Prey (2007)

This movie made me wonder what I'd find more horrifying: being stalked by a pack of man-eating lions, or being stuck in a car with a whining teenage girl.

Prey is a 2007 film directed by Darrell Roodt and starring Peter Weller and Bridget Moynahan.

When the opening scene of Prey showed, in graphic detail, actual documentary footage of a bunch of female lions dragging a zebra to the ground and going for the kill, I hoped I was in store for something truly horrifying, and perhaps more importantly, bold and original.

What I got was a corny family Drama (that's not a typo, this is drama with a capital D…) with some man eating lions and meany tribesmen thrown in (the latter almost as an afterthought).

The Newman family (Peter 'Robocop' Weller, Bridget Moynahan and two snotty brats) are in Africa. While Tom (Weller) is there for work, the wife and kids decide to take a relaxing safari to see some wild animals and great scenery. Unfortunately, their dipshit guide decides to go "off the beaten track", and winds up mauled by a lion when he and the annoying son go for a whizz. This of course leaves Mommy and the kids stranded, surrounded by wild lions, who see nothing more than a meal wrapped in a Jeep. After no success with the local bushmen, Daddy decides to venture off into the scrub (with a lunatic the locals avoid) to track down the family himself, and this leads to....yadda yadda you get the idea (even non-jaded filmgoers will have no trouble predicting the outcome of this film).

With such a good premise you'd think it'd be hard to screw it up. But somehow, director and co-writer Darrell Roodt, and writer Beau Bauman manage to do just that.

You see, Mommy isn’t really Mom, she's "Step Mom", and that’s where the Drama comes in. The 14 year old girl resents her, and decides that hey, this is as good a time as any to discuss some issues with her. Are you yawning yet? Don't worry, you soon will be.

The lion attacks are less than impressive. We get the obligatory "Monster-POV" shots, some CGI blood spatters and zero suspense. Then, when Step Mommy braves the outside to retrieve the car keys from the dead guide, you think, well, they're safe now. Just turn the Jeep around and go back the way you came. Lions are pretty cluey but their intelligence stops short of being able to, you know, open car doors.

But no, of course this doesn't happen because it makes too much sense. Step Mommy panics, floors it, and drives like a blind monkey straight into a ditch, leaving them stranded again in a even worse predicament than before.

I start clock-watching during horror movies when the main characters do things that are so idiotic your sympathy for them flies out the nearest window. Step Mommy's suicidal drive is a case in point. It reeks of lazy writing, and this movie is full of it.

The later scenes with the African tribesmen attempt to inject a bit of tension into a failing movie, but even a tangent can't save this film.

Prey could have been very cool. The premise is not that original but in horror films, there's some predictability that works. This film doesn’t. For a film about a family trapped by inhospitable desert and hunted by wild animals, there's a distinct lack of tension. Every time there can be a rampant cliché, there is. And the ending had me stop just short of throwing my remote at the screen. If you're brave enough to watch it through, you'll see what I mean.

Obviously some effort went into the production which was not wasted. The real lions featured here are magnificent creatures, and they are obviously well-trained. Bridget Moynahan turns in a fairly solid performance despite the lacklustre script. The cinematography by Michael Brierly is actually not bad, despite a sepia-tone in an effort to create a sun drenched look.

But sadly the movie is just pretty awful. The lion attack scene in the historical adventure flick Mountains of the Moon crams more tension into about 30 seconds of screen time than this movie does in all its 90 minutes.

If I'm ever trapped with these idiots I think I'll bail out of the Jeep and take my chances with the lions.

Ghoulies (1984)

I knew I was in trouble when I looked up Ghoulies on a website and the first keyword that came up was 'toilet'.

Ghoulies is a 1984 horror comedy directed by Luca Bercovici and starring Peter Liapis and Lisa Pelikan.

Ordinarily any film that features a pair of demonic midgets would be guaranteed to scary the holy shit out of me, but this film just left me wanting to bang my head against something solid. 

Ghoulies is a pretty poor excuse for any kind of film, much less a horror. I mean, for one thing, the ghoulies are peripheral characters at best. Some blonde sorcerer guy is the actual movie monster of the film. What a colossal let down. I was expecting a cheap version of Gremlins, or some decent gore, or at the very least a nice pair of naked breasts to look at, but this movie had none of that.

This is supposed to be a horror-comedy. I think the first thing you should do if you're going to put the word 'comedy' anywhere near a film, is make it funny. It's about as funny as a case of gastro. Before the ghoulies appeared in the film I found myself examining the DVD case wondering if somehow some other film had ended up in the box by mistake. But no. The movie's just shit.

And to make matters worse, the ghoulies are cute, not slimy and gross. I wanted to trap one and take him home as a pet. 

And at the end of the day, it's just plain boring. I was begging to be scared, or shocked, or even mildly entertained, but as the minutes ticked by I realized that hope was forlorn.

I must admit I did enjoy the freaky clown though. Best acting in the entire film, and I always find clowns freaky. But any movie that makes me start absently humming "I gotta wear shades" can never be counted among my favourites. I'm referring of course to the stoner idiot who never takes his off. People that wear sunglasses indoors should be shot.

The sorcerer boy is Jonathan (Peter Liapis). He and his girlfriend Rebecca (Lisa Pelikan) have just moved into his late father's mansion, which Jonathan has inherited. It seems Daddy was a Satanist who liked to perform magic rituals in the basement, so naturally Jonathan has picked up this little genetic anomaly, and he begins to do it himself. No sooner has he barked a few spells he's conjured some puppets and Daddy's even back from the dead too. Oh, and he also conjures two midgets, as you do.

Anyway, a bunch of Jonathan and Rebecca's friends die in the ensuing chaos before he has a show down with his sorcerer Dad and saves the day. Verdict: watch Gremlins instead.

Note: this is an updated version of a review I posted for Ghoulies on Best-Horror-Movies.com. The original can be seen here: http://www.best-horror-movies.com/review?name=ghoulies-1985-review 

The Postman (1997)

Kevin Costner swaps Waterworld for dry land, drapes himself in the American flag, and fails spectacularly to save humanity.

The Postman is a 1997 epically boring film starring Kevin Costner, Olivia Williams, and Larenz Tate.

I’m not entirely sure what killed Kevin Costner’s career. But the Postman certainly couldn’t have helped. In a nutshell – it’s a terrible film.

For starters, it goes forever. Seriously. Some films seem long. The Postman seems like it’s never going to end. Like you’re going to get stuck in some Groundhog Day-like time warp where whenever you turn on a television, anywhere, the Postman will still be on.

It truly is woeful. The plot is mostly incomprehensible and the few times it makes any kind of sense you realise how incredibly silly it is.

It’s 2013 and a nuclear war or whatever has wiped out civilisation as we knew it. Costner plays a drifter, basically his character from Waterworld but on land who gets captured by a group of survivors but he escapes and takes refuge in a jeep where he finds the skeleton of a mailman and a mail bag. He decides to deliver the letters and this somehow leads him to decide he needs to save humanity and restore order to the universe. Or some shit like that. Seriously. I didn’t make that up. That really is the plot.

In order to be a successful action movie hero, I think it’s probably necessary to have a fairly massive ego. But Kevin Costner’s must be planetary in size. Like, cosmic.

Don't get me wrong, I don't mind him as an actor. I think I just prefer him in films he hasn't directed himself. But after his huge success with Dances with Wolves (which is a very good film) he seemed to get locked into this ‘directing himself as the hero’ spiral where every movie he did had to feature him saving humanity. First came Waterworld (which is not an awful film. It’s bad, it’s just not as bad as people think it is), and then hot on the heels of that came this steaming pile.

Usually I can find some merit even in the most God-awful movies. But there’s literally nothing to like about the Postman. The ‘post-apocalyptic’ world is so badly done it seems like nothing has changed except people ride horses instead of drive cars. The acting is all over the place. The story (such as it is) falls to pieces like a matchstick house the second you give it any kind of serious thought, there’s plot holes the size of canyons, the music is hopelessly mismatched to the scenes it scores, and the script is like one of those ambling stories you’d write in high school for an assignment where you had to write a certain number of words but got stuck at like, 300. So you’d just make up stupid tangents and repeat things over and over again until you got to 1000 words. It’s drivel. It’s clichéd, and so over the top that it might have worked as satire if it’s hand wasn’t firmly over its heart the entire time.

I really want to stop but I can’t. This film is sort of what I imagine the result would be if some redneck American Republicans got together, got loaded on bourbon, and started fantasizing about what would happen if ‘we was runnin things’. For one thing, people in Costner's growing band of Merry Postmen keep going on about the ‘Reformed Congress of the United States’, whatever the fuck that's supposed to mean.

In directing this film, Costner committed a cardinal sin – he tried to appeal to absolutely everyone. We’ve got humour (albeit laboured), a romantic subplot, and loads of emotionally manipulative scenes that I think are supposed to induce clapping and cheering, but instead I found myself dry reaching and wondering how long this stupid film had to go. I wanted to be able to laugh at these scenes, in a so-bad-it’s-good way, but I just couldn’t. In trying to appeal to all and offend no-one, the film just winds up being incredibly unappealing in every way.

It's staggering to think how bad this film is when compared to Costner’s directorial debut Dances with Wolves.  The Postman was a shitty idea and it’s made worse by being poorly executed.

Three hours of my life (wait…I think it might actually still be going) that I really, really wish I could get back.

Iron Eagle (1986)

Lamar from Revenge of the Nerds and a bunch of precocious teenagers rescue Tim Thomerson from certain death at the hands of Poirot!

Iron Eagle is a 1986 film directed by Sidney J Furie and starring Jason Gedrick and Louis Gossett Jr.

Even for an action movie made smack bang in the middle of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, Iron Eagle pushes the boundaries of ridiculousness. It shamelessly rides on the coat tails of the far superior Top Gun, it shits all over a fictional Middle Eastern country, the action scenes are haphazardly staged and filmed (seriously, don’t attempt a drinking game where you take a shot every time there’s a continuity error – you’ll die of alcohol poisoning), and the story is far-fetched in the extreme.

Yet I can’t help but love the shit out of this movie. I think it’s quite possibly the greatest thing on the face of the Earth.

Strangely, the most well-filmed action sequence is one of the least important but most ridiculous. It’s right at the start, where they establish what a good pilot Doug Masters (Jason Gedrick) is by having him race a dirt bike in his Cessna. Yes, that’s not a typo. Plane vs motorbike. It’s actually a really good sequence, featuring a light aircraft being flown at insanely low altitude through canyons. It’s so well filmed it doesn’t jazz with the later flying sequences featuring jet fighters. They are so different it’s almost as if one director filmed this sequence, then read the rest of the script and ran away.

What I love most about this film is that despite the idiocy of the script it tries valiantly to be sincere. Doug’s father (the always awesome Tim Thomerson) has been shot down and taken prisoner. So we get these hopelessly emotional scenes at the start where Doug pleads with some generic Army guy that the suits in Washington are doing nothing to save his good old Dad from the clutches of a generic Middle Eastern dictator (played by none other than David ‘Poirot’ Suchet), a guy who is obviously based on Ghaddafi (or however you spell it).

What makes these silly scenes so much funnier is that right after one of them, Doug decides to attend his high school prom so we get some woeful scene featuring Lamar from Revenge of the Nerds busting some moves on the dance floor (the film is also casually racist – only the black guy knows how to dance).

So of course because the Government is powerless to intervene, Doug and his loyal band of teenage army brats must take matters into their own hands. They are assisted by the always reliable Louis Gossett Jr, playing Chappy, a retired army pilot whose motivation for wanting to help seems to boil down to some teary, badly-written scene where he reminisces about some kid he saw killed in Vietnam…or something. Those damn rice paddies have a lot to answer for.

This leads to a montage where we see the kids breaking into various air force bases and classified documents rooms to get some blueprints and maps and also somehow manage to steal two fully armed F-16 fighter jets. They make it seem as easy as chucking some packets of gum down your pants and waddling out of the corner store. There’s even a scene where two of them, dressed in some kind of weird Village People disguises, distract some guards at the base by throwing fire crackers into a 44 gallon drum. And no, they aren’t killed in a hail of machine gun fire, it’s played for a gag.

The whole ‘planning stage’ of the rescue operation is pretty much played for laughs. They kick about in a clubhouse, play tricks on hapless army guys, do silly voices and then all of a sudden the film shifts back into serious mode as Doug and Chappy take to the skies.

Oh I need to backtrack to one of my other favourite things about this film. You see, Doug is only a good pilot as long as he has 80’s rock music blasting on his Walkman. Again, that’s not a typo and no, I’m not kidding. He can’t fire missiles straight unless he has his music on. It’s possibly the greatest way I’ve ever seen songs shoehorned into an action film.

And speaking of tapes… Chappy’s made these ‘motivational’ tapes for Doug to listen to on the flight over. What is hilarious is that he seems to have made one for every possible eventuality. There’s one in the event of his death. There’s one for if they make it. One for if they don’t. One for when he’s rescued his dad. I just picture Doug fumbling with them in the cockpit, squinting at the labels Chappy’s put on them *click* IF YOU GET SHOT DOWN “uhhh dammit wrong tape!” They all pretty much say the same thing anyway: Don’t worry, it’ll be all right, have faith in yourself, kid. Chappy’s like a cross between Mr Miyagi and Yoda.

And getting back to continuity errors, one of my favourites comes toward the end when Doug decides to blow up one of Poirot’s oil refineries. You see him fly over what is quite obviously a water plant. And for some reason this makes Poirot agree to let Tim Thomerson go, to meet Doug on a tarmac. Of course Poirot thinks he’s setting a trap because Doug will obviously have to land in order to pick up his dad, but never fear as this gives Doug a chance to use his secret weapon: some ridiculous bomb called the “Hades” which puts up some kind of wall of fire between him and bad guys so he can take off.

The film just keeps piling on the stupidity. We see the bad guys rip tarps off some anti-aircraft guns. It’s edited and scored like an “uh oh” moment, but Doug then blows the guns up before they have a chance to do anything.

Ah heck, I love this film. I love its blatant geographical and continuity errors (look out for Doug’s dad’s plane at the start – missiles loaded under its wings appear and disappear at random). I love its shameless pro-Americanism (at one point Lamar even remarks that the bad guys don’t stand a chance because ‘Ronny Ray-Gun’ is in charge). I love the silly attempts at emotion and Chappy’s self-help tapes. And I love that the bad guy is a British guy playing a Middle Eastern guy speaking with a Latin accent. Jesus I miss the 80's.

Gladiator (2000)

Russell Crowe tries to change his name to 'Gladiator', Richard Harris makes Joaquin Phoenix mad, and Germans never got the 'don't kill the messenger' memo.

Gladiator is a 2000 epic directed by Ridley Scott and starring Russell Crowe, Joaquin Phoenix and Djimon Hounsou.

The best part of owning the ‘Extended Edition’ blu ray of Gladiator for me is the introduction by Ridley Scott. I find it hilarious. I don’t think he could sound less enthusiastic about it. The entire speech just screams ‘Universal made me do this’. And Universal, as if as some kind of weird punishment, makes this introduction impossible to avoid. It automatically plays every time you watch the film.

The fact the extended edition always begins with the director telling you that he got it right the first time ends up being remarkably apt, because he did. None of the extra scenes really add much to the film. It certainly isn’t ruined by the added 17 minutes or so, but the theatrical cut is a great example of it being unnecessary to fix something that isn’t broken.

Anyway, whatever version you prefer, Gladiator is an excellent film.

The opening battle sequence, where Maximus’ (Crowe) army confronts the Germanic warriors, is expertly staged and superbly filmed and scored. Beginning any ‘epic’ with the massive set piece battle has become somewhat of a cliché these days, but it began here, and it hasn’t really been topped. I love the lead up to the action. From Maximus quietly watching the sparrow launch itself off a branch amidst the smoke of the burning oil, to the way his dog runs alongside his horse as he gallops through the lines of his men, to the ‘message’ the Germans deliver in the form of the Roman messenger being returned minus his head, I love everything about it.

One of the things I like most about this film is the fact it pretty much lacks subtlety of any kind. Almost everything about Gladiator is overt. Ridley Scott directs the film as spectacle in the image of the old greats like Ben Hur and Spartacus and The Fall of the Roman Empire. The visuals of ancient Rome, despite being a bit turn-of-the-century clunky CGI, are really impressive. Scott's trademark attention to period detail is on fine display.

And I like that Russell Crowe gives Maximus some depth. He begins the film the honourable, revered general leading his men into battle, then becomes the bitter vengeful slave and finally the balls-to-the-wall “are you not entertained?” gladiator.

I do like one of the film’s only moments of subtlety though – it’s Maximus' quiet conversation with Emperor Marcus Aurelius (Richard Harris) at the beginning, where he describes his home in Spain. Crowe is excellent in this scene - he is by turns stoic and longing.

The other performance I like is Joaquin Phoenix as Commodus. Phoenix is a very impressive actor. His Commodus is evil in the best way – he’s unpredictable. He’s one of those people you’d feel really uncomfortable being alone with. You could never relax because he always looks like he’s just about to unhinge and start ranting and snapping like a rabid animal. He plays some scenes like a hurt sheep, but there’s always the menace of the wolf lurking just beneath the surface. He actually benefits from one of the scenes added to the extended edition – where he confronts a marble bust of his dead father and begins hacking at it with a sword. He's both pathetic and incredibly threatening.

All the performances are pretty spot on. I particularly like Maximus’ friend, Cicero (Tommy Flanagan). He’s that quietly loyal-to-the-bitter-end sidekick to the main hero that I always enjoy in films like this.

Anyway, this film will go down in movie history as accomplishing two things – firstly, it made Russell Crowe a star. And secondly, it made swords and sandals epics cool again. Both of which were more than welcome with me. Two and a half hours well spent.

The Tree of Life (2011)

Sean Penn talks to himself because Brad Pitt is his dad and he’s messed up because his little brother just died…okay….wait a sec, now there’s galaxies exploding and some dinosaurs…did I just lean on the remote or something?

The Tree of Life is a 2011 film directed by Terrence Malick and starring Brad Pitt, Jessica Chastain and Sean Penn.

I first saw this film on a date with my then-girlfriend. About half way through she asked me “what is this movie about?” I meant to reply, “I don’t know,” but I had a Freudian-slip and instead said, “I don’t care.”

And that pretty much sums up my reaction to this film.

The best scenes by far are the ones involving Brad Pitt’s character, “Mr O’Brien”, interacting with his three sons. These are without doubt the scenes that make the most sense. I like that Mr O’Brien is never portrayed as an ogre. He is very hard on his boys but you understand why. He wants them to grow up strong, and not abandon their dreams like he did. You also get the feeling that this is just how he was raised he has no other notions of what a man or a father should be.

This brings me to the central theme of the film which is Nature vs Grace. Mr O’Brien represents Nature, while their soft, welcoming mother, played by Jessica Chastain, represents Grace. At the beginning of the film we’re told Nature or Grace is a choice, however as the film goes on we realise it’s not that simple (nothing about this film is simple…but I’ll get to that in a bit). Eldest son Jack (Hunter McCracken, later played as an adult by Sean Penn) says toward the end of the film that influences from his mother and father “wrestle inside him” and always will.

I think my initial mistake was trying to figure this film out. Once my brain recovered from the ensuing meltdown I decided to watch it again but treat it like a painting. I just sort of looked at it, and didn’t really try to make much sense of what was happening before my eyes. I enjoyed it much more this way.

That said I don’t actually enjoy this film that much. The biggest issue for me is that by making the film so incredibly obscure, Terrence Malick manages to make all the characters strangely distant. I just wasn’t invested in any of them. There’s the trademark Malick voice overs, but it has nowhere near the emotional impact of say, the soldiers meditating on life and death in The Thin Red Line. It really doesn’t have much impact at all.

I’ve heard this film referred to as ‘pretentious’, but I don’t think it is. I just think that without any kind of real narrative, it just sort of fails to achieve what it seems to set out to do. It’s actually a lot more like a really long music video than a film.

The visual stuff is all very cool and some of it is downright beautiful. But my favourite moment is actually a very small scene where Jessica Chastain is walking along a street with her sons and as she pauses for a moment, a butterfly lands on her outstretched hand. There's something really amazing and spontaneous about it. That single visual gave me a much more profound sense of Grace than any other single moment in the film.

Still, as I mentioned before, my reaction again this time around was just to sort of shrug and think “well, it looked nice, but I still just don’t care.” Terrence Malick reminds me a lot of Stanley Kubrick. If I was going to compare this film to any other, it would be 2001: A Space Odyssey. Both are oddly meditative, visually stunning, and really, really strange.

Up in the Air (2009)

George Clooney does some really awkward dance moves, the creepy stalker chick from Two and Half Men marries the disabled war veteran who beat up Robert Downey Jr in Due Date, and lots of hardworking Americans get canned.

Up in the Air is a 2009 movie directed by Jason Reitman and starring George Clooney, Vera Farmiga and Jason Bateman.

Despite being a George Clooney fan I avoided this film for a long time because I thought it was the type of movie I despise – the sort of film The Simpsons makes fun of; films about “people coming to terms with things.”

I knew the general gist – Clooney plays a man whose job (a corporate asshole hired by employers to fire people) keeps him travelling. He lives out of a suitcase, barely sees his sisters and has no attachments besides a mutually beneficial loyalty to his boss (a wonderfully sleazy Jason Bateman). I figured it was about Clooney’s character finally ‘finding his feet’ and the woman of his dreams yadda yadda.

And for the most part that’s what this film is. It’s predictable, sometimes corny, rarely laugh-out-loud funny, but watchable due to Clooney and Vera Farmiga, who plays Alex; a woman seemingly as vacuous as Clooney with whom he begins a casual relationship.

But then it redeems itself at the end when it has Clooney doing the ‘coming to terms with things’ moment – showing up on Alex's doorstep. It’s set up like a happy ever after moment but instead he’s greeted with the cold reality that she is married with kids and has been lying to him.
I especially like the way she essentially ‘fires’ him in the same passive aggressive way he’s been firing people throughout the film.

The film has a really obvious metaphor that I would normally pretentiously sneer at, but this time it actually made me laugh (maybe it was the sleep medication I was on – which clearly wasn’t working). After spruiking idiotic self-help seminars on how to ‘empty the backpack’ of your life – free yourself from the baggage of friends, family, and possessions – Clooney’s character is forced to carry around a cheesy cardboard cut-out of his sister and her fiancé that juts out of his carefully packed carry on suitcase (she’s asked him to take lame tourist selfies with it at various landmarks he visits on his travels). The metaphor is as subtle as a knee to the groin, but director Jason Reitman somehow makes it work. I guess growing up with Ivan Reitman as your dad would instil a certain deftness at juggling sentimentality and comedy.

What I liked most about the film was that Clooney’s character essentially doesn’t change. His character arc is a full 360 – he ends the film the way he began; groundless and happy to be. The film essentially employs the rationale that made Seinfeld so great – the philosophy that good comedy should have ‘no hugging and no learning’. Works for me. Two sleep-deprived hours well spent.