GUEST ARTICLE: Is it enough to fill it with blood (your blood)?

So Biolab and I sat down to watch Slither (2006) the other day, safe in the knowledge that our thirst for BLOOD, a crazy story, and some silly dialogue would be quenched. We were counting it as a banker: you know, a pastiche of all those movies that you love so it won’t set our world alight but will be solidly entertaining. The same can be said when we recently visited Planet Terror and were falling into cess-pits with Black Sheep.

QUITE GOOD (BUT TRY AGAIN)

That’s pretty much how things turned out.

The film starts at full-throttle and barely lets up – in fact 30 mins in, we were wondering if there was anywhere else to go. I’d say that the middle third (the introduction of CGI worms and the zombies) is where they lost focus on what was working (an absolutely ridiculous monster) but luckily, the movie never comes off the road and the end is actually pretty good (ref: Society??).

Slither (the good)

Slither (the bad)

Feels like: ordering your favourite meal from a high street pub. Overall 6.5/10.

NO EXCUSES – I’M GUNNA BLOW OUT THE GOD DAMN AIRLOCK

In this day and age, with filmmakers and audiences so super cine-literate, there’s no excuses for not producing watchable and entertaining genre movies. It’s not like it takes a lot – just get someone who loves these movies to make them (but leave the successful franchises and A-List movies to filmmakers who have succeeded beyond the genre – I’m thinking RR’s sludge pit ‘Predators’, Snyder’s solid but disappointing Watchmen and the two The Terminator movies (you know, the really crappy ones)).

Also, what the hell is up with cheap CGI? If you haven’t got any money or can’t actually pull it off with originality or believability then get a guy in a suit or use stop-motion! Like your mum.

All you want when watching a film is that everyone involved cares for what is being produced. Have the producers of The Wolfman or Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus actually watched what they made? I doubt it coz they clearly don’t care. The people who made those movies are like high-school jocks who get the lab assistant pregnant and then never see the kids, but dream every night of either dating those rug rats or else punching them in the head. It’s just fucking irresponsible – a drain on society and no doubt you’re spreading your diseases (I’m wondering how Mega Piranha got made?).

Oh yeah, please don’t remake An American Werewolf In London. If you really want to pay homage, get someone who loves it to make something original and then reference it.

These are my thoughts.

Wibbly armed regards,

Airlock

Utterly Expendable: The Expendables

Perhaps they don’t realise the irony in titling the movie The Expendables, or perhaps they don’t expect their intended audience to even notice what the film is called because they’ll be too distracted by the gun play and slo-mo explosions, but they’ve invented a whole new pointlessness in The Expendables and if you watch it, that pointlessness will infect your life. It’s merely the latest in a recent eczema-like spate of lobotomised nostalgia-dependent action carnivals, hot on the heels of the equally dim-witted and ludicrously tedious explosion-fest of the A-Team and lagging way behind the classic fun of the knucklehead pedigrees we all know and love.

 TOUGH NIHILISTS LIKE A VD-LACED HOOKER

Heralded as a return to the glory days of macho violent action movies, they’re corralled together all the usual suspects (plus some others), none of which have done anything of any value since before the intended audience of The Expendables were born, and squashed them all into one feebly imagined action spectacular. If the title and the cast list alone isn’t enough warning to avoid this film like a Janiston romance flick or a VD-laced hooker then surely sitting through the parade of lumbering exploding awfulness that constitutes the trailer should be. Whilst I would be the first to admit I have fond memories of Arnold carrying tree trunks up a mountain in Commando, before jumping off a taking-off plane, outgunning a whole private army in a garden, and then engaging in a truly ludicrous knife fight with a jackass to rescue his implausible daughter, I can’t help but feel that this new movie is itself utterly expendable. It’s for people who consider their own free time expendable, as well as their lives, brain cells, relationships, self respect, and everything else. Therefore I must conclude that it’s for tough nihilists who have eaten way too much whey and pumped way too much protein into their iron to really know what’s going on. It’s for people who ask you to ‘spot them’ and people who try and fight you at traffic lights. It’s for muscley assholes, and for people who like their assholes as muscley as possible. It’s for the expendables in our society, and to prove they are the appropriate audience for this movie, anyone entering the theatre should be blown out of an airlock on entry and then exploded as they hurtle through the sky, probably trying and failing to come up with an amusing quip as they ignite.

REPEATED FAILURE  THAT DEFECATES WILDLY IN YOUR FACE

I’m all up for movies with decently ludicrous lines in them. Lines like ‘He’s dead tired’, ‘Stick Around’, or ‘What happened to you? You used to be someone I could trust.’/ ‘I woke up’ always raise a smile and the lack of these was one of the many, many reasons why the new Predators movie was a total waste of time. But I’d rather have a decent movie peppered with ridiculous dialogue rather than having to sit through a turgidly dull mass of bloody awfulness in the hope that someone may say something dumb enough to make me laugh. They can’t recapture the magic of those 80s classics. They’ve repeatedly tried and failed, as we’ve all unfortunately seen with the clanking/exploding bore-fests and increasingly uninteresting explosions of the latest Terminator, Die Hard, and Predator movies.

All in all I’m sure this is all good fun for hammy, sweatfest musclebrains who’ve guzzled enough Stella to make this movie bearable and need a distraction from bellowing at the TV or struggling to comprehend the editorials in Nuts magazine, or for people who think that going to see this movie is in some way ironic in the same way that U2 emerging from a lemon was, but it’s never going to equal the fond memories I have of this sort of wonderful macho trash from my childhood. If I want a rowdy night out I think I’d rather drink a bottle of rum and go out on the town wearing a polo shirt than sit in the cinema watching this turd of a movie as my poor eyeballs leak out of my skull in protest and my brain tries to mate with my stomach in order to stimulate itself enough to survive the monotony of the ordeal.

SLASHING OVER THE TOILET SEAT OF YOUR CHERISHED CHILDHOOD MEMORIES

The Expendables: a dumb and highly exploitative waste of everyone’s time. Especially since you can buy Commando, Universal Soldier, or Die Hard on DVD (or cheekily download them, if that’s your style). This is yet another example of Hollywood treating its audience like a brain-dead toilet and defecating wildly into the face of cinema-goers the world over, whilst having a slash all over the toilet seat of their cherished childhood memories. 

 Explodingly Sweaty Regards

 BioBLAM!

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