Carnography

Army of the Dead (2021)

"You all keep talking about the city like it's their prison. It's not. It's their kingdom."

I feel I need to give a small caveat at the start of this review: I am not a particularly big fan of Zach Snyder as a director. Now don't get me wrong - I'll give him plenty of praise/credit for his skills as a cinematographer and editor, but when it actually comes to his directorial skills... well, the best thing I can say is that his films feel like they're all style and no substance. Very pretty on the surface, but very little underneath that.

I'm saying all of this upfront because it turned out I really quite enjoyed Army of the Dead, despite any misgivings or suspicions I might have had from him being the director.

Six years after zombies overrun Las Vegas and the city is left to rot alongside the undead, casino owner Bly Tanaka approaches Scott Ward, a survivor of what might as well be called "The Battle of Las Vegas". The US government is about to nuke Las Vegas in order to deal with the zombies once and for all, but Tanaka wants to get $200 million from his casino vault before it all starts glowing in the dark. Ward agrees and puts a team together that consists of a couple of fellow Las Vegas survivors, a YouTube zombie killer, a German safecracker, a people smuggler, Tanaka's employee Martin, and Ward's daughter Kate, who tags along in order to rescue a woman she knows from the refugee camp she works at who has gone into the city to try to get some cash to relocate. Once they get into the zombie-infested city, however, however, they discover that there's more to the plan - and to the zombies - than they realised.

Despite what the title might make you think, Army of the Dead is not a sequel to Snyder's 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead - although Snyder did get the idea for this movie while working on that one. There's a blink-and-you'll-miss-it reference to the 2004 film in the form of a newspaper headline one character is seen reading, but other than that Army of the Dead is a standalone movie.

That's not to say that Army of the Dead is a 100% original story (Do Not Steal). When you look at it even a little bit closely, it's basically about a survivor/survivors of an event where unstoppable predators have slaughtered a whole heap of people and the survivor(s) barely escaped from, who are then asked to return to that place by a big corporation, accompanied by a corporate executive who assures them everything is on the up and up, only to discover that there's more going on than they realised and the corporation might have lied about their motives... There's even a bit where they have to rescue someone from being turned into an alien incubator a zombie, and a bit where our heavily-armed and badass surviving protagonists arrive on a rooftop to escape, with the head zombie in hot pursuit, only to discover that the helicopter has already left... or has it? Yes, there's more than a whiff of Aliens in this plot.

There's also the problem of there being several plot points crammed into the film, sans context, that are never expanded on or explained by the end of the film. The UFO sighting and Area 51 reference at the start of the film are fine because they at least are a suggestion of what has caused the Alpha Zombie who starts all of this off, and that's not a bad thing, if not always 100% necessary. But then the film starts dropping hints that the characters are in a time loop somehow? And then there are robot zombies randomly mixed in among the "real" (ie. flesh and blood) zombies, and no-one comments on any of this or thinks it's in any way odd. I dread to suggest it, but perhaps there's a 4-hour cut of this movie where all that is explained, but I (probably) wouldn't watch it. There's also the issue that the majority of the female characters are treated as little more than props or character moments for the male characters. Of particular note is one female refugee from the camp who sneaks into the city to try to get cash, and finding and rescuing her is pretty much the major subplot of the movie. Once they find her, though, she's relegated to human baggage and even gets killed unceremoniously at the very end, like Snyder decided to take on the start of Alien 3 to this for good measure.

But at least this is better than the original script from 2007. "The team quickly finds out that all the zombies are males, and that some kind of alpha zombie monsters who started the outbreak were raping all the human women who were left in the city and using them as breeders, which created hybrids of zombies and humans who are even more dangerous than normal and alpha zombies. After their escape route out of the city is destroyed, mercenaries get trapped inside one of the casinos and have to find another way to escape before [the] city gets wiped out from the face of the Earth by [the] army who want to cover up their involvement, and [the] team also has to save their female members who get captured by zombies and taken away into alpha zombies hive, which is the biggest casino in the city where they are impregnating the women they captured." Which... Sweet merciful Eris, who thought that could ever be a good idea?

Like I said though, I actually enjoyed Army of the Dead. The opening credits are fantastic, with them basically being a slo-mo telling of the original Las Vegas outbreak, set to Richard Cheese singing Viva Las Vegas, and it showcases two of the things Zach Snyder is very good at - namely slo-mo and soundtrack choices (the exception in this film being using The Cranberries' Zombie, because it's actually about an IRA bombing attack in 1993, and not actually about zombies, which makes it a little awkward to use here). The cast is all very good, especially Dave Bautista, who continues to prove he's more than just a comedy muscle pro-wrestler. And it is a lot of fun - enough so that you're more than willing to overlook how much of its homework it copied from Aliens. It doesn't overly complicate things, and it delivers what the title promises - an army of zombies. And a zombie tiger and a zombie horse, for bonus points.

3.5 out of 5.

 

A Quiet Place Part II (2020)

As of today, I've temporarily exhausted all the films I'm willing to see at the cinema for the time being (unless I get a case of cabin fever and decide to see Cruella, aka The Devil Wore Dalmatian). And today's film, A Quiet Place Part II, has certainly been anticipated for a while now, having been originally slated for release just before covid-19 took over the world, everything shut down for a year and I personally got a new appreciation for the self-confidence one can get by wearing a face mask everywhere. The question is, was it worth the wait?

We open with a brief flashback to the day the aliens that are 66% ear canal and 33% teeth arrive on Earth, showing how quickly they turn up out of practically nowhere and just start ripping apart our protagonists' home town. After that, we skip forward to right after the events of the first film, as the surviving Abbotts (mother Evelyn, son Marcus, daughter Regan and newborn baby who we shall call Millstone) have to leave their now-destroyed home and find a new shelter. Armed only with a shotgun and a hearing aid attached to a guitar amplifier to create the feedback that hurts the alien monsters, they head out towards a distant fire in the hopes of finding other people. They end up finding Emmett, a former friend of the family, hiding in an abandoned steel factory after the deaths of his own family and who has mostly given up hope. When Regan sets out to find the location of a mysterious radio broadcast in the hopes of using her hearing aid to broadcast the feedback on a larger scale, Emmett goes after her and together they face not only the aliens but also that other traditional post-apocalyptic enemy - other humans. At the same time, Evelyn and Marcus have to survive when another of the aliens makes its way into the factory they're sheltering in...

So, if you remember my review of the first A Quiet Place (and if you don't, don't worry - I had to look it up too), you'll remember that one of my biggest issues with the film was that it had non-diegetic music in places, which I felt was somewhat wasting the opportunity of having a film where all the sound is entirely in-universe. Well, sadly the filmmakers aren't reading this blog, because the mood music is still in this movie - in fact, I think it's even more prominent in the sequel, with grand orchestral swells at key points during the film. I mean, it's not bad music per say, and still nowhere near the levels of orchestra abuse that other films stoop to, but... It's just a disappointment, really.

As for the aliens... they're still used pretty effectively throughout the film. Their ability to just dive into frame and onto a hapless victim out of nowhere is still an effective natural jump scare - particularly in one scene where one just comes through a hidden door like the Kool-Aid Man as imagined by HP Lovecraft. There's also not a veritable swarm of them - I think the most we see in one place is maybe three or four in the flashback at the start of the film - which really does emphasise how effective they are at hunting and killing since they've whittled down the human race so much. Of course, that does also beg the question as to how they've apparently had no resistance until now - it's the same problem as I pointed out in the first film; I cannot believe that no-one in the world's military or scientific community discovered that the aliens that are mostly ear canal are hurt by certain sounds until One Suburban Dad With One Weird Trick came along.

Oh, and it turns out that the aliens have another weakness as well: [SPOILER] they can't swim (insert Swimmer's Ear joke here). So we get a nice little isolated island community having BBQs and letting children play outside for a bit, until one of the aliens inevitably gets there and goes on a rampage and taking Djimon Honsou out of the film before he's even given the dignity of a name (also, about that... there's two scenes in this film where a black nameless character sacrifices himself for our white protagonists to survive. I'm not saying the film is being deliberately racist or anything, but... little bit awkward when you realise it). For non-alien threats, we also have a brief encounter with some leperous-looking fishbillies who have a distinct rape-y air about them, and the ever-present threat of everyone dying of tetanus before they get to broadcast the alien-killing feedback on the radio (seriously, why is no-one wearing shoes?)

Cast-wise, everyone's still pretty good, in particular Millicent Simmonds playing Regan, and Cillian Murphy as our new bearded dad-substitute. I did feel a little sorry for the actor playing Marcus, mainly because until the very end of the film he might as well have been named Useless, as he functions mainly as a prop to cause further problems for the other characters without getting to do much himself for about 90 minutes of the film's 100-minute runtime. In the end though, I have to say that A Quiet Place Part II isn't quite as good as its predecessor - it's still got the same plot holes as before, and adds in a couple more for good measure. And the mood music... sigh.

3.5 out of 5.

 

Bad Taste (1987)

Everyone knows who Peter Jackson is - he's the guy who directed the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and The Hobbit trilogy, not to mention the 2005 King Kong remake. He's one of the biggest and most successful directors in Hollywood today. But of course he didn't come from nowhere, and so today I'm taking a look at his very first feature film (which I first saw when I was around 12 and was one of the films that really sparked my interest in film and in horror specifically), Bad Taste.

A panicked call comes in from the small town of Kaihoro that all the residents of the town have disappeared and strange attackers are roaming the streets. The New Zealand government sends in the Astro Invasion and Defence Service to investigate, and Barry, Derek, Frank and Ozzy soon arrive on the scene. They find the town deserted aside from several strange men in jeans and blue shirts roaming seemingly aimlessly throughout the town, but these men are actually space aliens in disguise and they attack the team. At the same time Giles, a charity collector, arrives in the town and ends up captured by the aliens, who reveal they have come to Earth because humans are the new fast food taste sensation and they needed samples to take back before starting a wholesale operation to slaughter the entire planet. Before they leave, they also plan to treat themselves to a meal of Giles. It's up to the boys of A.I.D.S. to rescue Giles and stop the aliens from turning Earth into a giant fast food outlet...

As I said, Bad Taste was Peter Jackson's first feature-length film, made on a shoestring budget of about NZ$25,000 over the course of four years (they were only able to film on weekends for the most part, which lead to problems such as one member of the cast only being allowed to shave once a week and another one being temporarily written out of the film when he got married and couldn't work on Sundays). Towards the end of filming Jackson received an additional NZ$235,000 from the New Zealand Film Commission to finish the film, but for most of the film, it was just Jackson, his friends and his parents doing all the work. As well as directing, Jackson also produced, wrote the script (he would write the scenes weekly), did the cinematography (he built his own $15 steadycam), edited, did a lot of the special makeup effects and played three separate roles in the film. There's no denying that Bad Taste is a low-budget film because it shows in the final product, but what also shines through is the sheer amount of work and love for filmmaking that was put into the film, and that alone elevates it into the hallowed halls of "cult classic".

It's also bloody funny.

There's a clear influence from Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead in Bad Taste, with its steadycam antics, excessive gore and splatter (we'll get to that shortly) and a lot of Three Stooges-esque slapstick, to the point where I wouldn't have been surprised to have seen a "Fake Shemp" or two listed in the credits. But it's also lighter in tone than Raimi's first film (perhaps on a par with Evil Dead 2, though...) - no-one gets sexually assaulted by a tree, for example. It's definitely a horror-comedy with extra grossness.

Ah, the grossness. Bad Taste is juvenile as hell, and it gleefully revels in that fact. Some of the more stand-out moments of the film include: brains oozing and falling out of a character's head repeatedly; extreme chainsaw rebirthing; foot torture with a bayonet; someone eating brains out of the blown-apart head of another, and a scene involving vomit that is almost guaranteed to put most people off their food. Really, if you've got emetophobia or any issues with vomit, you're best skipping this film, or at least that one scene (stop watching when they bring the large glass bowl out, that's all I'm saying). The title clearly has a double meaning to it. It's aiming to gross out its audience, but also to make them laugh at the same time.

The acting is admittedly rather dodgy in places, but it's not offensively or egregiously so; it's more of a charming amateurishness than anything else. Most of the cast weren't professional actors but Peter Jackson's mates, and most of them haven't been in anything else so they can be forgiven for their slightly stilted delivery at times. It also didn't help that all the film's dialogue had to be dubbed in post-production because a lot of the film was shot on Jackson's own 16mm camera, which didn't record sound.

As I mentioned above, Jackson played two roles himself (technically three, but the third was just a voice on a telephone) - Derek and one of the alien workers, Robert. Some very clever camera work with shots filmed months apart meant that Jackson was able to film a scene where Derek tortures Robert, and while, yes, the cuts make it obvious, just the scope and determination to do that is impressive. Derek is also pretty much the chief pratfaller in Bad Taste - a bespectacled, Harry Potter (or Doctor Who) scarf-wearing, anorak-wearing character who ends up looking like Rambo if he was a birdwatcher with a traumatic brain injury by the end of the film. And it's absurdly funny, even amidst all the brains and blood and guts that fly across the screen at every opportunity.

Bad Taste managed to get itself banned in Queensland, Australia after the Queensland Film Board of Review took a dislike to a version already cut by the Australian Classification Board. This action led to the Queensland Film Board of Review being dissolved, and when the film was released on video in Australia they advertised it as being "BANNED IN QUEENSLAND". But as an example of low-budget filmmaking and of Peter Jackson's talent long before he hit the big time, it needs to be seen to be appreciated (and believed).

Finally, a quick shout-out to all my City of Heroes homies: don't the aliens in this film remind you of something?

 

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The Predator (2018)

If you followed my reviews of the previous Predator movies over the summer, you might have noticed that I'm a bit of a geek when it comes to this franchise. I mean, I even had some of the Dark Horse novels when I was younger. So this latest addition to the series, slightly confusingly called The Predator, not only has to pass the test of being a good movie here but also has to prove whether or not it's a worthy entry to the franchise.

Sniper Quinn McKenna is in Mexico with his team tracking a group of drug dealers when their operation is interrupted by a crashing alien escape pod and its pilot, a (Yautja) Predator. Quinn manages to survive this encounter and escapes with some of the alien's tech, mailing it back to the US before being apprehended by the government group who have been tracking the Predators for over 20 years. In an attempt to silence or discredit him, they plan to claim Quinn is mentally ill and killed his own team, putting him in a group of veterans all suffering some form of mental illness or PTSD - but Quinn and his new friends find themselves in the middle of everything regardless when first the captured Predator escapes the facility it was being held at and attempts to recover his missing weapons and armour... and again when a second larger, angrier (Hish-qu-Ten) Predator arrives with his own agenda...

Director Shane Black is probably best-known for playing Hawkins in the first Predator movie, but he's had quite the career in Hollywood as a writer and director as well - his screenplays include Lethal Weapon, The Last Boy Scout, The Last Action Hero and Iron Man 3, the latter of which he also directed. Along with his friend and co-writer on The Predator Fred Dekker (and yes, everyone in Britain has made the requisite "Black and Dekker" joke by now) he also wrote the 80s cult classic The Monster Squad. And I have to say, the dialogue alone in The Predator is some of the best I've heard in a long while. It feels natural, real, and it flows incredibly well. Quinn and his rag-tag group of mentally unstable veterans (a lot like The Dream Team but heavily armed) feel believable for both those groups - not to mention sympathetic as well. The Predator also manages to have some of the best depictions of PTSD, neurodiversity and mental illness that I've seen in film in a while, and that's not praise I give lightly. Oh, it has a couple of slip-ups - a moment where something the Tourette's sufferer says is denied and explained away for laughs rather than just explaining his condition is one - but nothing so jarring that it can't be accepted and moved past.

Normally, when I start off praising a movie like this, it usually means I'm preparing to drop some particularly negative criticism straight afterwards. For once, that's not happening here. The Predator is a very good, lots of fun film.

Continuity-wise, The Predator follows on from Predator, Predator 2, the two AvP films (Alexa's Xenomorph tail spear is seen briefly) and Predators - the Yautja Predator here is the same one from that film that the three Hish-qu-Ten were using as a punching bag at their camp. The attention to detail and continuity is something I can really appreciate (obviously) and while I felt that more could have been done in a couple of places, like giving Jake Busey some more screen time (and is it just me, or has Gary Busey not had a child so much as just reproduced via parthenogenesis?) or having one of the protagonists from the previous films appear at the end, again, nothing is a dealbreaker here.

One thing I did have a problem with was a plot hole with regards to the Yautja Predator's actions. We discover during the course of the film that he has come to Earth to help humanity for [spoiler reasons], and while I get that he was probably understandably grumpy after being captured by the government and prodded around a bit, his first actions upon meeting any humans are not, "Take me to your leader, I have important information to share," but to start killing and stringing them up. Old habits die really hard, I guess.

The Predator is also a very wet, splattery film, with Shane Black going on record as saying, "I made a condition of my participation with Predator, that it be the same rating as the first movie, and the first movie was rated R. In other words, I don't want to cut away every time the Predator does something violent." And thank Eris for that, because I think we've all gotten frustrated with all these anaemic PG-13 horror films that don't show anything. People get holes blown in them, get limbs sliced off, get impaled on trees, disembowelled, have their heads explode... It's also best not to get too attached to a lot of the cast as well, although most of them survived far longer than I had predicted they would, and most of them get the deaths they deserve (for both protagonists and antagonist characters). Perhaps even better, the Hish-qu-Ten Predator has clearly been hitting the creatine hard and spends some of the film just ripping people apart with his bare hands, like a reptilian Brock Lesner having a really bad day. the film doesn't shy away from showing us the violence, which is exactly what an action-sci-fi-horror movie should do (with one exception which again shows that Black knows the formula for a successful film - he doesn't kill any animals. Well, one Predator dog, but it was trying to eat the humans at the time so it doesn't count under the rule of Unnecessary Animal Deaths).

I can therefore happily recommend The Predator for being not only a worthy entry in the franchise but also as a damn good movie in its own right. A sequel has clearly been set up in the film's final scene, so we shall have to wait and see if this success continues, but I think we can be optimistic...

 

 

Maximum Overdrive (1986)

It's time for another one of my guilty pleasure movies. I know full well that, objectively, Maximum Overdrive is a terrible movie... but somehow I keep on enjoying it whenever I watch it. I think it's one of those movies that's developed a cult following by virtue of being so bad it circles around and comes back to being good, albeit from the wrong direction. Hell, even it's director Stephen King calls it a "moron movie" and admits that it's terrible, mainly because he was high on cocaine for the duration of the shoot. Drugs, people. Not even once.

A "rogue" comet passes close to Earth and our planet ends up passing through its tail for several days. On the morning that the Earth enters the tail, machines and electronics across the globe become sentient - or at least sapient - and immediately start acting against humans with murderous intent. At a truck stop in North Carolina called the Dixie Boy, ex-con Bill Robinson and several other staff and patrons - including the Dixie Boy's owner Bubba Hendershot - find themselves trapped and under siege by a convoy of trucks who surround the diner, led by a truck with the face of the Green Goblin on its front grille. The machines manage to convey, via Morse code, that the humans will work for them, filling up the trucks' gas tanks or they will all be killed. But what has caused the machines to become self-aware and turn on their creators like this? And will Bill and the other people in the Dixie Boy manage to survive a world of homicidal machines all looking to kill them?

Maximum Overdrive is based on the short story Trucks by Stephen King, which was originally published in a magazine in 1973, and then in 1978 in the anthology Night Shift. While the short story differs from the film version in several ways, it's still undeniably a Stephen King story, even without his attempt at directing. It has the usual King tropes of some everyday items or things becoming suddenly and unexplainably hostile, the sudden world-changing events, and the full range of King characters, including a hypocritical Bible salesman and a 12-year-old boy who turns out to be at least equal in competence to the adult characters. King said that he had wanted to direct because "If you want it done right, you have to do it yourself." This on its own should probably have been a sign that King was coked out of his mind at the time, but even so, directing a film is very different from writing a film, even if you're stone-cold sober.

One of the bigger problems with Maximum Overdrive is its inconsistent tone. There's nothing wrong with a horror-comedy or a straight horror, but starting off a movie as a horror-comedy and then trying to abruptly play it straight leaves the audience with mood whiplash and makes the film in general feel terribly awkward. Opening with digital signs and ATMs insulting people is all well and good, but then the bridge incident is also played for laughs and it starts to feel off. So when we get to steamrollers and lawnmowers running people down and we get the feeling that we're not supposed to be still laughing, it starts to get weird (and it doesn't help that the steamroller scene is unintentionally hilarious). There's also the problem that some of these machines don't really seem that deadly. How exactly does a hairdryer plugged into a wall kill someone (apparently via strangulation as well)? Or a Walkman (okay, the Tommyknockers gave us an idea the following year)?

As well as the inconsistent tone, Maximum Overdrive also suffers from some excessively annoying characters. Dixie Boy owner Bubba Hendershot (played by 80s Commissioner Gordon Pat Hingle) is one example; he's so cartoonishly unpleasant despite everything that happens around him that he rolls around into comically evil instead. The travelling Bible salesman and the hysterical waitress who falls very quickly into drinking and screaming are another two examples. And then there's the newlywed couple of Curt and Connie - or more specifically Connie, who is played by Yeardley Smith, better known as the voice of Lisa Simpson. The movie is clearly trying to make the most use out of her very distinctive voice and it succeeds... as long as the end result was for us to wish an unfair amount of harm upon poor Connie by the end of the film. Again, her character would have fitted better in a "full" horror-comedy" rather than the indecisive mess this turned out to be.

But despite, or in spite of, all this, Maximum Overdrive is still fun. It's top-quality mature 80s cheddar, sure... but there's something about the idea of a soda machine launching cans out at people at terminal velocity, or an ice cream truck driving around at ice cream truck speeds looking for victims while playing King of the Road, or the closest thing the movie has to an anthropomorphised antagonist in the Green Goblin truck with the glowing red eyes, that just captures the attention and imagination and manages to hold it despite everything bad about the movie. It's also got a kick-ass soundtrack from AC/DC too, which certainly helps. Many sins can be at least excused if you've got Hell's Bells and You Shook Me All Night Long to rock out to.

And I personally love the end explanation with the Soviet "weather satellite".

(Stephen King has never directed again, by the way.)

 

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Alien: Covenant (2017)

We have finally reached the final film of this journey through the Alien and Predator franchises, and what a tangled and convoluted journey it has been. But here we are with Alien: Covenant, the latest film from Ridley Scott in the Alien franchise and the second film in a new prequel trilogy (or it might become another quadrilogy) happening before the original 1979 Alien.

It's 2104, eleven years after the events of Prometheus and the spaceship Covenant is heading for the planet of Origae-6 for colonization. A solar flare hits the ship and damages it, causing the deaths of 47 of the colonists in hypersleep as well as the ship's captain, who is burned alive inside his stasis pod. While repairing the ship, the remaining crew pick up a human radio transmission from a nearby planet that is meant to be uninhabited and seems to be far more suitable for colonization than Origae-6, which is still seven years away. They land on the planet to investigate and discover not only abundant plant life but also a crashed alien spacecraft. Two of the crew become infected with spores from some of the alien plant life on the surface and "give birth" to creatures similar to Xenomorphs but still noticeably different (neomorphs); the surviving crew meet David, the synthetic from the Prometheus who leads them to safety. David has been living on the planet for several years, he tells them, (after he and Elizabeth Shaw flew there after the end of the previous film) but he says that Shaw died when they crashed on the planet and that the planet's inhabitants - the Engineer race - were all killed when the ship released its bio-weapon payload on them. David has also been busy in the years since then, as he's been working to create a new species - the Xenomorphs. It falls to the few remaining crew members, including the captain's widow Daniels and Walter, the ship's synthetic who is a more advanced model than David but still looks like him - to defeat the new Xenomorphs and stop David from using them all in his science experiments...

Before we go any further, I need to get something off my chest. Alien had Ash. Aliens and Alien³ had Bishop. Alien: Resurrection had Call. Prometheus had David. And now Alien: Covenant has... Walter. What the hell happened to the naming convention? I don't get it and I don't like it, although I'm at least professional enough not to mark the film down too much for it.

The prevailing theme of Alien: Covenant, and indeed many of the Alien films, should really be that First Contact protocols are there for a reason. It wasn't too bad in Alien, as most people would be torn between doing what is right and following the rules as Ripley was (and of course Ash had ulterior motives in letting Kane back in), but several of the deaths in Alien: Covenant are because of people being stupid on an unexplored planet and sticking their noses right into alien plants and taking a great big sniff without any protective gear whatsoever. Weyland-Yutani really needs to make a safety video explaining this stuff because it would save them an awful lot of money in lost spacecraft and employees.

The return of Michael Fassbender as David (and Walter) is both a blessing and a curse for the film. On the one hand, Michael Fassbender is brilliant in his role as always and is far and away the best thing about the film. On the other hand, we know from Prometheus that David is an antagonist, and while that dramatic irony works well in Covenant when the crew first meets him, it also makes certain climactic scenes very easy to predict. After all, why have a second synthetic who looks just like David if you're not planning on having some sort of "which one is which?" twist somewhere in the film's climax (and the film really draws that one out, long after the audience will have figured everything out and gotten bored waiting for the film to catch up with them).

There are a lot of callbacks to Alien (and a couple to Aliens) in Alien: Covenant, most notably the character of Daniels, who is both our protagonist and a clear Ripley-substitute, right down to a similar hairstyle. Her inevitable climactic battle with the Xenomorph has elements from both Alien and Aliens, but unlike some of the other callbacks we've seen in previous films, this at least has enough of its own identity to not feel like pandering to the audience.

And on the subject of pandering... One complaint that people had about Prometheus is that it didn't really feel like a film in the Alien canon. Originally, Ridley Scott had wanted to explore the origins of the Engineer and of humanity much more than the Xenomorphs, because he felt that the Alien films were "overdone and overexposed". But after Prometheus's divided fan reaction he changed tack and brought the story back to the Xenomorphs more. Alien: Covenant does take a step back from the story of David the megalomaniac stalker synthetic (although he still has a key role to play) and so for the die-hard fans this should please them. Even then though, Scott said that he wants to focus more on David and other AIs for Alien: Covenant 2, which suggests to me that he really does not want to keep making films in the Alien franchise because that sounds a lot more like a Blade Runner universe (which I wouldn't be opposed to, but let's not get the two franchises blended together until they're indistinguishable).

So, that's all the Alien and Predator films up to this point (August 2018). It will remain to be seen if the Alien franchise can regain its impact with any future films, as plans are apparently on hold indefinitely after the divided fan reaction to the most recent two films. As for the Predator franchise, we only have to wait another month or so to see if The Predator will be a return to form, although the team of (Shane) Black and (Fred) Dekker as writers and director shows promise.

 

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Prometheus (2012)

And so, we return to exclusively Alien part of this series with Prometheus, which also returned Ridley Scott to the franchise as well. And if you're trying to follow continuity here's where it gets really complicated: Prometheus is a prequel to the four standalone Alien movies, but has no connection to the AVP movies. Meanwhile, the AVP movies are at least acknowledged in Predators but are said to not be connected to the upcoming The Predator movie, which leaves us with at least three divergent timelines. Ugh. This is enough to make even me want to give up trying to track everything.

An archaeological team discover a 35,000-year-old cave painting that not only implies an Ancient Astronauts theory for early human civilisation but also provides a star map to a moon where the originators of human life might have come from. Four years later, in 2093, the spaceship Prometheus arrives at LV-223 to investigate and try to find any trace of the creatures that have been dubbed "Engineers". Among the crew are Elizabeth Shaw and Charlie Holloway, who discovered the cave painting and "star map", and David, a synthetic who has been monitoring the crew while they were all in hypersleep for the journey. The expedition has been funded by the Weyland Corporation, whose CEO Peter Weyland recorded a message for the crew before he died, hoping they would find proof of humanity's origins. Exploring the planet, they find a pyramid-like structure that contains, among other things, the mummified and decapitated body of an Engineer and rooms full of mysterious stone cylinders. While Shaw and the others test the Engineer's remains and find that his DNA matches human DNA, David secretly brings one of the cylinders back to the ship as well and discovers that it contains a strange black liquid. But not everything is dead on this moon, and hidden dangers and agendas start to come together, threatening the lives of not only the crew of the Prometheus, but also everyone on Earth as well...

You know that feeling I've mentioned I have about Dario Argento now, as I look at his recent output (*cough*Dracula 3D*cough*) compared to his much earlier work and can't help but feel he's no longer at the top of his game? I'm starting to feel that way about Ridley Scott as well. He's done some absolutely brilliant films - the original Alien, Blade Runner, Gladiator - but lately he seems to have slipped a little. Prometheus was supposed to be a return to form; coming back to what made the first film so legendary and iconic, but instead it feels as though it's abandoned all that in favour of exploring some all-new ideas of a much more metaphysical bent. If not for the almost-token nods to series continuity with the Weyland Corporation, the Engineers/"Space Jockeys" and a scene at the very end of the film, Prometheus could easily have been its own film, completely unconnected to the Alien series altogether. And that's disappointing.

Let's list the things I did enjoy about the film. Michael Fassbender was superb as David, of course, although I'm not sure if they intended to imply he was a slightly deranged and creepy stalker-type person from his very first appearance in the film, or if it just accidentally came out that way. Regardless, the man puts his best performance forward regardless of what film he's in, and Prometheus is no exception. Idris Elba is another standout, although I was slightly distracted for a lot of the film trying to place the accent he was affecting. Charlize Theron, also excellent. As for horror and/or creepy elements, the shot of one of the crew, presumed dead, turning up at the doors of the spaceship with his body folded up so that he looks like a crab was an image I really liked, which was added to when he "unfolded" himself to stand up straight (although if he'd scuttled around menacingly like that I probably wouldn't have complained either).

But these things can't quite make up for the weakness, the wishy-washiness of the rest of the film. Even ignoring the ancient astronauts theory that I hate so much but keeps coming up, the film's underlying themes of religion and children seeking answers from their parents is, to be blunt, prosaic and obvious. Even after two hours we still don't learn anything from the Engineers (who, under their helmets, look like albino versions of Dr. Manhattan wearing nappies); what they were doing on Earth or LV-223. David's role as secondary antagonist goes completely unnoticed by everyone else in the crew, which considering some of his behaviour - particularly towards Elizabeth Shaw, who I'm pretty sure we're supposed to assume he has some sort of android crush on - is just ridiculous. And as I said above, the film barely feels connected to the Alien series at all, which had to disappoint a lot of people who came to the film expecting to learn the origins of the Xenomorphs. I'll even go so far as to say that I think the film might have been better if it had no connection to the Alien franchise at all, and been its own film about people seeking answers as to the origin of their species and why that turned out to be a bad idea.

Oh, and my suspension of disbelief went and threw itself out of the window as I watched Shaw running and throwing herself around the place straight after having abdominal surgery and getting the incision stapled shut.

Perhaps the one theme that runs through both Prometheus and Alien is that first contact protocols should always - ALWAYS - be adhered to. In both films, so much could have been easily avoided if they'd done so. Don't take your helmets off in alien atmospheres; don't poke at the strange new alien species you've found; don't bring containers full of strange alien liquids secretly on board your ship to do experiments with, and if in doubt, get the flamethrower out.

 

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Predators (2010)

After the films of the last few days, Predators has come as quite a welcome relief. Oh, I'm not about to start claiming it's the best film in the series or a triumph of 21st-century filmmaking, because it's not, but for what it is, it's entertaining enough - a clear love letter to the original 1987 Predator movie.

Several people, including an American mercenary called Royce and an IDF sniper called Isabelle, wake up to find themselves in freefall in an unfamiliar place. Their parachutes open at the last minute to ensure they hit the ground safely, and they come together one by one and discover that, with the exception of Edgar who says he is a doctor and death row inmate Stans, they are all members of infamous military groups or criminal gangs - Spetznaz, RUF, Mexican cartels and Yakuza included. Trying to work out where they are and who brought them to this place they try making their way out of the jungle they're in, only to discover that they're actually on an alien planet and being hunted. It turns out that, after years of various success and coming up against more formidable prey than they bargained for, the Predators have started abducting suitable prey from Earth and bringing them to this "game preserve" planet, where the Predators have the home advantage. We also discover that there are actually two species of Predator and that the two groups don't get on, to the point that they have one of the "classic" Yautja tied up in their camp to torture when they're bored. Royce and the others have to work together not only to defeat the "new" Predators hunting them but to also figure out a way off the planet...

First off, just to keep things as uncomplicated as possible and to keep with the naming convention I started in the AVP movies with referring to the Predators there as Yautja, 'm going to be referring to the new "Super Predators" in this movie as Hish-Qu-Ten (and just wait till September when we discover that I'll probably have been using the names the wrong way round or something).

So here's where the continuity gets a little bit complicated. Robert Rodriguez and Nimrod Antal have stated that Predators is a sequel only to the original 1987 film, and so disregards the 1990 sequel and the two AVP movies - which would also disregard the Alien movies from its canon as well. But there are several little nods to the Alien movies in the film, the most notable of which is that one of the Hish-Qu-Ten is wearing the lower jaw of a Xenomorph as part of his mask. Yes, stuff like this bugs me, because my actual OCD means I can't not see these things. However, in the grand scope of things, this is a minor continuity blip, and not one that ruins the film.

Predators is an ensemble movie, or as I like to call them, a spectacle movie. Several big names in the cast that may or may not be utilised to their fullest extent, lots of action scenes and only the barest of plot... and yes, I could be describing either this movie or the 1987 one, couldn't I? I said at the start of the review that Predators is clearly a love letter to that first film, and the level of devotion to the original subject matter shows. Even several of the characters have obvious parallels to the 1987 characters - Nikolai has a minigun just like Blain and Hanzo gets to face off against one of the Hish-Qu-Ten one-on-one in a clear callback to Billy's fate (and incidentally, that whole scene is my favourite of the entire film with its visual style reminding us of Samurai battles in feudal Japan, and I think Hanzo might be my favourite character in the film overall) and there are numerous little Easter Eggs throughout the film to remind us of moments from the original Predator.

On the other hand... The plot is paper-thin (although, again, the 1987 film was no intellectual powerhouse of a film either) and the movie does have to deal with the problem of having to juggle the fact that all of its characters are rather larger-than-life and could easily take over the film if not kept tightly under control - but then they also get very little characterisation. Hell, we only learn the names of four characters  - Royce, Isabelle, Nikolai and Noland (and Stans in a deleted scene)- during the whole film. Everyone else has to wait till the credits to be named, or for people to watch the subtitles. Characters are just that disposable.

There's also the issue that a lot of the characters in the film are... less than pleasant, shall we say. Cuchillo is a Cartel enforcer who puts people in barrels and sets them on fire, Mombasa is a member of a death squad, and Stans was on death row for killing 38 people and probably raping a lot of them as well (again, only in the deleted scenes). And our protagonist Royce, who carries a gun my brother swears looks like a plastic toy but is actually an AA-12 fully automatic twelve-gauge shotgun, is quite psychopathic in his behaviour himself. Of course, all of this is to lend itself to the dual nature of the title - not only are we facing more than one Predator/Yish-Qu-Ten this time around, but each of the humans is a predator is his or her own right. Which also leads to the obvious plot point that is Edwin, the apparently innocent civilian who's somehow found himself on an alien planet surrounded by killers. The film seems to think itself clever in keeping his revelation until the end of the film, but anyone who's even slightly genre-savvy will see what's coming within moments of meeting him.

Predators will never win any awards (aside from two for the stunt work, which it received for the scene when everyone rolls off an 80-foot cliff and freefall into the water below), but it's still basic B-movie, action-sci-fi-horror fun. It's competently made and the characters hold the attention, and it's suitably bombastic and knows its source material. Which is good enough for me.

 

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Aliens Vs Predator: Requiem (2007)

The basic moral of "The Monkey's Paw" is something that I come back to many times when I'm reviewing films, particularly long-awaited ones. "Be careful what you wish for." After the sanitised PG-13 disappointment of the first AVP movie, the people behind the next film decided to make it R-rated, as "it [was] what the fans want[ed] from the series." And so, for our sins, we got Aliens Vs Predator: Requiem.

Starting off at pretty much the same point that the previous film ended, we see the Yautja ship flying off with Scar's body lying in ceremonial repose until his Chestburster emerges and it's got the Yautja facial tusks. It quickly grows to its full size and starts massacring the crew and the ship crashes in the woods outside a small Colorado town called Gunnison. One Yautja manages to send off a distress call before he dies though, and on the Yautja homeworld a sole Yautja "cleaner" receives the call and suits up to head to Earth to deal with things. Meanwhile, a hunter and his son come across the crashed ship, the PredAlien and a pair of Facehuggers that also escaped from the ship. While this is going on, recently released felon Dallas arrives back in town and is met by the town sheriff Eddie Morales. Dallas meets back up with his younger brother Ricky, who's having problems both with a girl he likes and her bully boyfriend... but this generic teenage drama is sadly not pushed aside as the hunter and his son turn up missing, aside from a severed arm. The Yautja Cleaner arrives on the scene and starts getting rid of any and all evidence that the Yautja or Xenomorphs were ever there, but he's too late and the Xenomorphs have started to multiply, helped by the fact that the PredAlien has a new and rather horrifying method of implanting Xenomorph embryos into pregnant female hosts. Chaos quickly overtakes the small town as the Xenomorphs run amok, the Yautja Cleaner chases after them to kill them, and a rapidly dwindling number of humans try to survive and escape...

Aliens Vs Predator: Requiem has several good ideas in it - the very concept of the PredAlien, further showing us how the Xenomorphs take on traits of their "parents" and the Yautja "Cleaner" who became known as "Wolf" after the character with a similar job in Pulp Fiction being the two big ones. The film was also considerably more bloody and violent than the previous film, which was, of course, one of the biggest complaints people had about the first AVP. So surely this means that AVP: Requiem is a welcome improvement to the series?

...Well, about that.

First off, someone forgot to pay the light bill while making this film. Yes, I know there's a part in the film where Wolf tries shooting some Xenomorphs in the town's power station and things explode and the town gets hit with a power cut, but there are still several scenes that are shot in near-total blackness and involving black glistening creatures, sometimes fighting a cloaked opponent, and it's nigh-on impossible to see what's going on. The first time I saw the film I wondered if this was down to possibly watching a bad quality copy, but rewatching it for this review in High Definition I now know that, no, the problem lies with the cinematography. I had to sit hunched forward to watch the film because if I sat back in my chair I literally couldn't see details on the screen, and making people sit in a physically uncomfortable way to watch your film is never going to be a winning formula.

Second, a problem from the first AVP film has continued into this one - there are too many damn humans for a film called Aliens Vs Predator: Requiem and not Aliens Vs Humans and Predator: Requiem. What's even worse is the petty human dramas that get shoehorned into the film as well. I cared not a jot about Ricky and Jesse's burgeoning romance, or about Dallas' life post-prison, or about any problems the returning female Army veteran might be having with her family (and while we're mentioning her, she was clearly placed in the film just because someone thought that, since the other Alien films had a strong female protagonist, this film needed one as well, and never mind that this woman's sole purpose in the film appears to be the ability to fly our plucky survivors out of the town via helicopter). And on that subject... The film is so determined to make Dallas the protagonist of the film that it has the sheriff bringing a recently-released felon along with him to investigate crimes, asks his advice and even follows his lead until one point in the film, and I'm pretty sure their disagreement at this point is to both pare down the core cast some more and further make out the sheriff to be rather useless. Suspension of disbelief is one thing, but they puff him up so much I wouldn't have been surprised if he'd had a fist-fight with Wolf at some point... and won.

Yes, there's more gore in AVP: Requiem than in the last film, but some of it feels like it's been put in to be edgy rather than anything else. Within ten minutes we see a child get a Facehugger to the, well, face, showing us that, yes, this film's not afraid of shying away from stuff like that, but later on the scenes with the PredAlien and the pregnant women in the hospital feel a little like the film is trying to deliberately shock us, because hey, pregnant women and babies! Seeing them harmed is really shocking, right? We're a grown-up movie, really! We've got an R-rating!

In the end, AVP: Requiem takes a shot at improving on the previous film with more gore and more references to the lore from previous films... but between its poor cinematography and ridiculous focus on the humans, yet again, rather than the Xenomorphs and Yautja of the film's title, and its even more ridiculous bigging up of a character with a one-line backstory to try to carry the whole film means that it falls flat on its face and ends up woefully poor.

 

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AVP: Alien Vs Predator (2004)

You know, it's quite possible to draw comparisons between AVP: Alien Vs Predator and that other fan-fantasy crossover, Freddy Vs Jason. Both films were born from a brief shot originally meant as an in-joke; both took a decade or more to actually reach the screen, and both turned out to be disappointments for the fans who'd been waiting and playing out the smackdown in their heads for all those years. We should have stuck with all the comics and books that were released while AVP was languishing in development hell.

A satellite owned by the Weyland Corporation detects a "heat bloom" emanating from an uninhabited island in Antarctica, Bouvet Island. Charles Bishop Weyland (yeah, they went there) organises a team to go investigate the site, discovering that there is a strange pyramid buried 2,000 feet under the ice, and he wants to be the first to claim it. His team includes archaeologists, language experts and Alexa Woods, a survival expert and guide. The pyramid turns out to predate all other known pyramids and civilisations - unbeknownst to the humans though, it is also a "rite of passage" test for young Predators (let's start calling them Yautja), who come to the pyramid every 100 years to face off against and kill Xenomorphs. To this end, there is a Xenomorph Queen kept chained up at the base of the pyramid and thawed out whenever the hunt is on, and humans are lured to the pyramid to act as hosts for the Xenomorphs. In the past, it was all done via a ritual sacrifice aspect of early Aztec/Mayan religions; this time, of course, there's the team investigating the site. Three young Yautja are sent in to prove themselves against the Xenomorphs; things turn pear-shaped however when the humans discover the Yautja's plasma weapons and take them, leaving the warriors without their most important weapons against the Xenomorphs and trying to get them back. The humans find their numbers rapidly dwindling as they're caught between the two alien races, as both sides have no problem killing anything in their way. The human survivors realise that their only hope of survival is to somehow team up with the Yautja - but will that even be possible?

An early warning sign that AVP: Alien Vs Predator was not going to be up to the standards of the films that preceded it was the fact that it was released as a PG-13 film. Looking back at the previous six films from both franchises before this one, the one thing they all had in common was a refusal to shy away from showing gore. Even the much weaker Alien films, ³ and Resurrection, at least still had heads being crushed into a pulp, chestbursters messily emerging from hosts, and people being sliced to ribbons by Xenomorphs. AVP doesn't show any of that. It occasionally shows the aftermath of Xenomorph "birth", and there are one or two shots of humans being impaled on Yautja weapons, but for the most part the film decides to cut away whenever something messy is going to happen on-screen, so all we see is a trickle of blood, maybe, or someone's eyes widening and then closing as they die. And this wasn't even a case of executive meddling because someone thought that making a sci-fi horror film that combines two franchises known for their violent and rather splattery content would make more money if they made it teenager-friendly - director Paul W. S. Anderson (also responsible for Mortal Kombat, the Resident Evil movie franchise and, somehow, the ultra-gory and horrifying Event Horizon) set out to release the film as PG-13. It makes no sense, and I'm not saying that horror films just can't be good if they're not throwing buckets of blood everywhere like modern-day Grand Guignol. It's just that neutering a film like this is just going to alienate fans.

Another early warning sign was the fact that AVP was not screened in advance for critics. For films that aren't independent or underground but instead released by one of the big studios, this is generally seen as the studio and/or director not having any faith in the film getting positive reviews, so they just release it and hope they can make enough back on the box office before the negative reviews come rolling it. And oh, did they come rolling in - AVP currently holds a 20% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and 29 out of 100 on Metacritic - although its worldwide gross did end up being $172 million, so the trick of not screening it for critics did work out for them.

In the end, though, AVP is just a weak film. It's virtually bloodless, has a weak plot (that was cribbed from an Aliens Vs Predator novel I read back in the 1990s), and there are plot holes and glaring errors in it that give the audience the distinct impression that the filmmakers didn't really care about the film they were making. The timeframe from being impregnated by a Facehugger to expiring via Chestburster in this film can't be more than an hour, tops, which flies in the face of every other Alien film we've seen, and has clearly just been fudged for expediency rather than actually having to think for a moment about the plot. In another scene, a Xenomorph is killed by one of the Yautja (the one known as "Scar", for reference) and it doesn't bleed. They didn't even bother to put in a digital acid blood effect. And if the filmmakers seem to care so little for their product, why should we? the working relationship that develops between Scar and Alexa is pretty much the only good thing about this film, and even then I can find flaws with it - there's not enough screen time devoted to it; it suffers from the same problem that the new Transformers movies did in that we're not here for the fleshlings, we're here for alien-on-alien action, and there's just not enough of that in the film.

And of course, the movie's final shot sets us up for a sequel, which people may have thought they wanted with the anticipation of seeing the "PredAlien" in action, but as we were to discover, things didn't go as we hoped they would...

 

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