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.

Aliens (1986)

1986
Directed by James Cameron
Starring Sigourney Weaver, Carrie Henn, Michael Biehn, Paul Reiser, Lance Henriksen, William Hope and Bill Paxton

Regardless of anything that anybody wants to say about James Cameron now, he can go to his grave knowing that he has done two of the absolute best goddamn sequels of all time - Terminator 2 and the movie in question today.  Given what's on tap for his career, I am dead certain that this statement will hold true in its original form, because there's no way that the next 17 Avatar movies are going to come close to doing what these two flicks did.  Namely, what a sequel is SUPPOSED to do.  They raise the stakes, but also manage to carve out their own little identity at the same time.  Back in the '80s and '90s, Cameron was just a guy who knew the ins and outs of how to write an action movie screenplay, and this movie is a textbook example.  The end result is a flick that's still a damn fun watch 31 years after its initial release.  It's not quite as good as the first from a horror standpoint, but in terms of explosions and excitement, look no further daddy.

First off, a little background.  Seven years passed between the original Alien and the sequel Aliens, a very unique concept given the current climate of Hollywood cinema.  Back then, they actually used to let a movie sink in, digest and age before they planned out a sequel.  These days, it seems like the powers-that-be already have the sequel and the subsequent four films (complete with a wholly masturbatory two-part "final" film) planned out.  By the time 1985 rolled around, the original movie was already considered a classic, and this James Cameron guy had spent much of the interim time turning all kinds of heads.  He directed a movie about flying monster fish (seriously - Google it), wrote and directed a low-budget sci-fi flick featuring a bodybuilding champ from Austria that effectively blew up any and all expectations that it might have had, and wrote one of the early spec scripts for the insanely popular Rambo: First Blood Part II.  Aliens would be his first foray into the big budget, and if I haven't given this dude enough nerdgasm yet, he delivered on all counts.  Raise the stakes, bring stuff back, but make it important in different ways.  Sequels 101. 

As the movie starts, Ripley is being awoken from stasis.  For those keeping score, she placed herself in suspended animation after surviving the final encounter with the vicious, heat-seeking, xenomorphic creature from that film...and 57 years have passed.  Bummer.  She is debriefed by her employers, and the remainder of the first act is spent with the set-up for everything to come.  As you can imagine, Ripley - again with Sigourney Weaver playing the role, and once again she is 100% sliced awesome - is feeding her employers an incredible story about what she faced aboard the USS Nostromo.  One that would be hard to believe.  Hell, I'll admit, I would probably make a few jokes about how the tall woman who was frozen for half a century is full of crap.  But as she gets the news that there is now a human colony on the moon that her crew investigated in the first movie, we can quickly gleam where the story is going.

Lo and behold, it doesn't take long for word to reach the crew on Earth that communication has been cut off to the settlers on LV-246.  It's admittedly a pretty big script convenience that this happened JUST as Ripley came to, but bear with us for the sake of the movie.  Because of her experience on the planet, Ripley is asked to accompany the space marines (not THE space marine from the video game "Doom," but again, bear with me) on a search and potential rescue mission.  And this is where the film really gets cool.  The thing about James Cameron up until the colossal fail train that was Avatar was that he was AMAZING at creating memorable tough guy supporting characters, and this movie is full of 'em.  Michael Biehn as Corporal Hicks, the incredible Bill Paxton as sleazy Private Hudson, Lance Henriksen as the android Bishop (whom Ripley distrusts immediately for reasons that were clear if you watched the first movie), and Jenette Goldstein as tough chick Private Vasquez are all people that I remember by name, and their characters and traits are established from that first scene as they suit up for battle.  Great stuff.

Time for the "fun and games" act.  Of course, the marines find a derelict, demolished colony completely bereft of survivors, save a small child named Newt (Carrie Henn, who Cameron chose for the role over something like 500 professional child commercial actors because all of them smiled after saying their lines) who doesn't say much outside of things like "They mostly come at night.  Mostly."  If you've seen the 1950s creature feature Them! about giant killer ants, there's a character in that film very similar to this one who is horrified by the things she has seen and is initially mute.  So +2 for Cameron for making these references.  Cue the discovery of a baby alien that is subsequently killed by the marines, a big mistake since it awakens the hordes of xenomorphs that have overrun the place, killing off several of the lesser marines and leaving us with what's nothing short of a solid 45 minutes of really well-sustained tension-packed action sequences.

See, kids, these days I'm pretty damn sick of action movies.  In the last, oh, 15 years or so, they've essentially dropped any and anything resembling building characters or arcs and have pretty much been boiled down to "event cinema."  Not so here.  We got to know those characters, so there are things at stake once the guns start blazing.  The movie's central plot cog is the relationship between Ripley and Newt; the director's cut, which is widely available now in pretty much every home video format, lets us know that Ripley had a daughter on Earth who has since passed away, and the surrogate mother-daughter relationship between the pair gives the movie a genuine power.  But anytime that emotion starts to overpower everything, boom, here's Bill Paxton to make another one of his trademark jerkass quips and we're back to reality.

Another thing the movie has is a really good human villain.  Paul Reiser of all people plays the movie's representative of the big, bad evil company in charge of a similar "alien salvage operation" that the first movie swerved us with.  This time around, it's not much of a swerve, but Reiser pulls off the slimy executive thing really well.  Yet more Grade-A film criticism courtesy of the Lick Ness Monster.  It's also another pretty big screenplay leap, as we're meant to suspend disbelief and buy that this same damn company has been keeping up with the "we have to get a xenomorph all to ourselves!" mission for the past 57 freakin' years and has made attempt #2 just as Ripley re-awakens from stasis, but just roll with it, baby.

While Aliens is a damn fun action movie and one of the best that the genre has to offer, there's something about it that keeps me from enjoying it quite as much as the first film.  There was something about that one that stuck with me long after watching it for the first time.  This one lacks the sense of discovery that the initial one had; we already know all of the tricks of the trade when it comes to the alien creature, so a bit of the scariness was lost.  Which is just fine, since Cameron was going for more gunplay anyway, but it's just part of the nature of the beast with sequels.  There's a law of diminishing return no matter what.  Well, save for one BIG surprise that the movie has for us in the epic climax.  That part was all new.  So new that I won't even spoil it.

Having said all that, let's assign a rating.  Aliens gets a *** 1/2 out of ****.  It's one of the best sequels of all time with the same badass heroine, a ragtag group of supporting characters, and that middle 45-minute action sequence that's effectively one of the coolest things ever.  Unfortunately, it's also the last truly good movie in the Alien franchise, but we'll get to those in due time.

Alien (1979)

1979
Directed by Ridley Scott
Starring Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt, Veronica Cartwright, Harry Dean Stanton, John Hurt, Ian Holm and Yaphet Kotto

Time for another franchise review, and this one is going to be good.  The Alien and Predator series were things that I grew up on; the movie in question today, which we'll get to in due time, is one of the first movies that I actively started to seek out once I got a little bit more into horror than the fourth-grade dabbling phase.  I taped that bitch off HBO ('memba doing that?) and it rocked my world.  The Predator films, on the other hand, was probably my favorite two-movie combo during my early middle school years, and to this day I can quote the original film from front to back.  Because I'm a winner.  Woo.  While there were brief dips here and there, by and large, both of these series are just FUN incarnate.  Except for, ironically, the AvP movies that should have been my wet dream.  Screw them.

There's only one place to start, though, and we're going to be jumping all the way back to 1979.  Crazy to think that the first movie was released in the '70s, isn't it?  There were plenty of movies before it that made aliens scary, but nothing could have quite prepared viewers of countless 1950s creature features for what they were about to see when this beast hit theaters.  Director Ridley Scott gave those people an alien that was malevolent, savage, and really, really pissed off, and all of the bad stuff was shown to you in glorious close-ups.  It also introduced audiences to Sigourney Weaver and the Ellen Ripley character, a mainstay in this franchise all the way up until the aforementioned crappy AvP flicks.  A whole slew of like-styled ripoffs followed in its wake...not to mention the video game inspirations, as early NES classics Metroid and Contra borrowed heavily from its lore.  In short, kids, if you haven't seen this one, plunk down whatever a copy is going for on Amazon and sit down.

Most horror movies in space that people may or may not have seen feature characters that are government professionals in some way, be they astronauts or scientists.  This one had a stroke of genius, as the crew of the Nostromo is essentially a group of space truckers.  As the movie starts, the bunch is awaken from stasis by a curious message being relayed to them, and the law dictates that they have to investigate it.  The first act of scripting according to people who know about such things dictates that a person or persons' lives are about to change in a big way, and the setup here is fantastic.  Also, interestingly enough, the Ripley character isn't given much focus early on.  Don't get me wrong; we get to know her, and Weaver is already awesome in the role that would grow to define her, but the main character fairly early on is Captain Dallas (Tom Skerritt).  This results in one of the more effective kill scenes in any horror movie later on.  Oh yeah, spoiler alert.

What follows is one of the longest, slowest builds for any horror film you've ever seen, as the crew lands on a distant planet and finds a wrecked ship.  There is also a derelict alien body on board the ship, presumably after being overpowered by something on board.  Cue the discovery of the pod-like eggs and that immortal scene where one of the crew members eats a face hugger to the...um...face, and the rest is history.

The script of Alien was written by Charles O'Bannon, a guy who would later go on to direct the minor '80s classic Return of the Living Dead, and I don't think enough praise can be leveled on this guy for the antagonist alien creature that he created.  There's no way that I would have ever came up with it, that's for sure, and not just because this thing has an ecosystem that's more complicated than your average member of the amphibian family.  See, the thing that just attacked this character is called a "face hugger" because that's exactly what it does.  Unbeknownst to everyone else, however, it's also laying an egg in the unfortunate host's stomach that quickly incubates, resulting in a later twisted birth sequence and the baby alien (now a miniature version of its later adult counterpart) rapidly grows and develops a need to kill everything it sees.  What's more, the damn thing's blood is like pH 1-level acid that eats through anything it touches.  As one character flawlessly puts it, you don't dare kill the thing.  That whole concept is simply TERRIFYING.  So kudos to Mr. O'Bannon, because this is some of the best scripting you'll ever see.  Not just in horror, either.  Anywhere.

John Hurt is the actor who got the call to play the cursed crew member who found the alien egg, and he's quite simply fantastic in the role.  He would also get the opportunity to make fun of himself a few years later in that awesome Spaceballs diner scene that pays credit to his death scene here.  Really, though, ALL of the actors here are awesome.  Just read that list on the marquee above.  If you're a horror fan or grew up on '80s movies and Roger Ebert film companions like I did, you're no doubt familiar with pretty much all of them.  Even if you're not, you've probably seen all of them in a few other flicks before.  But here, as the game of "Ten Little Indians" begins and the crew starts getting picked off by the now adult, giant and really, really fast and angry xenomorph, the death scenes actually have impact because the actors were good enough to get us invested.

In that way, this movie was a product of its time.  Halloween had just been released in the prior year, and Alien definitely was a slasher flick set in space, minus all the gratuitous nudity.  It's a body count film, with one slam-bang death scene right after the other, set in a confined area with no place to hide not unlike the device that Friday the 13th would make popular the following year.  There's also a really great plot twist involved as one of the crew members is revealed to be something that you would never, ever guess, a plot mechanism that was mined further in the sequels.  There's an ungodly scene set in the ship's ventilation shafts that managed to get a good jump out of me re-watching it for the first time in ten years. 

Eventually, it gets down to Ripley vs. the Alien, and this is where the movie especially shines.  The best thing about Ripley in this film is that she's a badass female character that they actually, you know, don't shove down your throat that she's a badass female character, a fatal mistake that a lot of film and TV properties these days tend to make.  She's tough, but she's also vulnerable, and the audience is firmly behind this "final girl" as she faces off with the ultimate threat (with the benefit of some well-timed explosions and a flamethrower, of course).  And she also looks fantastic in underwear during the film's climax. /record scratch

I mentioned before that the first act in the screenplay is the one where someone's life changes.  This movie has that.  The second act is the "fun and games" act, and this movie also has that...well, at least as "fun and games" as watching the giant alien pick off one person after another can be.  The visual effects here are still really good...again, mostly because they're done in a conventional way, but I'm sure everyone is sick of hearing me beat on that dead horse by now.  While the xenomorph itself would be onscreen more in the sequel, I don't think the thing was ever as SCARY as it was here, mostly because there was just a certain level of tension that the sequels couldn't replicate due to the audience going through the "discovery" phase along with the characters.  How the thing grows, feeds, and operates was a mystery then.  But eventually it gets solved, and once the script hits the third act "insurmountable problem" section, that mystery is a big fucking problem.

It goes without saying that most horror films are a dime a dozen, and I say that as no indictment of the genre as a whole.  I love horror more than life itself.  I've spent much of my life seeking out as many horror-related films, TV shows, books, etc., all in the pursuit of getting scared.  Every once in a while, though, there is a horror story that truly is special, and in the world of movies, it tends to be the special ones that get blessed with that holiest of gifts from the Hollywood Gods - the big budget.  Alien had that golden gift, and thus, it also had a top-notch cast, set, makeup, kill scenes, you name it, this flick fires on all cylinders. 

**** out of ****.  The flick is an essential watch and a classic start to a pretty damn iconic series...but we're just getting started.  /thundercrash

Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension (2015)

2015
Directed by Gregory Plotkin
Starring Chris J. Murray, Brit Shaw, Dan Gill, Ivy George and Olivia Taylor Dudley

The time has come to finish this series off.  And let me tell you something, people, found footage movies viewed the way that I just looked at them get old fast.  Many years ago when I started to actively collect horror movies and started off with slasher flicks, I could watch a whole lot of those back-to-back without even batting an eye.  When a lot of idiots talk about how all horror movie are the "same," odds are they're talking about slasher flicks and the stuff they heard from Randy's rules in Scream.  Slasher movies, though...they tend to differ quite a bit in terms of origin story and script and execution and what killer angle they take.  These movies?  The level of sameness really is pretty jarring, if such a thing can be "jarring."  Chalk that up to bad writing skills on my part.  Alas, I have now watched every movie in the Paranormal Activity series, and I'm not going to lie, I feel free.

Six movies in, and much like the Saw franchise before it, the direction that the powers-that-be decided to take this time out was the 3D one.  Looking back, I'm actually a little surprised that they hadn't done this already, but 3D tends to raise a film's budget substantially.  According to the ever-accurate Wikipedia, this particular movie cost $10 million to produce.  That's still a dead mosquito on your windshield in the grand scope of Hollywood, but it's double the price tag of any other movie in this series.  I can't report just how big of a different this aspect of it made on the story, since I never saw this flick in theaters and watched it on another lonely Saturday night at my own damn house.  Maybe some of the luster was lost?  At any rate, let's get to the show.

The first thing that I need to mention that this movie actually has in its favor that the previous few films haven't is not just one but TWO fairly likable characters.  The first guy that we meet in this movie is Mike (Dan Gill), boasting of one of the world's most foremost 1970s porn star mustaches but all things told actually a pretty well-played and affable dude.  He has just broken up with his long-term girlfriend and needs a place to stay, and that place is the home of his brother Ryan (Chris J. Murray).  Of course, Ryan has a family of his own - wife Emily (Brit Shaw) and young daughter Leila (Ivy George), and unfortunately, these characters become the focus of the movie as it goes along and Mike kind of vanishes to the back.  Why?  I don't know.  The central family also has a friend named Skylar (Olivia Taylor Dudley) who is into new-agey Yoga stuff (God, I'm cool), and this would be likable character #2.  The early scenes in this movie establish a little bit of romantic tension between Mike and Skylar, a.k.a. something RADICALLY different from what we've seen in this series so far, and the two actors actually have really good chemistry.  It's a shame that it gets wasted in a found footage flick that Jon Lickness watched all alone two years after its release.

Setup time.  The two brothers are setting up Christmas decorations when they find a mysterious box containing an old-school video camera and a stack of VHS tapes.  I suppose this would be a good time to mention that the first scene in this movie was the ending of Paranormal Activity 3 and all of the creepy stuff that follows, because it's kind of central to the plot of this film.  Yup, it turns out that the house that Ryan resides in now was built over the top of cult leader granny's house from that movie, and the tapes just sort of arrived at the house via osmosis.  Ryan and Mike begin watching the tapes, containing footage of the young Kristi and Katie conducting strange psychic rituals...and they seem to be describing Leila's bedroom word-for-word.  Ruh-roh.

The gimmick this time around is that the camera left behind by that dude from Part 3 whom I can't even be bothered to check what his name was is somehow able to see all of the demonic activity in the house.  What this means for you, good reader and watcher, is a lot of cheesy 3D black swirly effects.  In theaters, who knows, maybe they looked better.  But in this series, a series that has been all about what you don't see (a plus even in films that I didn't like as much), it really sticks out like a sore thumb.  And when I start throwing around cliches like that, you know it's time to move on to another topic. 

And that topic would be...Leila, the family daughter who becomes the epicenter of the haunting.  Creepy kids in horror movies are one of my major dicey propositions.  I can count on something like two hands the number of times that I've seen this trope played well, and this would not be one of them.  I'll give it to Ivy George; the young actress did her best, but the evil little girl being slowly possessed plot is a difficult one to make entertaining after we've seen it happen so many times in so many better stories.  And if you noticed that connection to The Exorcist, you are one astute reader.  This movie takes a page out of it in another way as the family calls a Priest in to see Leila, a first for this series and actually a rather welcome change.  Father Todd doesn't get much airtime, but he's likable, so that's another plus in this movie's basket.  It's not original in the least bit, but again, it's welcome.

All of this builds to a finale, with the demon "Tobi" (that has been mentioned in almost every movie in this series, by the way) trying to use Leila as a springboard to finally taking human form in the real world on one side and the family led by Father Todd on the other.  I'll admit it, this movie actually has a pretty damn impressive last 10 minutes that had me legitimately tense on a few occasions.  It makes up slightly for the terminally boring middle section consisting largely of watching those Sharknado-esque black swirlies swish around in the darkness.

It should be apparent that I liked this one a little better than the previous two films.  For starters, I get the sense that this one had a script that the writers actually took a conscious effort to flesh out.  And seriously, this movie had FOUR writers.  They don't make 'em like they used to.  You know how many people wrote Chinatown?  One.  You know how many people wrote the groundbreaking lyrical masterpiece that is "Run the World (Girls)"?  Six.  I rest my case.  The aforementioned likable characters were also a big boost.  And if I still did the Skeevy Paragraph, rest assured that Olivia Taylor Dudley would have gotten her just due there.  The major problem with the film, though, is that it still just isn't very scary, at least not until the very tail end of the proceedings.  Thus, I award this film ** out of ****.

Lastly, a few words about the Paranormal Activity series in total.  Looking back, I actually think that I would bump up my rating of the third film another half-star to that *** "thumbs-up" range.  Part of that could be rose-colored glasses for when I started this project, and part of that could be that I'm just feeling generous, but it IS a better movie than everything that came after.  It can't be denied that this series has been infinitely profitable, and while press materials seemed to indicate that the movie in this review is indeed the last one, I have difficulty believing that.  It's hard to say no to a big return on such minor investments.  Personally, though...I'm just over this whole subgenre of horror, and it's a little sad to say since the first movie is the one that kicked off the whole craze.  For those who don't remember, I gave that movie *** 1/2, and I actually think it still stands the test of time as a modern classic.  What say you, loyal readers?  Would I feel different if I saw the sequels in the same way, after a 40-minute drive through the countryside with a storm brewing that never quite hit storm status and with maybe nine other people in that dark, quiet theater?  Would these movies be more effective?  Unfortunately, I can't say.

And now, the Xenomorphs and the Predators are about to do their very, very violent thing in a multi-part Mega-Review...

Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones (2014)

2014
Directed by Christopher B. Landon
Starring Andrew Jacobs, Jorge Diaz and Gabrielle Walsh

Never underestimate the power of low budgets combined with the power of horror fans hungry for anything new.  Yes, folks, we're up to Paranormal Activity 5, a.k.a The Marked Ones.  While the overaching plot of the series was wrapped up in the last one, the massive amounts of profit that these flicks continued to pull in meant that it was too much to ask that the series end there.  Thus, it's time for the spinoff, baby.  Or, more accurately, Paranormal Activity: A New Beginning.  Brace yourself.

While I saw the first two films in theaters, I was at least aware of the release of the third and fourth movies during their original theatrical runs.  Not so with this one.  Maybe I was just in some sort of boredom-induced coma in January of 2014.  Maybe I was still reeling from reviewing all of those godawful Leprechaun films.  But for whatever reason, the last two movies in this franchise completely slipped my radar.  Apparently I was in the minority, since it once again grossed a king's ransom on a budget of only $5 million.  The important thing that you need to know is that the folks at Blum House still had a legitimate cash cow on their hands, and even though this film is pretty bad all things considered, I can't fault them in the least bit for keeping the gravy train going.  And while it is technically a spinoff, it also links up with the original series at the end in a way that I promise not to spoil.  Once again, Paranormal Activity: A New Beginning.  Ch ch ch ch.

I'll be the first person to admit that I knew nothing about this movie going on and had no idea what I was in store for, but I certainly didn't plan on what we got, and that's a story set in a Latin neighborhood in California.  The switch in locales actually was a very fresh idea that gave the story all kinds of new possibilities.  Maybe.  But the characters that inhabit this story...oh man.  Broken record, I know.

The main duo consists of Jesse (Andrew Jacobs) and his best friend Hector (Jorge Diaz).  The former is a good student/good brother/good son/all-around good guy.  Hector is just kind of...there.  I don't know.  He's there to be Jesse's slightly more irresponsible best friend, and if you put a propeller on this guy's cap I wouldn't bat an eye.  These two are just criminally uninteresting, and since the main crux of what is to come places one of them under consistent eternal damnation, that's a problem.  We DO get the character of Marisol (Gabrielle Walsh), the two guys' female friend who actually does command the screen with something other than apathy.  She's also pretty hot.  The three have just graduated high school and are ready to have fun throughout the summer until the ghost dimension comes a-calling.  There's also a few side characters like Jesse's dad and grandmother, but they're not important.  And there is your Paranormal Activity character wrap-up.

If you've been reading these reviews, you know what comes next:  The Set Up, and this time around it's actually pretty nifty.  Hector has a new camera and carries it around everywhere, providing all of the convenient first-person perspective that by this point I had just accepted.  One night at Jesse's apartment they hear strange chanting coming from the apartment below them.  They use some MacGyver-esque cunning to look at what's going on, catching a naked woman standing utterly still while the crazy neighbor lady draws a symbol on her stomach.  Not soon after, crazy neighbor lady is found murdered by one of their classmates.  And not soon after that, the three best friends (Jesse, Hector and Marisol) invade murdered crazy lady's apartment and find a demon book, quickly perform one of the rituals inside, and then funny stuff starts to happen.

In many ways, this flick kind of reminds me of your typical Twilight Zone episode.  Regular Guy gets Amazing Power.  Regular Guy reacts to getting Amazing Power, usually in very irresponsible and greedy ways.  Regular Guy then gets comeuppance in the end for his arrogance in the face of using Amazing Power for evil.  That's what we get here, as the ritual seems to result in Jesse being impervious to being hurt.  It first manifests itself at a pickup basketball game where the local hoods intervene and start to shove Jesse around, only to be shoved something like 357 feet away by an unseen force.  It seems that whatever Jesse does, there is some invisible force protecting him.  But since this is a scary movie, it also starts to control him and make him do bad, bad things.  Slowly, I assure you.

This is one slow movie.  Sometimes, that can be good, as there's nothing quite as satisfying as a good scary slow burn.  By this point, though, the whole concept of these movies had worn thin on me and I was just waiting for the whole thing to be over.  Having said that, there is one NIGHTMARISH sequence that actually did frighten me as it happened, with Jesse waking up in the middle of the night, heading down to the cursed apartment, finding the trap door in said cursed apartment (in a sequence involving a hot girl that Jesse almost hooked up with earlier in the movie, no less)...and, yeah.  Watch for yourself.  To me, there are few things scarier than being trapped in a confined space, trying to escape, and then watching in terror as you're locked inside.  So A+++ to the movie for this sequence.  And...it has a final scene that actually works despite its clunkiness.  If you just watched all of these movies back-to-back like I did, I suspect that it probably was a little more effective than if you'd seen them all in theaters months and years apart.

Out of all five films thus far, this is easily the most cringey when it comes to the subject of realism.  We're asked to believe quite a bit when it comes to Hector's camera that everyone always seems to have at all of the best moments, but you're probably sick of me beating that dead horse.  But some of the things that camera CAPTURES...like Jesse going full rampage mode in the middle of a convenience store.  Or that bit right before the finale with the two gangsters arriving at this movie's Cult Compound (Trademark Sign) and blowing a couple murderous cultists away with shotguns...yeah, it was comedic gold, but not in the way the movie would have liked.

Oh, and there's a recurring bit involving an old Simon game that serves a a stand-in for a Ouija board.  Yeah.  It happens.

The biggest strike against this movie is that the story itself just is not very interesting.  Jesse gets a demon friend.  Bad things happen to people.  A mystery is unraveled about a worldwide cult using firstborn sons as some sort of possessed killer army.  It's actually an interesting idea that could be FANTASTIC if this movie weren't a found footage film, but the way it's portrayed here on such a small scale is terminally boring.  And the characters that we take the ride along with don't make the ride any smoother, believe me.  Well, except for Marisol.  She's captivating for any reason that you want to interpret.

* 1/2 out of ****.  I didn't think it was any worse than the last installment, but boy is this series starting to show its age.  Again, however, this movie grossed $90 million dollars.  We horror fans...we're a loyal bunch.

Paranormal Activity 4 (2012)

2012
Directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman
Starring Kathryn Newton, Matt Shiveley, Aiden Lovekamp, Brady Allen and Katie Featherston

Folks...just because it's there doesn't mean you have to watch it.  I posted an entire rant on this very subject several months back, and it's required reading for everyone in the entire world.  For everyone who missed it, the gist of it is this: I continue to be amazed (literally, it boggles my brain) how many people continue to force themselves to watch every movie franchise or TV series that they no longer enjoy with the rationale being "well, I've watched everything up until this point, so I guess I have to watch the rest."  Um...no, you don't.  Unless there is some law on the books that says that once you see the first film or episode of something that a man hides out in your closet with a gun trained at your head unless you follow said thing to completion, you're perfectly free to, you know, skip out once it starts to suck.  The Law of Diminshing Returns tends to hit like a motherfucker, and I present Paranormal Activity 4 as the proof.

Oh boy, this film.  'Memba how I said that I gave up on this series in theaters after the second one because it wasn't as good as the first?  Well, the twenty bucks I spent on this box set is going to have to motivate me to keep going forward, because this one just wasn't good.  The first, again, was a legitimately scary flick.  The second had its fair share of shocks, and the third at least had that great sequence with the sheet and the rotating fan cam.  In this one, there's a whole lot of nothing.  It does have a few redeeming factors that I'll get to a few paragraphs from here, but overall it's just a very tepid and borderline BORING time.  The market seemed to agree; while this movie still made a massive profit off of its $5 million budget, the gross was significantly lower than the first three films.  There really is only so much you can do with this formula, but let's see how much more I can pull out of my ass in explaining it.  THE MOVIE!

For those keeping score, Paranormal Activity 3 was a prequel film that gives us the back story and motivation behind everything that has happened so far.  I threw a little spoiler alert in the last review before I mentioned exactly what it was, but hell, these movies are already old by this point, so what does it matter?  Think lots of witches' covens, first-born son sacrifices and other assorted demonic debauchery.  That one handled the back story, and this one is actually a sequel to the second movie, which ended with cursed Katie from the original film killing her sister and taking her infant son away.  Five years later, and here we are.

The setup:  This time around, your main character is a teenage girl.  Named Alex, she's played by Kathryn Newton, and the character is unfortunate.  See, this isn't just a teenage girl; it's a 2010s teenage girl brought to life on the screen, which means Converse sneakers, skinny jeans and constant phone browsing every time there is a dull moment.  I don't know if a single paragraph has ever made me feel older typing it, but here we are.  Can't close that Pandora's Box.  She has a boyfriend named Ben (Matt Shiveley), and during the course of their Titanic-esque courtship Ben records their Skype sessions and begins seeing weird stuff happening in the house.  There's your recording motif, as computers are what captures everything this time.

The meat:  The rest of the family consists of a pretty nondescript mother and father, along with Alex's little brother Wyatt.  The ghostly visitations come once a weird neighbor kid named Robbie starts hanging around the house, with the movie springing its first effective jump scare on us as Alex and Ben go up to the tree house in the middle of the night only to find Robbie there staring into a corner.  Fairly normal behavior, if you ask me.  Robbie just moved into the neighborhood, and his mother is soon revealed to be in the hospital for some unknown reason.  I'll give you one guess as to who said mother figure is.  At any rate, Robbie is now staying with the family for a few days, which means that the plot can jump start.

There are two long-running motifs in this series.  I've brought one of them up, which is that every movie seems to have a "signature" camera shot.  This time around, it's the family living room with the lights off, dots of light illuminating the surroundings.  It's creepy and leads to a few good ghost reveals, but it's nowhere near as effective as that "oscillating fan camera" from the last one, or even the overhead kitchen shot from the second.  The other motif is that whenever the movie wants to spring a surprise on us, we have this guttural, bass-filled "rumble" that fills the soundtrack.  I remember sitting in the dark theater when I saw the first film and thinking that it really added to the atmosphere.  By this point, the shine was off and I just found it annoying.  Yet more A+ film criticism from this reporter.

What more is there to expound upon?  Well, Katie eventually reappears from the "hospital," and I have to admit that it was good to see her in a fairly regular role again.  Featherston is actually a pretty good actress, and I would certainly have liked to see her in more horror films because she has a very good, relatable quality when she's not possessed by demons.  Spoiler alert.  All throughout the film, the entity appears to have been targeting Wyatt, and I will also give it to the movie in this regard as it sprung a surprise on me when it comes to this kid that I genuinely did not see coming.  But it's kind of a sprinkle in the shit sandwich.

The reason?  This movie just isn't scary.  At all.  Maybe I'm just jaded, but I was able to call every jump, every time that a door would slowly creak open, every time a shadow would run past the camera, etc.  I'd seen this three times before.  The thrill was gone.  Without spoiling everything that happens, I'll also say that I felt extremely let down by the ending.  These days, it almost takes incredible balls for a horror movie to NOT have an open-ended final sequence, and given that this flick had the tagline "All the Activity Has Led to This," this would have been a good opportunity for the good guys to actually pull one out for a change.  Nope.  But...that probably would have led to no additional sequels, so we can't have nice things.

That's what we get with Paranormal Activity 4.  It's competent and well-produced, but with pretty much every specific it just feels there.  The acting is by and large bad, with the exception of Featherston in her brief scenes.  The kid who plays Wyatt in particular is grating to the core.  The camera gimmick feels even less believable in this one than it does in previous installments, especially in the finale.  And the plot springs that one good surprise on us, but even that isn't enough to barely lull us out of submission.  Suffice to say, I can't recommend this one.

* 1/2 out of ****.  And I realize that there are two more of these things to cover before I'm done.  But if anyone wants to call me a hypocrite for breaking my own Golden Rule of Entertainment, I say...screw it.  I spent $20 on six movies and that's a pretty damn good ratio in my book.