The problem with both previous Predator flicks were that there was very little high-concept. In both preceding entries (Predator and Predator 2), the Predators and the humans were on Earth.

In the first film, the Predators interrupted Arnold Schwarzenegger’s hunt for something or other, and in the sequel, they appeared in a very hot L.A. summer, getting in the way of a police investigation of some sort. In each, it is strictly humans vs. Predators.

In this new Robert Rodriguez film, things have gone 3 paces further, as the protagonists have been kidnapped to an off-world hunting preserve and there is no ‘team’ of humans working against the Predators. Rather, the 7 humans *aren’t* working together. After a short spell they recognize that the 7 of them each represent the worst kind of murderous criminal on Earth and that they have each been selected as quarry for some yet-to-be-determined agent on this new, Earth-like planet.

Rodriguez wrote an original script for Predators back in 1994, long before the AvP franchise was even conceived. To Rodriguez’s credit,Predators (1995) was conceived as a direct sequel to Predator 2.

Most interestingly, this really isn’t a Predator movie until well into the 4th reel, when the Predators finally appear. Until then, the film simply plays as a particularly good episode of The Twilight Zone, where the  hunters  of The Most Dangerous Game size each other up, before trying to do one another in. Rodriguez does a nice job here by prepending a human story to all of the glitchy, gooey and messy effects, remembering that the story should drive the effects and not vice-versa.

The most interesting aspect of this film is the ‘hands-off’ approach that Fox studio chief Tom Rothman has taken with this franchise, after his direct involvement with the ‘AvP‘ franchise. Here, Rothman has handed Rodriguez the entire Predator franchise to shoot, not in some Hollywood backlot, but on Rodriguez’s own Troublemaker Studios, out in Austin, TX. The most interesting thing is that the film works as a late addition to entire concept of Auteur filmmaking.

And a great big hats off to Adrien Brody for playing against type and to Topher Grace for making another, great, unaticipated career move.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Operation Paperclip Nazis working in criminal sanitariums off the coast of Washington State? Mind control? A WWII veteran and widower with PTSD? Visuals by David Lynch.

It’s 1951 in this film and the most unfortunate thing about Shutter Island is that Scorcese and writers Stephen Knight and Laeta Kalogridis decided that it’s okay not to make sense. They decide to just let go. Film is a visual experience and flourishes are flourishes, so why the fuck not? If your local cinemat can affor to spend $750k on a new 3D projection kit, you can sit and watch Martin Scorcese orchestrate some crazy in 2D. On Shutter Island, the Eater Eggs and Red Herrings run thick, wild and free. So wild, that you may want to pause and consider throwing a few back, before deciding which ones you want to take home to eat.

Emily Mortimer is both Rachel Saldano whom Marshals DiCaprio and Ruffalo have been sent  to find, but also a Concentration Camp victim that DiCaprio liberated Dachau back in ’44. Saldano was committed 8 years ago, after she stabbed and drowned her 3 children, but disappeared out of her cell 3 nights ago. DiCaprio and Ruffalo wake up one morning to discover that Saldano has returned.

And then Scorcese lets it all fall away, revealing that DiCaprio is, in fact a Nº 6 and he’s been lured to the island for treatment,  and that he’s apparently murdered his dead wife. It’s a brain teaser.

In the last scenes there’s an uncomfortable acceptance of roles, where DiCaprio and Ruffalo briefly acknowlege the role-playing game they’ve been involved in, before DiCaprio joins the men with the pitforks and shovels (literally!) to take his long walk off a proverbial short pier. Scorcese spares us the pier, but leaves us wondering what kind of mannerist, noir, magic realism thing we’ve just given 137 minutes of our lives to. It’s beautiful and occaisionally sublime to behold, but I somehow suspect Dennis Lahane’s novel makes more sense in print.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

The misguided mash-up that resulted in Hellraiser — in Space… by Executive producers Paul W.S. Anderson and Jeremy Bolt have now given us Alien-meets-Serenity-meets-The Descent-meets-Defying Gravity-meets-2001:A Space Odyssey-meets-The Abyss-meets-Cube-meets-Sunshine, allowing the worst aspects of each film a moment for a pirouette of inexplicability.  3 of those 7 movies had serious story problems.

Like the 4 different posters in the movie’s advertising campaign, the PR can’t seem to determine whether the movie is science-fiction, horror or something else completely. While that combination might sound somehow enervating, the fact is that where those producers missed with their horror-fied remake of Andrej Tarkovsky’s ‘Solaris’ is exactly where this duo have missed with ‘Pandorum’.Pandorum starts out well enough, with an intriguing premise — two astronauts on a long-distance, deep space exploration awake suddenly, after an unknown duration in hypersleep, the side-effect being that they have no memories of how they got where they were or what their mission is supposed to be. The problem is, that seems to be the motivation that the entire production team was using when they put this movie together.

There are no ideas in this movie, unless you’re the kind of science-fiction fan who delights in trainspotting the plagiarized source material. The movie is neither artful nor postmodern in it’s presentation. Like Event Horizon before it, Pandorum is just reheated leftovers, a serving of refried beans, some of them more than 20 years old.

The set design is pretty good, the fight choreography is difficult to follow and Dennis Quaid and Norman Reedus (Blade II, Mimic) are wasted here. Save your money and share a meal with someone you enjoy spending time with. Have a conversation.

I could go on at length, but there are only so many hours in a day and I have other business to attend to.

Rating: 0.5 out of 5 stars

Imagine a couple million dollars of filmmaking equipment, and empty studio and several tens of state-of-the-art technicians waiting on some Seattle lawyers, and you get the idea. though the film is a little more substantive than  that.

As someone who’s hasn’t played many video games in the past 20 years and been disappointed by just about every game-to-movie adaptation I’ve seen. ‘District 9′ exceeds all of the expectations I never had for ‘Halo’.

Plot-wise, ‘District’ is sort of novel because it starts with an unlikely premise — technologically advanced extraterrestrials end up marooned here on Earth, living in dire, 3rd world conditions. Strangely enough, these aliens don’t exert their prowess and take-over the planet. Somehow, they end up as an underclass here on Earth, whiling away their time in an aimless barrio in Johannesburg, as poor as any of the former bantustans living off of cat food

Why Joburg? To quote the characters on ABC’s current space-opera, Defying Gravity, “H2IK” — hell if I know. Any other storyteller would use the Joburg location to make a point — about South Africa’s apartheid history, it’s role as a former British colony or Nelson Mandela’s heroism. Unfortunately, that’s just where ‘District 9′ seems to fail. You shouldn’t pull an ornate prop or set-piece out of storage unless it’s going to serve your play in a constructive manner. Here, Johannesburg is just a city, like any other.

With all of the potential that D9‘s dystopia had to offer, it really doesn’t go anywhere. Had D9 been set in Asia somepalce, the film might have played as an metaphor for the money that the West pours into Asia year after year, only to see human rights violations  and hungry children persist.

My understanding is that director Blokamp hails from Joburg and had done a 6-minute science-fiction film, ‘Alive in Joburg‘ (film) back in 2005. ‘District 9′ is an expansion of the AiJ premise.Though the visuals are fairly impressive, I didn’t get the impression that D9 was ever intended to be a game-changer the way that ‘Close Encounters’ and ‘Star Wars’ were. 30 years ago.

Shot for only $30M, the film is a marvel of low-budget, high-end effects, but it’s still too expensive for the SyFy channel. I only wish they’d given the script another 2 weeks, to drive home an enduring story.

Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

While the franchise’s demons, the Cenobytes, appear within the film’s first 5 minutes, we only get a glimpse — they are by no means central to the story. Rather, Pinhead and the Cenobytes are simply the vehicles of hubris:The cenobytes both identify and punish those who are willing to overreach. Though the SciFi Channel insists that all genre movies reveal their creatures within the first 15 minutes, that formula — dictated by commercial requirements — is really irrelevant because ‘Hellraiser’ is an epic drama that circulates around Kirsty Cotton (Ashley Laurence) and her evil stepmother, Julia (Clare Higgins).

Indeed, writer-director Clive Barker waits over an hour to give the audience a good look at the franchise’s signature demons, the Cenobytes, specifically Pinhead. The key antagonists in the first film are really Julia and the posthumous Uncle Frank. Julia wears little makeup, and Frank little skin.

What makes ‘Hellraiser’ an effective and entertaining movie is its emphasis on character and story, rather than makeup.

Uncle Frank rises from the dead at approximately the 20-minute mark, whereupon he marches around for the next 45 minutes fully flayed and in search of skin that can only be acquired vampirically, via the victims that Julia supplies him.

Looking back, ‘Hellraiser’ really was one of the precursors to the big genre franchises that the studios are wont to get ahold of these days — you know, the one-picture spec that turns into the 3 picture franchise-project after box-office receipts cross the $120M mark. Even Mr. Barker is probably surprised that his little million dollar picture spawned seven sequels and warranted a remake.

The remake — due in either 2009 or 2010, depending on where you look — one hopes that Seraphim Films and the Weinstein Company will work toward a 3 picture story-arc and take into into account the many continuity errors of the first two movies, like the Julia-spawning mattress that somehow survived the Dresden-like house fire at the conclusion of the first movie. Though substantial time is spent on a retcon-recap at the beginning of ‘Hellraiser:Hellbound’ (1988) that one would hope that the Weinsteins would choose a capable director and take the LoTR approach.

But the real value of ‘Hellraiser’ lays not so much in its latex prosthetics and stage-blood, but the slow burn of it’s domestic taboo themes: incest, infidelity and lust. It’s not selling her soul to the Devil that’s Julia’s error, it’s her transgressive relationship to brother-in-law Frank that drives her to participate in a Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka-like serial-killing spree, to restore skin to Uncle Frank’s undead sinews. Certainly, the soap operatic Bonnie and Clyde prepending of Hellraiser that makes the first movie so effective, especially when one considers similar movies — Bernard Rose’s ‘Candyman‘ (1992) and Paul W.S. Anderson’s ‘Event Horizon‘ (1997) — and their reasons for relative mediocrity.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

*Actually, the Cenobytes do make an appearance at the 3 minute mark, but it’s dark and ambiguous — the only real concluusions viewers can draw is that they wear leather and are comfortable around medical waste.

As is the case with many of these latter-day remakes, the movie is populated by television actors cut loose from their day-jobs:The 2005 remake features Tom Welling (“Smallville”) and Maggie Grace (“Lost”), wasting Selma Blair (‘Hellboy’) in the de-emphasized role of Stevie Wayne, the lighthouse owner and disc jockey. This remake ‘updates’ the story with references to ‘Girls Gone Wild’ and other PG-13 mall-scares like Darkness Falls. Like ‘Alien (1979) the original ‘Fog’ was a decidedly R-rated with a strong female lead, aimed at an adult audience.

The original was a work of passion, as Carpenter famously re-shot a third of the original film after principle photography had wrapped, adding the John Houseman prologue to decisively frame the picture as a ghost-story. The remake was greenlit on an incomplete, 18 page draft.

Both movies take place in a picturesque seaside community — Antonio Bay, California in the original, Antonio Island, Oregon in the emake — a town founded 100 years ago, about to celebrate its centennial with parades, ticker-tape parades and a statue dedicated to its founders. But as with much of the American frontier, the community of Antonio Bay was initiated with a blood-debt that most of its current residents are unaware of.

Selma Blair’s Stevie Wayne is under-written, compared to Adrienne Barbeau’s original movie. In Carpenter’s film there is a ‘Rear Window‘ dynamic operating between Barbeau’s character and several other characters that falls flat in the remake. Whether it’s the weakness of Blair’s acting chops or Welling’s incipient stardom, the emphasis of this remake has shifted from the Barbeau character to Welling’s Nick Castle, who was little more than a supporting role in the original.

Carpenter also manages pacing better than Wainwright:The difference between the two movies occurs precisely in the gap between hearing and seeing. The remake places an emphasis on visual spectacles — fires, explosions and glass attaacks — whereas Carpenter allows characters to report violent things that have occued offscreen, creating tension without having to stage gory events until absolutely necessary.

Besides the generational shift, the remake misses the gravitas brought to the original by the participation of the mother-daughter team of and Janet Leigh and Jamie Lee Curtis. Leigh is known, of course, for her iconic roles– not only as Marion Crane in Hitchcock’s ‘Psycho‘ (1960) but also Susie Vargas in Orson Welles’ ‘Touch of Evil‘ (1958) . By 1980, Jamie Lee had become a star as the result of Carpenter’s ‘Halloween‘ (1978), but actors like John Houseman and Hal Holbrook brought a remarkable pedigree to the work of the still-young filmmaker. The remake has no strong veteran players to anchor the story.

Gone is the feminist subtext, and Rob Bottin’s superior make-up and practical effects, replaced by CGI. But Graeme Revelle score is an effective, interesting addition underserved by Cooper Layne’s finished script.

Like many of the J-horror remakes, this movie seems to want to place an emphasis on electronic gadgetry to ornament the story — camcorders, televisions and cell-phones which naturally go on the fritz as a result of proximate ghosts, but the gadgetry is a nod rather than a plot-device.

‘The Fog’ (1980):Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
‘The Fog’ (2005):Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

‘Shutter’ plays like ‘Ring 2′ ought to have. Back in 2005, I had hoped that the production team at DreamWorks would have done the smart thing and either followed the Japanese sequel or done the metatextual thing and paid homage to their source material by sending Rachel Keller East for a close-encounter with kwaidon — Japanese ghost stories. Unfortunately that didn’t happen.

Shutter ’08 is good at explaining the mechanics of Asian horror, but little better than other American remakes. It may even be too late to resurrect American interest in the import subgenre.

The 2004 Thai original and American remake are almost identical, save for the fact that in the American version protagonists Ben and Jane are visiting Japan from the United States, whereas the original’s Tun and Jane are Bangkok locals. Ben-Tun is, in both cases, a photographer with a past. Thai-Jane is a student, while American-Jane is a schoolteacher. American-Jane and Ben are newlyweds, while Jane and Tun are presumably just dating.

It’s fairly clear that the original Thai Shutter of ’04 was inspired by the Japanese Ringu franchise — the Hideo Nakata film that gained popularity in Japan, then spun off into 2 sequels and a South Korean television series. Aside from the stringy-haired ghost, there’s a moment when an iconic, Sadako-like figure starts to rise from a darkroom sink.

Interestingly, it’s the original version of this viral ghost-story that raises the ante for Western audiences by tipping its hat to Chris Marker’s ‘La Jettée‘. Though it’s just a little didactic, there’s a good moment in the original film where student-Jane’s instructor explains that “photography does not reproduce reality. It depends on how the image is framed. What is revealed, [and] what is concealed. Your perspective is critical.”

The original film features more inventive camera work and better production design despite the re$ource$ the American version had going for it. Because their Shutter entered the field at the end of a wave of Asian tech-virus horror movies, Directors Pisanthanakun and Wongpoom really are able to improve upon everybody else’s stories of haunted cell phones and watering holes: Spirit Photography has been a cult fascination throughout the world since the 19th c. What better ay to populate an Asian horror film than with a technology or phenomenon that Westerners might already be familiar with?

Moreover, Pisanthanakun and Wongpoom borrow numerous Western ideas ideas about photography and it’s aesthetics as plot-points — specifically, the heretofore mentioned matters of framing and perspective. But this effort at staging and blocking doesn’t make it into Luke Dawson’s screenplay adaptation . Curiously, there’s a Larry Craig moment in the original that might have entertained American audiences but for some reason it didn’t make the American cut of the film.

One thing I have noticed about these movies, especially in the Thai original is the attention to shot composition. Here, more than most American movies, the original emphasizes shot composition because you’re constantly surveying the background for ghostly apparitions. Directors Pisanthanakun and Wongpoom go one further than any of the directors that preceded them by paying homage to both Nakata and Stanley Kubrick in closing pursuit scene absent from Dawson’s adaptation.

Another nice invention by Pisanthanakun and Wongpoom is a sequence where Jane assembles her snapshots only to discover that they’re haunted by a zoetroped ghost in an image sequence. This is repeated in the American remake, but of course the pictures here are in color.

For all of the ‘Ringu’, ‘Grudge’, ‘Pulse’ and ‘One Missed Call’ rip-offs that have been projected onto American screens these past few years, the original ‘Shutter’ has the best ending, something that surprising and thoughtful, but aped in the American version. See it, but see the original.

Original Thai version Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
Japanese-directed U.S. remake Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

A list of all 79 of the ‘banned’ movies is available here, but as we all know, because something is banned it doesn’t mean that college kids and high schoolers aren’t going to figure out a way to smuggle the item home from the Continent or a summer vacation in the US.

For some reason, each of the 79 movies on the VNP list got the dander of right-wing British pols like Mary Whitehouse, a member of the British equivalent of America’s Moral Majority. Importantly, Whitehouse was interested in prohibiting all sorts of ‘morally degrading’ crap like cannibal zombie movies and ethically ambiguous junk like ‘I Spit On Your Grave‘ (1978). Well, the Video Recordings Act 1984, which was all but irrelevant by 1997 — just in time for DVDs.

‘Dead & Buried‘ a/k/a ‘Dead and Buried’ (1981) was written by Dan O’Bannon and Ron Shusett, the screenwriters better know for their 1979 hit ‘Alien‘. I should add here that Shusett and specifically O’Bannon were responsible for several other big genre his of the ;70′s, ’80′s and ’90′s, including John Carpenter’s ‘Dark Star‘ (1974), ‘Total Recall‘ (1990) and ‘Return of the Living Dead‘ (1985), so O’Bannon’s B-movie water-into-wine chops are pretty formidable, given that he was inspired by the dross of ‘Queen of Blood‘ (1962) and ‘It! The Terror from Beyond Space‘ (1958) to make ‘Alien‘ (1979). ‘Dead & Buried’ is the Shusett-O’Bannon take on the small New England town of Stephen King’s ‘The Fog’ (1980) or the seaside community of H.P. Lovecraft’s ‘Dagon‘, yet ‘Dead & Buried’ takes the high concept of the bucolic horror locale one step further.

More to the point, ‘Dead & Buried’ is a strange sort of mash-up of ‘The Stepford Wives’ and some sort of zombie movie. While that may just be a huge spoiler, the pleasure is in the execution of the thing and the pleasure of watching the whole thing play-out. The only thing that hurts Dead as a film is the 27 years of twist-ended films that have been made since 1981. As a writer myself, I can’t help but to watch Dead today and imagine the numerous ways in which the story might be updated for contemporary audiences.

Dead stars James (‘Ironside’/'Melrose Place’) Farentino as Sheriff Dan Gillis and Jack (‘Chico and the Man’) Albertson as the town Coroner-Undertaker. The typical sort of seaside horror-drama gets set up when a number of visitors to the scenic Potter’s Bluff keep turning up dead, only to have their bodies disappear from the morgue. For genre fans, the movie features early performances from both Robert Englund and Prince of Darkness‘ Lisa Blount.

It’s not quite a classic but it’s a necessary film for any self-respecting horror buff to investigate. It’s definitely a movie that warrants a second look, if not a remake.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

I used to be a King fan way, way back and read a good few of his books back in my junior HS days. I even followed some of his adaptations for a while — his adaptations from other people’s ideas and other people’s adaptations of his work — but that was before Frank Darabont started making his filmazations.

From the commercials that advertised the movie last fall, ‘The Mist’ looked as though it was going to be a King-remake of John Carpenter’s ‘The Fog‘ (1980), which was entirely unnecessary and redundant, considering the widely panned ‘Fog’ remake of 2005.

Lo and behold, ‘The Mist’ was based on a 1980 novella — early, as far as King’s career is concerned — and not necessarily one of his more apparent/glaring ripoffs, since ‘The Fog’ only appeared on screens in 1980. That, and the ‘mist’ in this case inexplicably provides cover for extra-dimensional insects and flying lizards, as opposed to the ghosts of dead pirates. King’s ‘inspiration’ for ‘The Mist’ was more likely one of the old EC comics — you know, the ones about zombies and coprophages — that created an uproar among politicians and lead to the creation of the Comics Code Authority.

Where ‘The Mist’ falls down is the writing — with all of the crappy, Red-State themed teen-slasher ‘Deliverance’-type flicks we’ve seen over the past couple of years and the ‘War on Terror’ fear-mongering, you’d think that Darabont could mine something more involving than this Cold War-inspired invasion flick. But that’s precisely where Darabont leaves it, with a Twilight Zone-type twist ending, rather than a resolution of the many Red State vs. Blue State conflicts that he creates on the central set-piece of his supermarket.

As an end calculus, I think that Darabont opened up too many worm-cans: He may have been faithful to the King novella, and masterful about eliciting the conflicts between his supermarket protagonists — hats off to Macia Gay Harden as the crazy church-lady — but the insects, the scifi element and the implied social commentary (or lack thereof) just didn’t hold together at the end.

That, and he kills off both Alexa Davalos’ and Andre Braugher’s characters too early.

Rating: 2 out of 5 stars

Numerous reviewers have referred to ‘Cloverfield’ is horror for the Facebook generation, “because it’s not really happening unless it’s on videotape”. But to be more exact and closer to the point, ‘Cloverfield’ is authentic J-horror for Facebookii Americanus — J-horror made by and for narcissistic, web-ready American audiences.

What goes unremarked in J-horror fandom (that’s Japanese-horror for you non-initiates) and it’s American remakes is the frequent, petty school-kid antics that often form the subtext of these films in their original form – ‘The Ring‘ (or ‘Ringu’ the original Japanese title) is awash with petty, self-interested schoolkids trying to one-up one another in their grade-school social pecking orders. As much can be said of the original versions of ‘One Missed Call‘, ‘Ringu’ and the Pang Brothers’ original version of ‘The Eye‘.

In each of the original versions of these films, the narcissism of the principals virtually percolates off of the screen (or television, depending on whether it’s the big or small screen you watched it on). But because the originals are foreign films and we don’t have an intimate knowledge of these cultures, we take all of the gadgets, the obsessive text messaging and the school uniforms for granted. But what JJ Abrams and director Matt Reeves have done with ‘Cloverfield’ is modify the Japanese horror-movie formula very subtlely to reflect American anxiety, rather than those of SE Asia and Japan.

What Abrams, Reeves and writer Drew Goddard have done is successfully translate the anxiety of those J-horror movies to the American screen; what they’ve missed is the relative sophistication of American audiences as the movie’s emphasis on the hand-held camera (or often in J-horror flicks, camera-phone) stretches credulity. From the first sign of trouble, Reeves and Goddard insist that the camera remain in Turk’s hand and that Turk and other protagonists never appeal to any authorities – police, firefighters, etc. – for any guidance or assistance until a moment 3/4 through when the small band of friends literally trips over some soldiers making their rounds through the streets of a Cloverfield-ravaged Manhattan.

Is the message that Abrams, Reeves and Goddard trying to communicate about YouTube and MySpace kids too obsessed with internet celebrity to put down the camcorder to participate in a real-life crisis? Possibly. Or is it that celebrity trumps common-sense these days? Perhaps it’s just the legacy of low-budget hits like ‘Blair Witch’ and ‘Saw’ that forbid the story from breaking out of the first-person environs of the principals, but 40+ years of American disaster-cum-horror movies have taught American audiences to expect more from the movies they pay to see.

On the other hand, ‘Cloverfield’ seems to mine a lot of 9-11 PTSD for many of it’s chills – the head of the Statue of Liberty laying in the streets of Lower Manhattan; random mortar fire, an invisible enemy? — It all sounds like an average day in the Green Zone, rather than an authentic piece of entertainment.

I haven’t gotten around to reading this elaborate interview with Director Reeves, but one would hope that there’s evidence of greater forethought over there, as ‘Cloverfield’ otherwise ranks as just another virally-hyped disappointment that misses its mark — the camcorder gig is okay for the first 10 minutes or so, but at the 20 minute mark it became strained and I started to wonder if this exploration of this voyeuristic subculture wasn’t the *real* horror story.

Further, I can’t help but observe how much the Manhattan of Cloverfield must resemble downtown Baghdad and Fallujah at this point and reflect the Japanese fear of American occupation and cultural domination at the end of WWII.

If Abrams was missing the rubber-suit movies of his youth, he didn’t quite honor their memory with ‘Coverfield’, unless he intends the headless Liberty as a portent of our future relationship with terror.

Rating: 3 out of 10 stars