Imaginary and Real Horrors: Predators (2010) and The Thin Blue LIne (1988)

Predators (2010): written by Alex Litvak and Michael Finch; directed by Nimrod Antal; produced by Robert Rodriguez; starring Adrien Brody (Royce), Topher Grace (Edwin), Alice Braga (Isabelle), Walton Goggins (Stans), Oleg Taktarov (Nikolai), Laurence Fishburne (Noland), Danny Trejo (Cuchillo), Louis Ozawa Changchien (Hanzo), and Mahershala Ali (Mombasa): Overcrowded with characters and gifted with a hilariously miscast Adrien Brody, Predators is nonetheless mostly entertaining. Producer Robert Rodriguez's fingerprints are all over it, though Nimrod Antal is a slicker director than he. Lightly recommended.

The Thin Blue Line (1988): written and directed by Errol Morris; score by Philip Glass: Errol Morris' riveting documentary, backed by a hypnotic Philip Glass score, got an apparently innocent man out of jail. Randall Adams spent about ten years in a Texas jail for a murder that the film overwhelmingly suggests was committed by another man. The film shows how the justice system can go horribly awry, even after Adams finally goes free -- Texas releases him in such a way that he can't receive any wrongful imprisonment funds from the State. Thanks, assholes! One of the essential documentaries (and films) of all time. Highly recommended.

Predator 2 (1990)

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.

The Predator (2018)

The Predator (2018): written by Shane Black and Fred Dekker; directed by Shane Black; starring Boyd Holbrook (Quinn McKenna), Olivia Munn (Casey Bracket), Trevante Rhodes (Nebraska Williams), Thomas Jane (Baxley), Keegan-Michael Key (Coyle), Sterling K. Brown (Traeger), and Jacob Tremblay (Rory McKenna):

1. The Predator in this movie gets a definite article because it's 11-feet tall and comes with two Predator dogs and the ability to speak English.

2. The funniest line in the movie was apparently not written by writer-director Shane Black, who was not having a good week when he wrote this movie, but rather by Olivia Munn's sister.

3. Olivia Munn needs to hire an agent who stops putting her in front of green screens. She does look less discombobulated than she did in X-Men: Apocalypse.

4. Because there can only be one active woman in an action movie, Yvonne Strahovski gets sidelined for the most part even though The Predator kidnaps her son.

5. Boyd Holbrook, who plays the protagonist, Strahovski's ex-husband, and the father of that son, has negative charisma.

6. The son has autism. In the Predator universe, this makes him "the next step in human evolution!"

7. Shane Black labours so hard to make the wacky group of crazy soldiers who team up with Boyd Holbrook, um, wacky and memorable, that one can fairly see the flop sweat running down Black's face.

8. The last 20 minutes are so frenetic and (literally) dark that I don't know whether Sterling K. Brown's evil Black Ops guy is alive or dead when the movie ends.

9. The now infamous deleted scene probably involves our wacky group of Predator fighters procuring the RV that mysteriously appears 55 minutes into the movie.

10. Arnold Schwarzenegger turned down a cameo after reading the script.

There are a few moments, and it's not unbearably awful or anything. Lightly recommended.

Aliens vs. Predator 2: Requiem (2007)

Aliens vs. Predator 2: Requiem (2007): based on characters created by Dan O'Bannon, Ronald Shushett, Jim Thomas, and John Thomas; written by Shane Salerno; directed by Colin and Greg Krause; starring Steven Pasquale (Dallas), Reiko Aylesworth (Kelly), John Ortiz (Morales), Johnny Lewis (Ricky), and Kristen Hager (Jesse):

Fun fact: so far as I could tell, 'Requiem' never appears as part of the title in the actual movie. Which makes a certain amount of sense because there's very little that's Requiemesque about this production.

Aliens vs. Predator 2: Requiem (AVP2R?) surprised me by not being terrible. It's not good. But it entertained me sporadically for two hours. Its main strength is its absolute ruthlessness towards characters minor and major, and ruthlessness in its scenarios. An egg-laying Alien gets into a maternity ward. Hoo boy, is that brutal both in what's shown and what's implied! The Alien, actually a Predator-Alien hybrid, can lay multiple eggs out of its mouth. Ha ha! That's some grotesque stuff! Those mothers and fetuses are totally screwed!

And there's more where that came from. 

On a television screen, the action is sometimes so dark as to be incomprehensible. That's not really a bad thing in a horror movie, though because of the darkness it took me two-thirds of the film to figure out which Alien was the ill-advised Alien/Predator hybrid. And good luck differentiating that hybrid in some scenes from the actual Predator sent to clean up the mess caused by a Predator research vessel crashing near a small town in Colorado and thus releasing a truckload of Facehuggers and that nasty hybrid.


The cast is anonymous but perfectly serviceable. British Columbia plays Colorado effectively. It's a decent time-waster and, though it' s a direct sequel to the first Aliens vs. Predator movie, one doesn't need to have seen that movie to understand this one. I do wish Robocop would get involved in these franchise crossovers, though. And Wolverine. Lightly recommended.

Man Vs. (2015)

Man Vs. (2015): written by Adam Massey and Thomas Michael; directed by Adam Massey; starring Chris Diamantopoulos: Filmed north of Guelph, Ontario, Man Vs. pits Doug Woods, a minor reality show star, against Something. Woods is filming an episode of his show in the Northern Ontario woods. It's a wilderness survival show in the tradition of so many shows on television. But then something happens, and someone or something starts stalking him. 

Man Vs. is a fairly enjoyable, straight-to-cable movie with an affable protagonist in Chris Diamantopoulos (a recurring bit on Silicon Valley as a the guy who 'invented' Internet Radio definitely shows that he has acting range). The revelation of the menace is a bit of a letdown, as these things go, though the climax manages to throw in a gratifying extra twist. But the movie does do a nice job of slow-burning the tension in its first 70 minutes or so. Recommended.