“Don’t Look!”: Skyline Is Coming!

Skyline

Apparently it’s the sci-fi thriller that everyone’s talking about, so I cracked my knuckles, put on my best eye protecting goggles, and braced myself to be raped in the head until I cried blood as I set out to investigate. Having said that though, I do like the phrase ‘sci-fi thriller’. It excites me for some reason in a way that the phrase ‘Judd Apatow comedy’ or ‘fungal genital problem’ doesn’t. Sci-fi thrillers for me are like promises from God, promises that are rarely fulfilled and usually turn out to be dull, tedious and ultimately soul ravaging exercises in making me wish I’d just spent the evening vomiting until my insides bled instead. But every now and then, increasingly rarely these days, those promises actually manage to deliver a decent movie, and then I am very, very happy indeed. And so, despite my intense fear of being disappointed, I decided to investigate further. 

 HOPEFULLY NOT TWATLETS

Apparently, a group of friends (hopefully not the intensely irritating bunch of American twatlets that usually populate these films. I’m thinking particularly of Cloverfield (0.03/10) here) are disturbed in the night by a load of lights in the sky. Apparently people are being dragged up into the sky by these lights and then no doubt some jiggery pokery at the hands of some sort of aliens is going on. So far, this sounds to me like Fire In The Sky (6.5/10), only with a potentially crippling Dawson’s Creek/Independence Day (2.5/10) feel to it and no doubt an over-reliance on dubious CGI. I loved and hated Fire In The Sky. As a teenager it fascinated me, but also freaked the shit out of me. I can’t say why, as it’s not particularly scary or well made, but for some reason it just freaked that shit right out of my body. And now I expect Skyline is going to relentlessly try and pump that shit back into me- through my eyes, my ears, and then any other portal that the film can possibly reach it will mercilessly force its faecal mess into my body until I want to choke with loathing and disgust. And then, apparently, at the end of the film a group of survivors must fight for their lives as the world unravels around them. Pfft.

I don’t know if it’s just me as a sentient being, but that just sounds beyond awful to me. Turdcurlingly terrible. It sounds like another excuse for again repeating all the worst mistakes of this kind of movie. Again and again and again.

 A SUCCESSION OF WAVING IDIOTS

My scepticism concerning this movie is heightened all the more by learning that it’s been directed by the Strause Brothers, those bumbling pricklets who ‘directed’ the ridiculous Alien Vs Predator: Requiem (0.0/10). And we should never ever forget that AVPR was one of the worst excuses for a movie you could ever imagine. Everything about it was just so stultifyingly inept that you had to wonder whether there was actually anyone with any sense involved when they were making that movie. Every single decision made in the making of that film was wrong. It must just have been a succession of idiots who didn’t care just waving their approval without even bothering to look at what they were doing during the filmmaking process. It was a film that made me want to peel off my own skin and throw it in impotent fury at the screen whilst howling as if my beloved dog (F*I*S*T*) had been hit by a truck. It was a film that made me wish I had died on the way to the cinema in the most horrific and gory way possible, thus providing more entertainment for passersby than anything AVPR could offer. In fact, if one person had been too distracted by my death to go see that film that it would have been worth it.

Anyway, to continue my thoughts on Skyline- it’s also written by Joshua Cordes and Liam O’Donnell. Getting my spies to try and turn up any other writing credits enjoyed by these no doubt genius scribes, we drew a massive blank (much like the mental processes of anyone watching AVPR). The only other work we could find they’d been involved with of this sort of profile was visual effects work on AVP (1.5/10), Iron Man 2, and Avatar (6.5/10). Hmmm. Draw your own conclusions on that one, and then let me try and influence them by yelling: WARNING! WARNING! WARNING!

 REWARDING A DISGUSTING CHILD

After watching Alien Vs Predator: Requiem, I have to seriously ask why these people are being allowed to make more films. And I use the word ‘people’ as an act of generosity here. It’s like a child who has just shat messily all over the WHOLE HOUSE being not only praised but also rewarded (perhaps by being given a new toy) for its disgusting efforts, and then being invited over to the neighbours’ houses to piss all over their crockery just before Sunday lunch. It defies (and defiles) belief!

In the words of Pablum Airlock: “What the hell!? Weren’t those people thrown into a combine harvester after being made to watch the movies that they made??”

 They certainly should have been. There’s still time. I’m looking at my watch.

 Here’s a link to the trailer: www.youtube.com/?v=DAOFYp1l5JQ

In our minds it looks awful. Like something you wouldn’t want to wish on your worst enemy, or even Janiston. It’s not very long, but it somehow manages to be incredibly boring. It only lasts about two minutes, but yet I must have checked my watch at least twice. Then I checked my pulse, and was disappointed to find that watching this atrocious garbage hadn’t yet killed me. May I suggest that going to see Skyline will be like pushing old people over and jeering at their injuries- it’s  just something that civilised people shouldn’t do and in any sort of proper society it should involve some sort of punishement for doing so.

SMALLPOX INJECTION

I think I’d have more confidence and desire to see this film if I was told that it had been made by primary school children and every person who went to see it would have smallpox injected into their eyeballs before being generously flayed for the entire running time of the movie.

But it’s your time and money. Waste it how you will! But you can’t say I haven’t tried to warn you.

Frankly Appalled Regards

Biolab

P.S. This will probably be the best film ever now. Better than Sunset Blvd.

Does Anyone Care Anymore? Predators: A Review

Let me tell you a story. It’s only very brief, so don’t worry.

When I was very young I used to love sea food, especially prawns and mussels. Whenever I went on holiday with my family (which was invariably camping in France in those days) I would always have prawns and mussels. I used to look forward to eating them, and actually got quite excited about the prospect of eating them. I used to chomp and slurp those salty prawns and mussels down like nobody’s business (as, indeed, it was). But one day that all changed. I must’ve eaten a bad batch because I was suddenly and violently ill after eating a massive platter of prawns and mussels. Possibly my expectations were too high and I was too excited to dig in, but I was sick for hours that seemed like days and days that seemed like years. In many ways I have never recovered, and I haven’t eaten a mussel since. In fact, the mere smell or sight of them now brings back that nauseous feeling in the pit of my stomach and I have to leave the room.

Why do I tell you this (true) story? Because it almost exactly mirrors my engagement with the Predator franchise. Right down to the salty, back of the throat vomiting and gut churning terror.

 MESSY SPLATTERED VOMIT

 I’ve ranted before about my misgivings and anxieties about Robert ‘Let’s Blow It Up With Wisecracks’ Rodriguez getting involved with this series, and you can read them in my Clanking And Exploding article earlier. Yet still, against every fibre of my being, I sat in the cinema with a mixed feeling of excitement and nausea as I waited for it to start. 

I wish I hadn’t. My time would have been better spent eating duck penis or being trampled by bulls.

Frankly this is a big messy splattered vomit of a movie, with all sorts of half-digested ideas slopping about all over the place like foul bile. Not the sort of appetising morsel you’d want to guzzle. More the sort of half-formed slop you’d think twice before feeding a starving mangy cat, and then wouldn’t. For every one thing these idiot filmmakers got right, they managed to get a dozen things wrong.

It seemed almost as if the filmmakers had a total misunderstanding of what had made the first two movies (and yes, I said the FIRST TWO MOVIES and that INCLUDES Predator 2) so good. They made numerous and idiotic attempts (as every pricklet that gets their hands on this franchise seems to do) to add to and evolve what we’d seen earlier, but only succeeded in making it into a tiresome spectacle of repeated explosions and resolutely ungripping awfulness.

 A TOTAL ABSENCE OF PULPY JOY

 Firstly, despite the masterstroke of actually using the music from the first film (albeit totally ineptly) the film never ever recovered from the totally ludicrous and downright lazy premise it was burdened with. Supposedly in an attempt to be the worst plot of all time, a bunch of totally unsympathetic and uninterestingly generic “characters” were literally dropped out of the sky into a jungle on a planet that was apparently a hunting ground for the Predator creatures. And as you watch the film that is as boring as it sounds. I’d rather just have watched a static shot of the jungle for two hours with Alan Silvestri’s wonderful music playing over the top.

The cast and characters were totally flat and as forgettable as a Damien Rice song, the tone of the film totally incorrect. The pleasurable pulpy joy of the first two movies was entirely absent, replaced instead by an overly serious attitude and confusing chaos of events that were as inexplicable as they were irritating. The first encounter with the monsters was just a confused blur of uselessness, shoddily executed and bringing back bad memories of the beyond awful AVP movies and making me wish I could send my poor eyeballs back to hell where they belong. The final battle was equally confounding and felt like watching one of your worst enemies playing a video game and molesting your kid sister whilst you lay in foul sewage with a bad hangover recalling that last night you killed your own grandparents by bludgeoning them to death with your beloved family dog (which you had also molested). People around me in the theatre laughed at the sight of Adrien Brody minus a shirt. There was no tension, no terror, no spark. 

SCAVENGERS

They were always going to be treading a fine line with drawing Predators so closely to the first film, making it vulnerable to unfavourable comparisons. The jackasses! Like a decomposing corpse riddled with maggots, this new film was riddled with references to Predator that went beyond being mere references and instead made me think the filmmakers thought they were in some way ‘improving’ on what the original had so effortlessly achieved. No such luck. Don’t reference a great movie unless you can better it. And then shut up. 

One of the clearest signposts of the muddle that this film was is that we had to be constantly told by the onscreen characters what was happening! This is not because we’re stupid, but because the film was such a confusing splurge of half-baked ideas and illogical conclusions that you would need to be a mindreader to understand what they thought they were trying to achieve and follow the bizarre turns of events. I particularly enjoyed the hysterical cry of ‘He’s a scavenger!’ This was definitely the best line in the movie (partly because it came totally out of the blue and was just so peculiar), but it’s no way near ‘I ain’t got time to bleed’ or any of the other genius moments from the earlier films. Try again, idiots. Or actually- don’t. Don’t ever try again.

 EYEBALL ABUSE

To be fair, there were vague scattered points early on in the film that made you think (hope) it was going to pull itself together, but it never really cohered into anything and as soon as you started to get your hopes up then something totally stupid would happen, like the introduction of new ‘hunting dog’ creatures that looked like teenage Slipknot fans, or a semi-civilised exchange between human and monster that was like something out of Brief Encounter. Or an idiotic swordfight in a cornfield. Or Jennifer Aniston singing a showtune. True, I made that last one up, but it could have slotted in nicely amid the gibberish and irrational idiocy being gummed over our eyeballs.

IN SUMMARY

So essentially this was a film of unfathomable choices, useless new ideas, and a final nail in the coffin of a series I once loved as a youngster. It’s dead for me now. I’m not watching any more of these movies. I’ve taken all the disappointment I can have! The door on my boyish dreams has been forever slammed shut.

Unless they actually get around to making that Pride and Predator movie I was hearing so much about of course.

GAME OVER.

 Predators: 2/10

 Bitterly Disappointed Regards

 Biolab

Clanking And Exploding: The Sad State Of Sci-Fi

I’m concerned and tired. Concerned about sci-fi and tired of things clanking and exploding.

CRUSHING DISAPPOINTMENT OF YOUTH

I’ve been filled with this foul tasting disappointment and righteous fury ever since that idiot Joss Whedon got his irritatingly gilded claws all over the Alien franchise and proceeded to piss over it as if it commanded no more respect than a Fast & Furious movie. In my idealistic and hope-filled teen years, I remember lining up excitedly to see Alien Resurrection with all the enthusiasm that only youth can bring, only to be curiously crushed after seeing the CGI-infused pap they had lazily churned out. Not adding anything but ludicrously misjudged awfulness, and displaying a total misunderstanding of what I wanted from the franchise, it was like having your own mother spit your sister’s faeces in your face and then crushing each of your eyeballs underfoot like grapes. Well done, idiots. I was more disappointed than I would have been had they ruined Jesus’ resurrection by splicing his DNA with Jennifer Aniston’s and attempting to give him some sort of quirky teen backstory. That was the end of my youth.

CYBORG WEEKEND AT BERNIE’S

Stupidly, and going against every fibre of my being, I lined up to see Terminator 3, and later Terminator: Salvation, with a similar feeling of excitement. All right, it wasn’t Alien (the love of my young life), but it had a fair chance of being good. In my mind, it shouldn’t be difficult to make a terrifyingly tense and dreadfully scary movie about a cyborg killing machine intent on wiping out the human race. But somehow, with Terminator 3, they seemed to have decided to try and make post-OC version of Weekend At Bernie’s, complete with vacuous sunglasses jokes and for some reason almost no violence. The only reason to watch it was for the leather-clad blonde lady. And Terminator: Salvation- well that somehow managed to be even worse!

Walking into Salvation,  I had convinced myself that it would be impossible for them to fuck this up. Making an exciting film about a climactic war between people and machines should be as simple as the brain-dead zombies who write articles about Jordan and Peter for the terminally idiotic, shouldn’t it? It should be as easy as outwitting a Nickelback fan! But somehow, as I watched the sheer pointless vapidity unspooling before my poor eyes, I realised that McG had managed to churn out something that was so boring I was looking at my watch every ten minutes before the halfway mark and wishing that the whole human race had never existed, so ashamed was I to be a human.

CLANKING AND EXPLODING

And that’s the problem- a slew of CGI explosions and non-entity characters does not make for an exciting or even vaguely interesting film. Terminator: Salvation was just an endless slog of things clanking and exploding, with a pointless cameo from Helena Bonham-Carter in it, and it was SO BORING I WANTED TO DIE. Transformers 2 was almost entirely the same. Once you’ve seen one thing clank and explode, you’ve seen them all! Of course, McG said when making that awful Terminator experience that he was fully aware of the legacy of the previous films, and what the fans were hoping for, and the faults with the previous film and blah blah blah. Promises were made, but on watching the film it’s painfully obvious that neither he nor anyone else involved in the making of the film gave a shit about anything, or anyone, ever.

FILMIC ‘FINAL SOLUTION’

And that’s what worries me with this new Predators film. Robert Rodriguez can go on all he likes about being a fan of the original 2 films, and wanting to build respectfully on those. Both him and director Nimrod Antal talk about being aware of and avoiding the pitfalls of the mindless, vacuous tosh that were the Alien Vs Predator films- which somehow managed the feat of BEING EVEN WORSE THAN YOU WOULD EXPECT, despite me expecting a sort of filmic Final Solution. But at the end of the day I doubt either Rodriguez or Antal really give a flying shit, and from the trailer that’s now doing the rounds online it’s clear that all this talk of respectfully trying to make a decent film rather than a jumped up toy advert of a cash-in are well and truly LIES.

The plot (a number of tough idiots find themselves whisked to an alien jungle for some sort of already tedious alien hunting party) is ludicrous beyond all comprehension, and already bores the living hell out of me just thinking about it. The fact that they’re talking excitedly about introducing new creatures frankly makes me sick! They’re also talking about trying to make it funny, and of revealing the creature pretty much straight away. In a recent interview that Airlock sent me, both Rodriguez and Antal suggested that modern audiences would be too impatient and dim-witted to wait 40 minutes of tension out to see a monster. Way to respect your audience, eh? Who is this audience made up of- attention deficit disorder fuelled three year olds? 

ECSTASY OF IDIOT PIXELS

I’d like to see a movie where they don’t reveal the creature until the final five minutes, and just continually rachet up the tension and characterisation until then. I’m more interested in that than watching some sort of foxy female predator clank and explode her way onto the screen in an ecstasy of idiot pixels.

Haven’t they just fundamentally disregarded (or misunderstood, more likely) what made the original two films so great? You don’t need more creatures. In fact, you don’t need more anything. We don’t need to be baby stepped through all our films. We’re not ALL idiots (despite the fact that so many of us went to see the Da Vinci Code). Why the hell someone whose best movies are the Spy Kids series has been allowed anywhere near making a Predator film is totally beyond me. Still, I’ll probably buy the lunchbox and go see the movie. They could have had Why Bird making it and I’d have gone.

DULL

I also hear a dull rumbling that Ridley Scott is looking to make another Alien movie. In 3D- of course! This will obviously be a movie for all you pricklets and numbskulls out there that watched Alien and thought that it could have been a good movie if only they’d made it in 3D. With more lasers and monsters and CGI. And lots of clanking and exploding. With Jennifer Aniston playing Ripley and Vin Diesel playing the alien.

I expect they’ll even slap a Linkin Park soundtrack on it. Bliss.

Clanked-out Regards

Biolab