[REVIEW] The Expendables
I will freely admit that I’m a Sylvester Stallone fan. When I was a much younger man I used to groove on Rambo: First Blood, Part II and Rocky IV with a perhaps inappropriate level of intensity. Cobra was the last film of Stallone’s ’80s period that I can honestly say I enjoyed. The other stuff (the comedies especially) can go to hell.
Stallone’s had something of a renaissance in recent years, starting with the excellent Rocky Balboa and continuing into the bloody, uncompromising Rambo. So I looked forward to his next venture, The Expendables, with some excitement. Now that he’d done such a great job closing the books on his two most famous characters, what would he do with something original?
I felt even more favorably about The Expendables when cast details began to emerge. Favorite names from action movies current and past surfaced. Jason Statham. Jet Li. Dolph Lundgren. “Death From Above” himself! This was going to be good stuff.
I will confess I didn’t go out the first weekend and see The Expendables. I tend not to do that with movies, so they win or lose their box office race without my help. The Expendables hit #1, which was definitely good news for Stallone and Company, but in the extra time that lapsed I began to hear things about the movie that gave me pause.
[REVIEW] Alien vs. Hunter
I owe the makers of Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem a heartfelt apology. You see, in my review of that film, I described Requiem as a very, very bad movie that I would recommend to no one. I said this, now I understand, because I lacked the appropriate context to make such a statement. You see, I hadn’t yet seen Alien vs. Hunter.
I can say without fear of contradiction that you will see no worse an Alien or Predator or Alien/Predator knockoff than Alien vs. Hunter. Oh, you can look as hard as you can and turn over a lot of stones, but you aren’t going to find something equally bad. Not even close. Those folks who laughingly discount Plan 9 From Outer Space as being the worst film ever made have not seen Alien vs. Hunter, or they would surely change their minds. It really is that awful.
To a certain extent this is to be expected. Alien vs. Hunter comes from production house The Asylum, whose primary claim to fame is their capacity to churn out “mockbusters,” movies that hew closely to the model of some popular film title, only with a tiny fragment of the budget and little attention paid to the finer points of moviemaking. So you get stuff like Snakes on the Train or Transmorphers. I’m not sure who they’re fooling, but their stuff does tend to show up on SyFy a lot.
So Alien vs. Hunter has a strike against it from the get go. Maybe even several strikes, as the production is likely to be as abysmal as the screenplay. Populate the cast with has-beens and never-weres and you’re ready to start filming a microscopically budgeted knockoff of Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem. I guess.
Top Five Blu-Ray Discs I’m Gonna Buy
I watch a lot of movies, as anyone who’s perused the last few weeks’ worth of blog entries should be able to tell. I have a vast collection of DVDs, many of which I’ve never taken out of the wrapper, but that doesn’t stop me from thinking about what I’ll buy for the next shiny thing: Blu-Ray.
We’ve had a giant, 1080p HDTV dominating our living room for a couple of years now, and we’ve only really scratched the surface of its capabilities. We get HD programming through our cable provider, but when it comes to prerecorded entertainment we’re still watching upconverted standard resolution DVDs. Which are nothing to sneeze at, I should say; the picture is very clear and it’s obvious we’re squeezing every line of resolution possible out of those discs.
But still I crave more, more, more resolution. Which brings us to this small list of five Blu-Ray discs I’m gonna buy once I finally cave in and get a Blu-Ray player. Because you know it’s going to happen.
1. Blade Runner. Every time I get a new piece of equipment capable of playing video or audio, the first thing I run through it is Blade Runner, either the movie or the soundtrack. So it goes without saying that I would want Blade Runner for this purpose. And one of the nice things about the particular issue of the movie I want is that it includes all the extant versions of the picture. I happen to like different things about different releases so this is an excellent way to have that all under one roof, so to speak.
[REVIEW] Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem
Holy moley does this movie suck. I’m not even sure I have it in me to spend 500 words talking about much it sucks, but I’m going to give it my best shot. I owe Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem no less.
I said yesterday that Alien vs. Predator was a well-intentioned semi-failure of a film that never rose to its own potential. Despite that, I kind of like it and will probably watch it again. I’ve seen Requiem twice now and I can say without fear of contradiction that I will never watch it again. Only viewing the movie with the commentary of Tom Woodruff, Jr. and Alec Gillis on made the film tolerable the second time through. It’s just that bad.
The movie begins pretty much right where Paul W.S. Anderson’s left off. For those of you who’ve seen that film, you know that it ends with a chestburster emerging from the dead body of the lead Predator, displaying some of the traits of the Predator already. What happens then is actually pretty stupid, but then you can say that of most of Requiem. Anyway, somehow the chestburster gets aboard a Predator ship that’s headed back to Earth for reasons unknown. Following the rapid development cycle I complained about in the last film, the PredAlien matures to full size in the blink of an eye and kills everyone aboard the ship, forcing a crash landing in the mountains of Colorado. And did I mention that the ship is inexplicably loaded with facehuggers? Well it is.
What follows is a slow infestation of a small town by Aliens, led by the goofy-looking PredAlien. And when I say goofy-looking, I mean that. The PredAlien looks like someone’s Alien knock-off for a movie like Alien vs. Hunter and it never looks good under any lighting or at any point during the entire film.
