Predator 2 (1990): written by Jim and John Thomas; directed by Stephen Hopkins; starring Danny Glover (Lt. Harrigan), Gary Busey (Keyes), Ruben Blades (Archuleta), Maria Conchita Alonso (Cantrell), Bill Paxton (Lambert), and Kevin Peter Hall (The Predator):
An enjoyable, trashy, pulpy piece of action-horror with the original writers of Predator but none of the stars or director John McTiernan. Danny Glover is game as our hero, a Los Angeles cop in the far-flung future of 1997. Glover gets to be the Gibsonian hothead instead of the voice of reason of the Lethal Weapon series, two movies old when Predator 2 was made.
The writing sometimes jarringly veers into Robocop territory when it satirizes vigilantes and media junk, a penchant that the inferior recent The Predator (2018) also indulged to no real end. If you think the weird geography of the Overlook Hotel warrants a conspiracy theory, the impossible geography of the long final battle between Glover and the Predator will blow your mind. Recommended.
Phoenix Forgotten (2017): written by Justin Barber and T.S. Nowlin; directed by Justin Barber; starring Luke Spencer Roberts (Josh), Chelsea Lopez (Ashley), and Justin Matthews (Mark):
Here in the real world, the Phoenix Lights that form the backbone of Phoenix Forgotten were a real thing.
In the movie, a young girl's teen-aged brother disappears along with two friends several days after the Phoenix Lights. Now at the age of 26, 20 years later, the sister and her camera-carrying dogsbody go In Search Of... Lost Brother.
Yes, Phoenix Forgotten is low-budget, found-footage horror. It's an enjoyable, low-key entry in this genre. And it involves UFO's instead of the supernatural, thus making it somewhat unique. The actors for both the 2017 and 1997 narratives are all quite charming.
The panicked flight of the missing teenagers across the rapidly darkening desert, recorded for posterity in its near-entirety because no one ever stops filming in these movies, has some fresh moments of terror. The actors sell panic at things unseen or barely glimpsed.
The makers don't stick the climax, though the coda is unique among these things as filming continues in what's really quite an unusual and, by the end, hilarious situation insofar as, Jesus Christ, that goddam camera can't be destroyed, it can only run out of battery power. Recommended.
The Ax (1997) by Donald Westlake: Burke DeVore, a mid-level paper company executive, has been downsized. So he's going to kill his way back to full employment by murdering everyone who stands in the way of his taking a job at another paper company. And he justifies his serial spree by noting that it's not really any different than what the board members of large companies do to their workforce every day.
Westlake's bleak, black satire rings as horrifyingly true today as it did in the late 1990's. Maybe moreso, in this Hell Age of Trump the President. Westlake's novel presents white middle-class rage taken to a (seemingly) logical extreme.
But The Ax also satirizes that white middle-class sense of privilege while also damning the American obsession with profits for the very few at the expense of everyone else. It's a dynamite novel that shows rather than tells. And it's not for the squeamish. Highly recommended.
