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

Simultaneously Arranged Vomit: Hollywood Remakes

Airlock tells me the Hollywood grabblers are readying an Americanised remake of Let The Right One In, the excellent Swedish Vampire movie that entranced anyone who could tear their sweaty eyeballs away from Twilight for a second and who can read well enough to do subtitles. Bizarrrely, this remake is apprently to be called Let Me In- the original title must have been deemed too confusing for your typical audience.

SIMULTANEOUSLY ARRANGED VOMIT

But will it actually be any good? My bile filled crystal ball tells me not. The very act of changing the title in this way rings idiot bells in my big fat head. Because if you keep talking down to your audience long enough then they’ll eventually become as dumb as you think they are (hence the success of films like Crank, Law Abidin’ Citizen, and the careers of Janiston and Dan Brown). It strikes me that toilets are especially designed to constantly receive shit. An intelligent film goer isn’t (no matter how willing they apparently are to gorge on it). I’m tired of the powers that be treating me like a toilet and so should you be! It’s time to wipe those faeces off our chins and vomit up as one in the multiplexes! Rise up! It’s a puke revolution of defiance! Maybe someone can organise it via Twitter or something so that at some exact pre-arranged time all the film fans who are sick of being treated like toilets can all vomit up their guts at the same time!! Imagine the clean up! Imagine how easy it will be for the Hollywood powers that be to totally not even be aware of it!

But no, I expect it’ll just be little old me, sitting at the back vomiting on my own whilst my wife does her best to pretend like she’s not with me. And then she’ll hand me a small tissue to wipe my face clean on. SIGH! 

ASSHOLES ON SEATS

Anyway, anyway, there’s clearly a market for these sorts of non English language films being remade (badly), focusing of course on particular genres and types. They must be getting assholes on seats, as it were, and allowing idiots who can’t read the subtitles because of the long words to feel a little bit more sophisticated. Or maybe they just like the gore (nothing wrong with that). 

And of course, for many of these films there’s a ready made audience of people who saw the original and did love it and want to see a comparison, and all the hype and imagery is easy to build on the existing reception of the original film. That’s why people like me go to see them and then get terribly disappointed.

Hollywood are fairly selective about the films they remake (hence no bizarre Korean comedies). If only they were a bit more rigorous with the quality of what they pump out the other end, we’d all have happier and more fulfilled lives with less faeces down our throats.

DOUBLE INDEMNITY

A few years ago they all jumped on the series of Asian horror movies that were doing good business in their own countries and getting good reviews over here. And so we had new and flashy Americanised versions of Ring, Into The Mirror (which wasn’t any good to start with), and The Grudge. But what- no Meatball Machine, Audition, or Old Boy? At least not yet. I hear they are doing a remake of Double Indemnity with David Schwimmer and Ice T though.

But these films are average at best, like a drunken first time or a Gordon Ramsay recipe. The only recent remake I can think of that I enjoyed more than the original was Scorsese’s The Departed. In actual fact, this was more ‘inspired’ by Infernal Affairs than a simple remake, and really added to the original template as opposed to just slavishly raping it. And of course, remaking non English language successes is no new thing- A Bout De Souffle was famously remade into Breathless, and we had a fairly respectable version of Plein Soleil that became The Talented Mr Ripley. But I’m on a tirade here, and most of them are distinctly average!

KOOKY PANT GUSH

However, with the vogue for modern horror fading and the run of new horrors from Asia drying up to be replaced by bizarre (to our eyes), postmodern kookiness, maybe the slew of bad remakes will finally slow down. Of course it won’t, but let’s pretend. The popular movies from that part of the world I’ve seen recently (Kamikaze Girls, Love Exposure, The Fox Family) are just too oddball and long to play to those same people who gushed their pants over Sarah Michelle Gellar being scared by a rattly ghost in The Grudge, and even a fairly straight forward monster movie like The Host is chock full of Korean humour that probably wouldn’t play so well over in the West.

Afterall, even with the mass popularity of Bollywood worldwide (it’s huge!), we haven’t seen more than tentative attempts to copy and engage with this cinema. Slumdog Millionaire doesn’t really count. Where’s the Robert Rodriguez version of Devdas? Where’s the Michael Bay reimagining of Dhoom? And why haven’t we seen David Fincher tackling Lagaan, eh?

SELF DEFEATING

Of course, all of these questions are self defeating. We know why. And there will always be films that are too uniquely of their place to be remade or even consumed in their original form in the West. Thank shit for that. But for those films that might have some sort of faint cross over potential (either to be redubbed as in the sad case of the Ghibli movies) or totally remade altogether, you can only do your best to avoid them. They may be solid remakes, and at least they get some people into the cinema that wouldn’t be there otherwise, but I don’t want them making these films at the expense of other, more interesting films. Surely David Fincher has something better to do than remake The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo? 

Just watch the originals. If you can drive a car (no matter how badly), then you’ve got a fighting chance of being able to read the bloody subtitles and a fighting chance at being able to fight me when I whine about the remakes.

Blinkered Regards

Biolab

Wack-Ass

What is the big deal with this Kick-Ass movie?

Like anyone else who has been to the cinema lately, I’ve seen the trailer but frankly I don’t get it. As a trailer it wasn’t quite as tedious to sit through as the Green Zone or Legion ones, but it did seem equally pointless and also infinitely more irritating. I almost slit my wrists then and there with the razor sharp excuse for wit vomiting out of the screen.

MAGNERS

This is another one of these films aimed at pot smoking mid teens and adults who should know better but have killed too many braincells with endless teeth dissolving bottles of Magners/WKD and handfuls of idiot drugs to actually realise they stopped being a kid over a decade ago. In other words, this is a film for people who think Superbad is Citizen Kane and Russell Brand is some sort of Bill Hicks. People who were still eggs/sperm when Mallrats came out, or were mentally at the level of eggs/sperm and haven’t progressed much in the intervening years.

EYE BOILING 

Kick-Ass. Even the title is eye-boilingly awful, like the kind of thing you’d be embarrassed to find your own child saying and then would need to take them to Jurassic Park in an intense tropical storm or send them to investigate a mysterious distress call in space to ensure they never say it again.

PUNCHED IN THE HEAD BY TOSS POTS

Not that this titular failing has proven a handicap to this film, juding by the ill-informed avalanche of superlatives loaded onto its flimsy, pimpled shoulders by the kind of idiot tastemakers who still think an apostrophe indicates a plural. In fact, the slew of enthusiastic statements reading off the poster has the same effect as being repeatedly punched in the head by tosspots (an experience that I’m sure is only magnified when actually watching this vomitorious garbage). It’s excellent! It’s amazing! It’s the best thing since the surrender of the Nazis! And no doubt some imaginative pricklet has commented that it also ‘kicks ass.’

CAT EATING

Even the WHSmith browser’s film rag of choice, Empire, seems to like it. Not that they know what they’re talking about of course. Just like Q Magazine, they merely give 3 or 4 stars to anything ITV considers vaguely hip. But I have it on good authority that you have to be a cat eater to work at Empire. I do have a friend who eats cats (but doesn’t work for Empire- he works for TotalFilm, which isn’t any better), and his girlfriend has a glass eye. Together they lay out thickly sliced wedges of rum and raisin fudge to tempt cats into their flat, and then he clubs out their brains with a copy of Eyes Wide Shut. His girlfriend then goes through the entrails to determine how good any given new release movie is and sears the carcass by focusing a ray of sunlight through her glass eye. Then they eat the poor dead creatures on a bed of child abuse shaped pasta.

MISSING THE POINT

Or maybe, just maybe, in my bitter ignorance I’m missed the point here. This thought occurred to me whilst, appropriately, taking a piss, and I’m prepared to admit I’m wrong if I am.  Maybe a two joke film with the high point being a foul mouthed little girl kicking people is funny and worthwhile and not in fact evidence of both total laziness of both audience and filmmaker and not a harbinger of impending apocalypse. After all, at least it’s not got Jennifer Aniston or Adam Sandler in it.

Apocalyptic Regards…

Biolab