10 Fonzie cool points).  Much like that other horror-ish smackdown that took place a year earlier called Freddy vs. Jason, the movie makes a kinda-sorta decision about which one we should pull for based on the human characters tying their fate to one of them, and that's the plot device here. 

It's kind of an unsung role, but Sanaa Lathan really was good here; when it's down to herself, the scarred Predator, and a whole army of xenomorphs led by their gigantic queen, we're actually on her side.  Especially during that nifty scene when the lone Predator gives her a shield made from one of the xenomorph craniums and christens her by burning her cheek with alien blood.  That was pretty cool, even in 2004 when I was actively loathing this film.  Sometimes, the story can get downright dopey.  How so?  I just realized that I completely left the OTHER surviving human character for much of the running time out of this review, and he's so inconsequential to the plot that I don't even feel guilty.  Every time this dude is a part of the action the movie feels less, and when he gets captured...yikes.

As a film with a long development time of something like a decade, they definitely had plenty of advance notice to work out an awesome story for a movie where the two most vicious cineamtic aliens of all time got to go toe-to-toe.  This was not that film.  When I saw the movie in theaters, I thought that the story was terrible.  I don't think that anymore, but Paul W.S. Anderson just has a way of making his movies feel very soulless.  He was quoted once as saying that he watched Citizen Kane and was bored to tears by all of the talking, and that no one has ever felt that way while watching one of his movies.  His career is a really strange beast, in that I absolutely love his one and only original property (the downright horrific 1997 sci-fi horror classic Event Horizon) and can pretty much tell everything else to screw.  There's no soul or depth to anything that goes on here, and that shouldn't surprise anyone who has seen his version of Resident Evil or any one of its 17,000 sequels.

However, upon watching the movie again, something strange happened.  Call it the nostalgic rose-colored glasses for a time when I was slightly younger, but this time around I thought the final trimester was fairly cool.  That last word is a big key - cool, because the movie is still definitely lacking all of the hallmarks of the best of these series.  Namely, any semblance of tension, shocks and even gore, which this flick was such a letdown with that it became the centerpiece of the sequel's marketing campaign. 

< sigh >  I suppose it's time to assign a rating to the movie described in this incredibly nonsensical review.  I'll give AvP ** out of ****.  All these years later, it's not the out-and-out disaster that I remembered it being.  It's still a big disappointment, but compared to what would follow, it's a Patrick Bateman undisputed masterpiece.

Alien: Resurrection (1997)

1997
Directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Starring Sigourney Weaver, Winona Ryder, Ron Perlman, Dan Hedaya, J.E. Freeman, Brad Dourif and Michael Wincott

Funny story about writing this review - that poster you see up above is burned into my brain.  I didn't even need to look it up to know what it was, and if I had even a single inkling of artistic (read: MS Paint) ability I could have made the damn thing myself.  See, I got that poster when I went to some long ago movie in the fall of 1997, and it stayed on the wall of my old room at the parents' house for something like 15 years after the fact.  Hell, the thing was STILL up on that wall right up until a few months ago when I helped them move.  Thus, that image has a ton of nostalgic value for yours truly.  Unfortunately, that's where my wistfulness regarding Alien: Resurrection ends, because I think this movie is just a giant miscue on pretty much every level.

It certainly wasn't a misfire when it came to keeping the series alive.  We've had the two AvP flicks and two more Ridley Scott-directed films since, and it made a very respectable $160 million at the worldwide box office.  It promised yet more mayhem with the same main star who had been omnipresent in the series since the beginning, as well as the BIG COMEBACK (capitalized because important) role for Winona Ryder.  More on that later.  It had a script by Joss Whedon, a man who makes me scratch my head at the fact that he's one of the two Kings of Hollywood of the moment along with J.J. Abrams.  I mean...how did that happen?  One guy created Buffy.  The other created Jennifer Garner.  And now...they're essentially royalty.  Whatever.  But you get the idea.  Everything was here on paper, and people came and saw on opening night.  And while some fans of the series consider this to be a fun little diversion before it turned to spoof for the big smackdown, I've never liked it.  No sir, I don't like it (/Mr. Horse).  On with the show.

The movie starts with yet another example of the Alien series' trademark EvilCo chicanery, as members of the military find the DNA materials of Ripley.  And what do they do with this knowledge?  Extract the queen inside of her and make a clone.  Because that sounds like a spectacular idea.  Actually, it's not the dumbest story idea that Whedon could have concocted, as the opening passages of the film actually make a decent amount of sense.  The movie has some fun pretty early on experimenting with this new version of Ripley (now dubbed Ripley 8), including watching her punch through walls and dunk basketballs.  After all, this Ripley is half human/half alien, with all of the strengths and none of the weaknesses.  Once again, Weaver is excellent in the role, and there is hope that this could be a pretty kickass movie.  But then...the other characters come into the fray.

Every time I watch this movie, this is the aspect of it that completely kills it for me.  It was no different this time.  See, the military no-goodniks in the film rely on a bunch of mercenaries to provide them with human hosts for their alien experiments.  Folks, EVERY single character in this film with the exception of Ripley 8 is nothing short of a totally hateful douchebag that desperately makes you ant to see them get killed.  It's definitely a far cry from the first film, where we had this cool group of space truckers that we were genuinely fairly invested in.  It's really a shame, because they're comprised of some cast, including Ron "Earl The" Perlman being his usual gruff self and an appearance from Brad "Horror Movie Gold" Dourif as one of the scientists involved in cloning Ripley.  What you need to know is that there's a bunch of dislikable asshats in the movie now, and the bad guys completely and utterly fail to keep the alien project under wraps.  Cue running and screaming aboard the ship where this whole thing takes place.

And now for a Lick Ness Monster Side Rant.  As previously mentioned, Winona Ryder is in this movie, getting top billing along with Weaver when this one came out.  In the online pro wrestling world, a frequent discussion point is how bookers take a wrestler that they're personally fond of and shove them down your throats whether you like it or not.  If anyone out there thinks that Hollywood doesn't do this...they're wrong.  I don't remember anyone clamoring to see Shia LaBeouf in 2007, but then all of a sudden we were constantly told that this dude was a big deal despite audiences by and large being apathetic to him (big-league franchises be damned).  I think this is also the case with Ms. Ryder, and I couldn't tell you why.  This flick was supposed to be her career launching point after doing nothing of note for a few years, and it didn't take.  Amazingly, she got ANOTHER chance at hitting the big leagues a few years later with Girl, Interrupted, and instead she got totally outshined by Angelina Jolie.  For whatever reason, directors were just OBSESSED with making her a star for almost a decade-and-a-half.  I don't hate her, but I don't get why they were so determined to make it happen.  Oh, and this trend?  Yeah, it continues.  Taylor Kitsch, I'm looking at you.

Anyway, back to Alien: Resurrection.  There's actually a cool concept that the xenomorphs use this time around in the idea that they exploit their genetic memory to their advantage, along with Ripley 8 having a psychic bond with the aliens.  It gets brought up whenever the story needs it, which unfortunately means we spend a LOT of time with the group of mercenaries.  Most of them get picked off, and we eventually get a twist involving Ryder's character that most people will see coming if you're a veteran to this series.  There's also a big finale involving the extracted queen alien and its really, really weird-looking humanoid offspring that some fans think is coolness personified.  Me?  I just preferred the classic brood queen from the second movie.  But I'm the most boring human being alive.

In looking through some of the external reviews, there's a quote from Roger Ebert that pretty much sums up this whole film to perfection: "There is not a single shot in the movie to fill one with wonder."  It really is something just how much suspense had fallen to the wayside, even by 1997.  Everything about the execution of the first film, from the slow burn reveals to the eerie, simple score to the threat that escalates as the movie goes on, had been replaced by loudness, gunshots and explosions.  And not the good kind of loudness, gunshots and explosions that James Cameron utilized, either.  The bad kind.  The annoying kind.  The kind that Michael Bay and Roland Emmerich had made famous at multiplexes in the middle part of the '90s and that had already begun to infect popcorn movies, is well on display here. 

Really, though, it just comes down to whether or not you care when it comes to movies like this.  Given what we had to work with - a character who had essentially been stripped of everything in Ripley (including most of her memories) being tailed by a group of essentially moral-free human cargo jockeys and their crazy hijinx trying to escape from a military mad science experiment - it's just very difficult to care about anything that goes on here.  Weaver has said in interviews since that she would not say no to playing Ripley again if the right project comes along, but if THIS is her swan song in the role, I do think it's kind of sad, because I don't have much good to say about it.

* out of ****.  It definitely reversed course from Alien and gave us a whole heaping helping of xenomorph action again.  Too bad they did it in the most obnoxious way possible.  Avoid this one.

Alien 3 (1992)

1992
Directed by David Fincher
Starring Sigourney Weaver, Charles Dance, Charles S. Dutton and Lance Henriksen

Time for the first Alien movie that I actually knew about.  Not only that, I pretended to know a lot more about it than I actually did.  I still remember the ads for Alien 3 when it premiered in 1992 and the effect they had on me.  You see, sometime in second grade, I became obsessed with the paraormal and checked out every book that my library ('memba those?) had on the subject.  And then the ads for this flick came, promising not just aliens, but vicious, man-eating aliens.  Since it had that number 3 in the title, it almost seemed too good to be true - there was a whole SERIES of movies about said man-eating aliens?  Color me in.  Those ads became the talk of school, and for something like a month, I acted (and probably failed) like I'd seen the previous movies.  Some epic story, huh?  Lick Ness Liar.

A few years later when I actually saw the flick, I though it was a strange beast.  Hell, I still do.  When I re-watched it again for this review, I had essentially the EXACT same experience that I did initially and have had something like four times since.  Every time I give this one a watch, I think that THIS might finally be the time when I find more things that I like about it.  It's never happened.  It's still just as scatterbrained as it ever was.  Of course, these days, big-time blockbusters mandatorily have big overblown pre-production periods with something like the population of a small country all lending their hand in the story process.  This film was one of the first examples of this.  It has this legendary back story about how f**ked the whole thing got by the 70,000 talking heads pushing it in various directions behind the scenes that I've never actually gotten around to gleaming in its entirety, but man, can you tell.  Let's explore why.

Drab, drab, drab.  It's one four-letter word, but it sums up the whole movie.  In a way, it makes sense.  Aliens was one of those films that could be held up in the official Action Movie Handbook (TM) as a shining example of how to do it.  Thus, it was worn territory, and going the Ultra Dark Route (TM) seemed like a good play.  The movie starts off with the pod from the previous film crash-landing on a planet.  The inhabitants quickly resuscitate Ripley from hyper-sleep, and we learn not soon thereafter that both Hicks and Newt were killed in the crash.  Every other review you've read of this movie bitches about the fact that two perfectly good, likable characters being killed off without a whimper, so yeah, color me among them, it sucks.  Drab. 

Even more drabness awaits.  The planet that Ripley now finds herself on is...my, it' something else.  Fiorina 161, or "Fury" 161 for somewhat shorter, is this sort-of massive prison world where the inmates essentially police themselves with minimal involvement from any sort of higher authority.  The first trimester of the movie is spent introducing us to a lot of these very non-humorous jokers.  Ordinarily, I spend this part of the review telling you all about them, but yikes, I just can't do it this time around.  There are some very good actors in Alien 3, but the truth is that the characters they play are just completely one-dimensional and one-note.  For a franchise that featured some pretty damn unforgettable side characters, this part of the movie is the huge disappointment that I still just can't get over and probably the biggest reason why every one of my 5-6 watches of it has just been a chore.  Who cares?  These people are very boring.  Drab.

Wait, isn't this an Alien movie?  Why, yes.  Yes it is.  I own the director's cut of this flick, and at something like 30 minutes longer we get a little bit different of a setup than the one that theatrical audiences saw all of those years ago.  A queen facehugger stowed away on the escape ship Ripley was on, and upon crash-landing on Fury 161 it attaches itself to one of the planet's oxen.  Yup, there are oxen in this movie.  Within short order (short order in this film being something like 47 minutes of dialogue, doctor visits and the inmates' strange rituals featuring all sorts of religious imagery), the alien hatches...and it's something else.  One cool concept that this film hatches onto (see what I did there?) is the idea that the alien is indeed a true xenoMORPH, taking on the shape of whatever host it had.  In the first two films, it was bipedal since it was always attacking humans.  This time, it walks around on all fours.  In theaters, it was dog-like, but the ox-alien in the director's cut is also pretty awesome.  This was one of the rare welcome changes of Alien 3.

It's generally accepted that all of the powers-that-be behind this film didn't want to go back to the well-worn territory of Aliens and were looking to get back to basics.  Much like the original, Alien 3 is all about a group of characters trying to take down one alien creature before it mows through the local population, with the added suspense coming in the fact that firearms aren't allowed on Fury 161, putting the inmates at a huge handicap.  Everything builds to a third act that has almost every side character dying a gruesome death at the hands of the ox- (or dog) alien, and an ending twist that had to have seemed to audiences in 1992 that this was, indeed, going to be the final film in the franchise.  But you know what they say about Hollywood: Never Say Never Until it's Truly Distasteful, Then Make Five More Films.

I know it seems like I've been pretty hard on this flick, but it's not all bad.  This might actually be Weaver's best performance as Ripley in the entire series.  She was definitely cooler and more badass in the first two films, but this script required her to do some actual acting, and she was more than game for it.  You truly do get a sense of just how long this whole story has been playing out in Ripley's mind as you watch.  In addition to that, the world of Fury 161 and the production design is unreal, with director David Fincher showing clear early signs of just how awesome some of his later work would be.  And again, the work on the alien itself by visual effects guru Tom Woodruff Jr. is spot-on.  Oh, and Lance Henriksen makes a cameo appearance in the movie as the android Bishop...or rather Bishop's torso. 

It's the story details where this flick completely fails.  The concept of the film was sound enough on paper, I just don't think it's executed very well.  It's a shame, because I WANT to be into this movie.  Even today, knowing full well that I don't especially enjoy it, every watch comes from a place of optimism.  It's just that the characters are SO uninteresting and the pacing is SO slow.  There's nothing wrong with a good slow burn, but this movie has an ancient one.  As a result, the suspense is practically non-existant.  Imagine an Alien 3 where Hicks and Newt also survived the crash, giving us that added emotional weight to go along with the strong attachment we have to Ripley...and that the planet they land on isn't a prison world but a highly-advanced, booming human colony with a bustling Metropolis...and that the side characters that get introduced to us speak in a manner other than dull whisper mode...and that the alien queen succeeds in multiplying on said world, thus launching an apocalyptic final battle to end the series.  Sounds awesome to me.  Sometimes, overthinking is bad, and that should be the lesson that is forever gleamed from Alien 3 and its incredibly convoluted production.

* 1/2 out of ****.  There are some great scenes in this movie, but they're VERY few and far between.  All of these years later, I still think this one is a textbook example of style over substance.  Thus, I still can't quite convince myself to like it.

Predator 2 (1990)

1990
Directed by Stephen Hopkins
Starring Danny Glover, Gary Busey, Ruben Blades, Maria Conchita Alonso, Bill Paxton and Robert Davi

Ladies and gentlemen, Predator 2, a.k.a. Hot Town, Predator in the City.  I promise that this is the most cringe-worthy thing you'll read in this review. 

Upon first watching the original flick way back when I was 13, I immediately wanted more of this world.  I was well aware that there was a sequel, as this film popped up ALL THE TIME on TBS back in the day.  For mysterious reasons, it popped up even more than the original.  Maybe the rights were just cheaper?  Who knows.  These are the mysteries of the life of Jon Lickness.  At any rate, back then, this film was just what I was looking for.  The whole Predator creature was just endlessly fascinating and awesome to me, and this movie really expanded on what the thing was all about.  It definitely didn't shy away from the violence.  It gave us a few answers as to just how the Predators operate.  In addition to all of that, the film had that whole glorious "overblown in the good way" action movie thing going on for it that movies these days don't even try to replicate for fear of becoming parodies of themselves.  Think Sly's Cobra with an alien suit and you've got this movie.

Of course, not all of it was good.  In retrospect, this movie does have its fair share of flaws.  First among them is that while the flick does have a really good crop of actors, the characters are nowhere near as cool and badass as they were the first time around.  As opposed to any of the characters rom the original film, now we've got Danny Glover in full-on action hero mode.  He does his best, but he's no Arnold.  The script (by brothers Jim and John Thomas, the guys who created the Predator in the first place) made the move of not just setting the carnage in the city, but in the FUTURE city.  More specifically, the future city of 1997 Los Angeles circa 1990, where various drug gangs engage in open warfare with police officers and sniff cocaine in the middle of said wars.  Yep, it actually happens.  And that's what this movie is all about.  Let's get to it.

I've mentioned on countless occasions that movies of this type typically waste no time getting going, but this one REALLY doesn't.  We're immediately shot into a bloody shootout between a gang of Colombian drug lords and the LAPD, a party that soon gets crashed by Lieutenant Harrigan (Glover).  He's your typical old-school cop movie dude who doesn't go by the rules.  Within ten minutes of the title screen, we've seen a new Predator descend on the Colombians, massacre the f**k out of them, and a cop who has conversations with his captain about how much of an insubordinate he is.  In short, it's an early '90s action movie masterpiece.

First things first, while the characters are pretty one-dimensional, all of the actors here are amazing and give this material their all.  There's Danny Archuleto, Harrigan's best friend played by Ruben Blades and the first one to bite the dust.  Spoiler alert.  Then there's Leona Cantrell, the feisty Latina played by that all-time great feisty Latina Maria Conchita Alonso.  I've always loved this woman; if I still did the skeevy paragraph, it would be coming up right about now.  Yeah.  Check out that workout scene from The Running Man for proof.  And THEN there's the new guy Jerry Lambert, a.k.a. Bill Paxton in full Bill Paxton zany douchebag glory giving us periodic bad jokes and completing his hat trick as he becomes the only actor to get killed by a Terminator, an Alien, and a Predator onscreen.

Now, a few words about the execution of Predator 2.  This flick was expected to be a big deal, and it was given a big-league budget of $35 million (gargantuan by 1990 standards).  I suspect that this budget made the screenwriters go a little overboard with how many big set-pieces they wrote into this thing, as we aren't given a story so much as a long series of attacks by the Predator on the cops, the Colombians, and a particularly nasty gang of Jamaicans led by the vicious King Willie (Calvin Lockhart in a dynamite brief role).  These attack scenes are frequent, bloody and violent, and I learned from the ever-accurate Wikipedia that this flick was originally given an NC-17 rating in its original version.  I can see why.  This is the only movie I've ever seen that contains a blood-soaked voodoo ritual being performed while a fully nude woman screams in the background before a violence-crazed alien descends onto the room and guts everyone inside in full cinematic glory.  This is some damn movie.  As an added bonus, the creature has a REALLY cool group of new weapons to dispense of his foes with.  In the first, he just had that shoulder-cannon thing and his bare hands.  This time around, he's got a net launcher that bores into the skin of anyone that it snares.  This is some damn movie.

As if all the actors I've mentioned already aren't enough, this movie also has Gary Busey.  This character is the one that brings us to where we need to go, as he's a Fed who claims he's in town to stop King Willie.  As a surprise to no one, he's really after the Predator itself, much like Evilco (TM) was always after the Alien in the rival franchise.  Of course, this puts him at odds with Harrigan.  I know I haven't mentioned him much in this review, and it's a testament to how scatter-brained this particular flick was, but Glover really did give the thing his all.  By the time most of his partners have been killed and he's on the trail of revenge, you're on his side.  It all leads to a big showdown that starts with a sting operation being led by Busey in a slaughterhouse and winds up in the Predator's escape ship.  Along the way, we see several of the society's rules in effect, such as not gunning down unarmed victims, sparing the life of a pregnant woman, and the somewhat cowardly practice of committing suicide when cornered.  Every one of these discoveries was insane to me when I was younger, because I had so many friends and things to do.

If you can't tell, this movie is just structurally very different from the first.  That one had a very sound screenplay and a slow-burn build.  This movie, on the other hand, is choppy to the max.  It tends to leap from violent horror sequences to violent action sequences with not really much in between.  Of course, that's forgivable when you've got people getting cut up in as crazy-cool ways as this movie has, but watching this film isn't quite the tension-packed experience that the first was.  A movie with this much murder and mayhem really was the perfect vehicle for Stephen Hopkins, the director of A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child.  Hopkins is all about bleakness, and this movie was his shot at the title, as the L.A. of this movie is dark, twisted and bleak to the core.  Obviously, it didn't quite pan out.  This movie barely grossed half as much as the first while costing more, and while Hopkins has had a good career directing television he never quite became the next big thing that he was slated to be.

I loved this movie as a kid.  Don't get me wrong - I still enjoy Predator 2.  But I got one big thing out of re-watching it in preparation for this review. I can't help but think that this movie would have been a lot more effective had they dropped the whole "set a few years in the future/massive scale drug war" thing and just decided to have the story take place in modern-day 1990 Los Angeles without all of the exaggeration.  How about this idea - a serial murderer is on the loose, and the Predator sees this sicko while gutting a few unfortunate souls in one of the seemier parts of the city.  The cop character could be one of the homicide officers after the serial killer, only to find the ULTIMATE killer in the process.  Tension-wise, this could have led to some very interesting situations as well as one BIG-TIME crowd pleasing death when the Predator catches the human bad guy.  It also could have allowed the movie a lot more time to develop the characters as something other than one-note archetypes.  I don't know, that's just me.  Throw in a nude scene for Alonso and more of Paxton being a douche and I'd likely just be happy with that.

Judgment time.  This flick is nowhere near the almost-perfect classic that the first movie is.  But all these years later, the flick is still loads of fun.  Thus, I award this movie *** out of ****.  If you love Predator like I do, this one gives you more of what you want and then some.

Predator (1987)

1987
Directed by John McTiernan
Starring Arnold Schwarzeneggar, Carl Weathers, Elpidia Carrillo, Bill Duke, Richard Chaves, Jesse Ventura, Shane Black and Kevin Peter Hall

Time to go back to the past.  Again.  I mentioned a couple reviews ago that there was no pair of films that I watched more during my junior high years than the first two Predator movies, and it can't be overstated just how big of an influence these things had on those formative years.  The whole concept of the Predator creature was so cool to 13-year-old me; not only because this was one of the few things that could be onscreen with Arnold and actually manage to make him seem like an underdog but because of just what the damn thing WAS.  An intergalactic hunter who comes to conflicted areas of other planets to claim skulls as trophies?  That ranks right up there with a cyborg sent from the future to kill the mother of the man who would defeat his machine compatriots in the future.  Say whatever you want about Schwarzeneggar the actor, but you can't say that this guy doesn't pick projects that accentuate his strengths, because his movies are AWESOME.

Undoubtedly, Predator is one damn cool movie.  It ranks pretty damn high on several lists.  As far as sci-fi flicks, alien movies, '80s action movies, it's hard to find many movies better than this one.  It started off as a script by two brother who took a joke about Rocky Balboa running out of earthly opponents and just morphed from there.  If this alien is a hunter, then man must be the most dangerous game.  And what men are the most dangerous game?  Combat operatives.  Bouncing one idea after another is often the way that the best stories are constructed.  Add director John McTiernan, producer Joel Silver and the coolest crop of supporting actors around...and you have Predator.  This is some magnanimous praise so far, isn't it, boyos?  On with the show.

Meet Dutch Schaefer, played by Schwarzeneggar in all of his 1987 macho glory and the commander of an elite group of mercenaries.  As the film opens, Dutch meets with old friend an present-day CIA agent Dillon (Carl Weathers, also in all of his 1987 macho glory that was just a shade below Apollo Creed but miles above Chubbs).  Dillon has the assignment for Dutch and his team - rescue an American official held hostage by insurgents in some fictional and wholly substitutable (is that a word?) central American country.  As an added bonus, Dillon is coming along.  Ladies and gentlemen, there is your setup.

While Predator has some great stuff in store for us, the first act of this flick is some of the most kickass stuff you'll ever see in any action movie.  For starters, we've got an unforgettable cast of characters and an even better crop of actors playing them.  In particular, the duo of Mac (Bill Duke) and Blaine (Jesse Ventura pre-tinfoil hat) give the movie some of its best moments, but really, everyone in this cast is someone you'll remember by name.  The team finds the members of the American team within short order, skinned and hanging from the trees, eventually finding the enemy camp and blowing it to smithereens in a really well-done sequence that has a weight and forward momentum sorely lacking from the Michael Bay movies of today.  Must I mention modern movies and bitch about them in every review?  Probably.  During the attack, Dutch finds out that the operation was really nothing more than an assassination attempt cooked up by Dillon, giving us some nice tension as Act Two begins.

See, all throughout the action in the Val Verde jungle, we've gotten periodic glimpses of something stalking them in the wilderness.  It's done via first-person POV shots, and clearly it's not from human eyes, because it looks like the stuff you'd see on an Apple IIe computer.  We get the first glimpse of what it might look like after the village attack as it follows the group and picks up a crushed scorpion, and it's one of the more creative ways I have seen to introduce a menacing character.  The following 40-45 minutes of the film show the creature eliminating the team one-by-one, gradually revealing more of itself as nothing more than a "blur."  Only it's not a blur.  It's camouflage.  Smartness.

Yeah, it's true that Predator is more of an action movie than a horror movie.  But when I was in seventh grade, this movie made me feel more tension the first time I watched it than any horror movie had in years.  Hell, to this day, it's still a nerve-wracking experience.  Picturing yourself in this situation is some pretty nightmarish stuff, and the kills?  The Predator in this film is definitely more minimalist than the one we would see in subsequent films, where he had a whole host of cool gadgets and weapons to play with.  This time around, he has a shoulder-mounted energy weapon, retractable wrist claws and his bare hands.  It still works just fine, because it's the Predator's ability to go invisible and devise traps that gives the movie its pervasive sense of dread.  Of course, once we actually DO see the thing, the movie manages to be one of the few flicks of its type to not disappoint us with the details.  Dreadlocks, mandibles, and really freaky bug eyes fit in well with actor Kevin Peter Hall's 6'8" frame.

And that's not even mentioning some of the gory details of this flick.  Make no mistake about it, there is a definite slasher movie influence at work here.  The death scenes all have plenty of red stuff flying around, and most of them look like they really friggin' HURT.  Especially Weathers' death, and I don't think that's much of a spoiler alert.  But it's the story execution that really makes the movie feel slasher-rific.  We start off with a large group of likable characters, we have the past evil (revealed to us in the form of a local prisoner who tells the soldiers that the "demon who makes trophies of man" returns only in the hottest summers), and we have the inevitable showdown with the final would-be victim.  Yeah, it goes without saying that the de facto "final girl" here is Dutch.  But the fight itself is gut-wrenchingly tense stuff all the same.  Just like the best slasher flicks, everything has been stripped away but survival.

If you're looking for more superlatives for me to hurl at this movie, I'm pretty much out of them by this point.  Predator was the right movie with the right guy at the right time, complete with some infinitely quotable lines of dialogue ("Payback time" and "Get to da choppah!" being the first things that come to mind).  It's a good old-fashiond R-rated bloodfest and a special effects bonanza with director John McTiernan in the first of several collaborations with Joel Silver.  And, to this day, it's still a flick that I can turn on late at night and actually feel some tension rising in my throat, all these years and approximately 181 viewings after I first watched it on TBS as a nerdy seventh grader.  Bravo.

Rating time.  Predator gets another **** out of ****, and I actually do like this movie a little bit BETTER than Ridley Scott's original Alien.  Just a damn fun time from beginning to end.  Check this one out.