Sci-Fi In July: Alien Vs. Predator (2004)

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Alien (1979) is one of the greatest science fiction/horror movies ever made. Predator (1987) is, well, it isn’t the greatest anything, but it is a ridiculous bit of 1980s sci-fi action elevated by some fine direction by John McTiernan and some charismatic performances by its stacked cast (including Arnold Schwarzenegger, Carl Weathers, Jesse Ventura, and Bill Duke).

Dark Horse Comics obtained the rights to both franchises and began releasing separate stories from them. In 1989, some genius decided to combine them and created the first Alien Versus Predator mashup. There are a lot of comics, and I’ve not read any of them, so I can’t comment intelligently. My understanding is that the Predators, at some point, found some Alien eggs and have been breeding them ever since. With the intent of periodically releasing them so that they can be hunted.

A quick primer if you’ve never seen any of the films. A Predator is a technologically advanced alien species that flies to various planets and hunts the native species for sport. The Aliens are Xenomorphs, incredibly dangerous, but not particularly advanced, creatures with acid for blood.

There are numerous films in both franchises, and two crossover movies. The crossovers got terrible reviews and are generally considered some of the worst films in either franchise, which is why I’ve avoided watching them for so long. I found a cool DVD boxed set at Goodwill the other day that contains the first four Alien films, two Predator movies, and both of the crossovers. And here we are.

For the first thirty minutes, Alien vs Predator creates a promising setup. Wealthy industrialist Charles Weyland (Lance Henriksen) (the Weyland-Yutani corporation features heavily in the Alien franchise) discovers a massive pyramid structure buried some 2,000 feet below the surface of a tiny island off the coast of Antarctica.

Weyland gathers a bunch of smart people, and they investigate. I love a good story where a group of specialists investigates something mysterious and discovers monsters, or ghosts, or aliens. I can completely get behind that in a film.

The difficulty of an Alien/Predator mashup is that they are both aliens. Big, scary monsters. The Xenomorphs are basically killer animals that can’t communicate in any real way. The Predators canonically speak a non-human language that is never translated (at least not in the films). Making an interesting story with just these two creatures would be difficult. One likes to be able to relate to at least one character in a story.

I really wish they’d make that film, though. They always add humans into the mix, and humans just muck up your Alien/Predator mash-up. They don’t get developed well, and for the most part, they just become cannon fodder for the monsters. I think you could make a really good AVP film without any humans at all.

Here’s where things get stupid. Our heroes (such as they are) come to the Antarctic island only to discover someone or something has already drilled a hole down to the pyramid. Naturally, it is the Predators who drilled the hole. Apparently, the pyramid is theirs. They keep a bunch of frozen Xenomorphs down there, and every hundred years, they come to Earth, unfreeze them, let them feed on humans to grow big and strong, then hunt them for fun.

We spend a little time watching the humans muck about in the pyramid. Then they unwittingly unleash some Facehuggers, and quick as you like, they burst out of their chests and become full-fledged Xenomorphs.

A few Predators, who have apparently been hanging out in Earth’s orbit waiting for this to happen, fly down for some (finally) Predator on Alien action. Most of the humans are dispatched pretty quickly, though a couple last a while, and there is at least one survivor (because, of course, there is).

It was directed by Paul W.S. Anderson, who helmed films like Mortal Kombat, Event Horizon, and several of the Resident Evil films. And like those films, his direction isn’t terrible, he’s not incompetent, but neither is it particularly memorable. He’s just good enough to keep you watching, but bad enough you wish you hadn’t.

That pretty much sums up my feelings on this film. It is better than I expected to be, but my expectations were incredibly low. I still think you can make a good Alien Vs. Predator movie, but this is definitely not it.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: 28 Weeks Later (2007)

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28 Days Later was one of the first movie reviews I ever wrote for this blog. With the new legacy sequel, 28 Years later, coming out this weekend, I thought it would be fun to revisit the first film and its original sequel 28 Weeks Later.

I find I mostly still agree with my original review of the first film. I like the first half better than the second, but my opinion of the second half improved a little, and my thoughts on the first half declined. I think I appreciate what it was trying to do with the military stuff more, and the zombie stuff no longer feels all that fresh or original.

My memory says I hated the sequel, but I rated it 3.5 stars out of 5, so I guess my feelings were mixed. I didn’t write a review of it, so I don’t have the details of those feelings written down for posterity.

This time around, I mostly liked it.

It begins with completely different characters from those who were in the first film. We find a group of people huddled inside a small but rather fortified cabin, hiding from the zombies. This includes Don Harris (Robert Carlyle) and his wife Alice (Catherine McCormack). The zombies attack, and at first, Don plays the hero, fighting back the zombies while everyone else runs.

But then he runs and ultimately finds himself separated from his wife and a small child. The zombies attack them, and instead of fighting, he runs. We see him fleeing the house while his wife pounds on the window, presumably about to get eaten.

The film spends a lot of time painting that action as completely cowardly and Don as a horrible person. He is completely grief-stricken. The thing is, I kind of found myself on his side. It was a horrible situation, and there wasn’t a whole lot he could have done to save her.

Movies teach us that everybody should always risk their lives to save others, and while that is a noble sentiment, it is also perfectly human to be scared out of your mind in these types of situations, and not always be the hero.

I’m going to avoid spoilers, but something happens to rub that guilt in, and then it totally doesn’t matter because the film takes a different turn.

Anyway, flash forward to 28 weeks later, and the zombies have all died out. They apparently never escaped England, and all the humans either were bitten or escaped. The zombies eventually died of starvation.

Now they are trying to repopulate the country. NATO forces (led by Americans) have set up a fortified camp on the Isle of Dogs, an isolated peninsula near London. Don’s children, Tammy (Imogen Poots) and Andy (Mackintosh Muggleton) have just arrived, where they are reunited with Don.

There is some interesting subtext about Americans and militarization. They act like they have complete control of the situation, full of bluster and ego, and then everything goes haywire, and they are mostly completely useless to stop it.

The film takes its time before the zombies come back, but once they do, things kick into high gear. There are several terrific set pieces that I enjoyed a lot more than the original film. 28 Days Later used a lot of handheld camera work, and I often got lost in what was happening to whom, but here the action is much better balanced.

There is a lot of nonsense in where the plot goes, and so many characters make so many dumb decisions, it is hard to take it seriously, but if you can set that sort of thing aside, this makes for a good little zombie sequel. It helps that the cast is completely stacked. Besides those already mentioned, we’ve got Idris Elba, Jeremy Renner, and Harold Perrineau as soldiers and Rose Byrne as a military doctor.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Baron Blood (1972)

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Apologies for getting this out late. My daughter had a sleepover last night, and I decided to stay up late watching a French adaptation of an Agatha Christie story with my wife rather than write this. I think you will understand.

Baron Blood was directed by the great Italian genre director Mario Bava. It was made late in his career (he’d only direct three more films before his death) when he was having trouble getting financing for any film. Beloved as he is now, Bava’s films rarely made much money when they were released.

As such, the film has plenty of style and looks amazing, but falls fairly flat in the storytelling department.

Peter Kleist (Antonio Cantafora), an American university student, comes to Austria to visit his ancestral castle. While there, he learns that his Great-Grandfather was a notorious sadist who tortured and killed hundreds of villagers, earning him the nickname Baron Blood. Legend says that the Baron burned a witch at the stake, but before she died, she cursed him with a spell that would allow him to rise again from the grave only to be eternally tortured by her.

Naturally, our hero, along with his friend Eva Arnold (Elke Sommer) enacts the curse and raises the baron from the grave.

But first, Joseph Cotton.

Although he is top billed, the legendary actor doesn’t appear until at least half an hour into this 90-minute film. He plays Alfred Becker, an eccentric millionaire who buys the castle at auction.

Actually, no, my timeline is off. Peter and Eve do use an incantation to raise the Baron from the grave before Becker shows up. They do it at midnight, but the clock strikes 2 ( the exact time when the Baron was murdered), and blood runs under the door, but they don’t actually see the Baron. Before they can read the recantation, a wind knocks the scroll into a fire, and it is lost.

Although they do not know it, the Baron has risen, and he kills the previous owner of the castle, hence the auction, hence the showing up of Alfred Becker.

He kills a few more people, and our heroes try to find a way to lift the curse. Etc. The plot follows a pretty standard path from there.

Cotton feels out of place here, like he’s not quite sure what he’s doing in this film. He was in his late 60s at the time, making a string of low-budget horror movies, which I can only assume was a low point in his career. Sommer seems to be the only one having any real fun, and she’s a delight.

What makes it worth watching is the setting and Bava’s usual fantastic use of color, light, and shadow. Shot on the grounds of a real castle, he makes great use of the gothic setting, complete with a tower, torture chamber, and lots of enormous chambers that give the director plenty of interesting angles to shoot from.

It is far from Bava’s best work, but even average films from him are well worth watching.

Now Watching: Blacula (1972)

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Blacula (1972)
Directed by: William Crain
Starring: William Marshall, Vonetta McGee, Denise Nicholas and Gordon Pinsent

Synopsis: An 18th-century African prince is turned into a vampire while visiting Transylvania. Two centuries later, he rises from his coffin, attacking various residents of Los Angeles and meeting Tina, a woman whom he believes is the reincarnation of his deceased wife.

Rating: 7/10

I tend to do my movie watching over the weekend. The rest of the week tends to be dedicated to television series. Which means if I keep this up, you’re gonna get a lot of Now Watchings on Saturday and Sunday and basically none through the rest of the week. For now, I like doing these as it lets me give some basic thoughts on a film without having to put all the time and energy into a full review. I’ll still do full reviews, I’ve got a couple of war movies to talk about soon, but I like supplementing them with these snippets.

I can still remember browsing the aisles of my local video store (Mega Movies, the biggest and best rental place in town – it used to be a Burger King and they had a lot of floor space) and always smiling when I came across Blacula. I was aware of the existence of Blaxploitation films at this point, but had not seen any of them. But the idea of a black-centered Dracula movie was awesome to my young eyes.

I never did rent it, though. I couldn’t tell you why. But it always stayed in my mind, it remained on my list. Thirty years later, and I’m just now actually sitting down with it.

It is probably a better film than I imagined it to be, though not nearly as much fun. I hear the sequel leans into its inherent silliness.

The plot is pretty basic; it is pretty much explained in that synopsis. Mamuwalde (William Marshall) visits Dracula in 1790. In this film, Dracula is an old racist and states that he thinks the slave trade is good, actually. Mamuwade yells at him, and Dracula sucks his blood, sticks him in a coffin and our hero doesn’t wake up until 1972 when some gay interior decorators buy the coffin, ship it to Los Angeles and awaken our newly christened Blacula.

Mamuwalde/Blacula doesn’t even blink looking at how things have changed while he’s been away, gets him self spiffed up and hits the town. He sucks a little blood, learn to dance, and meets Tina (Vonetta McGee) who looks exactly like his wife from olden times. He becomes obsessed with wooing her.

Meanwhile, Dr. Gordon Thomas (Thalmus Rasulala) begins to suspect a vampire may be the cause of the recent uptick in murders, and the chase is on.

I’m by no means an expert on Blaxploitation films, but the ones I’ve seen have a lot more style and are a lot more fun than this one. Blacula isn’t dull by any means, but it leans more into the drama/horror aspects than the exploitation ones. It takes a few digs at social commentary, and William Marshall looks terrific as a vampire with some major sideburns.

Worth watching if you are into this sort of thing, but I can’t say I’ll revisit it anytime soon. But I definitely want to watch the sequel.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Freaky (2020)

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“What if Freaky Friday, but a slasher?” – some guy in a pitch meeting, probably.

Christopher Landon directed the two Happy Death Day movies, which were basically Groundhog Day, but a slasher, and they are both quite good. So is Freaky, which handles the mashup of comedy and horror with aplomb.

Millie Kessler (Kathryn Newton) is an unpopular and constantly bullied teenager (despite being very pretty, relatively stylish, funny, smart, and plays the school mascot at football games) who is still mourning the death of her father one year ago.

After a game, her (alcoholic) mother “forgets” to pick her up (she’s passed out in a drunken stupor), leaving Millie alone after dark. She’s attacked by a serial killer called the Blissfield Butcher (Vince Vaughn), who stabs her with an ancient Aztec knife. This causes a body swap, and now Millie must stab the butcher with that same knife by midnight or the body swap will be permanent.

The specific plot elements of this film are pretty dumb. But the film doesn’t take them seriously. The joy of it is watching Vince Vaughn and Kathryn Newton play each other. Vaughn is especially a lot of fun. He gets a lot of mileage as a middle-aged man sporting a tall, bulky frame playing a small teenage girl.

Millie has a couple of sidekicks (played by Celeste O’Connor and Misha Osherovich) who provide a lot of banter and comic relief (some of which works, some of it doesn’t). The kills are clever and surprisingly brutal.

But really, the reason to watch this is Vaughn having a ton of fun and Newton getting to act like a brutish psycho killer in the body of a teenager.

The Friday Night Horror Movie – Awesome ’80s in April Edition: Night of the Demons (1988)

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These days I meticulously log all the films I watch on Letterboxd. Before that I used to have a blog post where I listed out everything I watched. I also marked the films on IMDB as I watched them, and I often tried to remember everything I had ever seen and marked them as watched and rated them as best I could remember.

Often, after I’d watch a movie, I’d click on an actor and then scroll through all the films they’d ever been in, carefully marking the ones I’d seen as watched and rating them. It wasn’t a perfect system. I’m sure there are lots of films I never marked down – movies that I watched as a kid and have long since forgotten, etc. And there are probably some movies I marked as watched that maybe I hadn’t actually seen. Memories are weird like that.

As I get older, I find there are a lot of films I’ve marked as watched, but then when I sit down with them again I realize not a single scene is familiar. I have no idea if I actually did watch them and have just forgotten everything in the film, or if I somehow thought I had seen it but actually had not.

Night of the Demons is a film I would have sworn that I had seen before. I remember watching it. Okay, I remember watching some of it. Well, alright, I remember one particular scene in which one of the actresses got topless. What can I say? I would have been about 14 at the time, pubescent and horny.

But watching it tonight there wasn’t a single moment that seemed familiar. Most of the actresses do get topless, but none of them rang that memory bell. And it seems like I would have probably remembered multiple instances of sex and nudity and not just one scene. So maybe I watched one of the sequels. Or maybe it was something else and I somehow conflated it with this film. Possibly I remember the movie poster for this (which I definitely saw many times at the local video store) and watched something else and my memories of the film got mixed in with the cover art. Or maybe I just watched part of the movie and had to turn if off for some reason (possibly my mother caught the nudity and yelled at me for watching it).

None of this matters, of course. You’re probably wondering why I’m spending so much time talking about this. I’m just forever fascinated by how my brain processes all the movies I’ve seen.

The film itself is a silly bit of 1980s horror. Some dumb teenagers (all played by actors who are clearly well out of high school) go to a party in an abandoned funeral parlor and accidentally unleash a demon which, one-by-one, possesses them and does a bit of light murdering.

The film isn’t big on specifics. There are some vague murmurings about the place being haunted due to some crazy murder taking place there sometime in the past. They unleash the demon by doing a half-assed seance and looking into a mirror.

The kids are all paper thin in their development and they are almost all obnoxious. Especially Stooge (Hal Havins) who loudly complains all the time, calling all the girls, “Bitch.” 1980s horror icon Linea Quigley is probably the most interesting, but that might just be because I know her from other films.

But the special effects are good. I’m a sucker for practical horror effects and there are some good ones here. Quigley’s character has a scene where she rubs red lipstick over her chest in circles and then pushes it completely into her breast. Which has got to be the most low-budget 1980s horror special effect ever.

I have no idea if I watched this movie back when I was a kid. But I’ll definitely be watching it again. It is by no means a great movie, or even a good one. The plot is barely there, the characters are annoying, but it’s still quite entertaining in that dumb ’80s horror way.

The Friday Night Horror Movie – Awesome ’80s in April Edition: The Initiation (1984)

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The Initiation feels like two different slashers thrown together in a way that does disservice to them both. The first part is a bit of a cliche but it is fun to watch. The other part is also a cliche but it is not fun, a bit of a mess and a kind of a slog.

College girl Kelly Fairchild (Daphne Zuniga) is pledging a sorority and for Hell Night her and her fellow pledges have been tasked with breaking into her father’s enormous department store and stealing the security guard’s clothes.

She’s also been having this terrible recurring nightmare about a strange man being burned alive in her childhood home. Unrelated to her story (or is it? – it definitely is) a man with a burned face breaking out of an insane asylum and starts killing people.

She gets cozy with graduate assistant Peter (James Read) of the psychology department who specializes in dreams. This is the part that’s a slow. He’ll analyze her dream and investigate her past and realize the connection between the dreams and the murders. But as an audience we figure that stuff out pretty quickly so the whole mystery he’s trying to solve isn’t mysterious at all.

The fun part of the film is the group of girls going to the department store and being killed off one by one. The deaths aren’t all that inventive and I’m being generous with the word “fun” here, but it is more more enjoyable to watch than the psychology nonsense.

As a certified horror fan and slasher enthusiast this is very much in my wheelhouse. I love films where characters are trapped in an en closed, but large space and have to face off against something horrible. This certainly doesn’t do anything new with it, and half the plot is a bit of a chore, but there is enough there to satisfy your hard core horror nerds.

The Friday Night Horror Movie – Awesome ’80s in April Addition: Dolls (1987)

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Stuart Gordon directed Re-Animator (1985) and for that he will have my eternal gratitude. That film, along with Evil Dead II (1987) opened my eyes to gonzo horror that mixed crazy violence with comedy and gore, and my life was forever changed.

But while I absolutely adore Re-Animator I’ve never really taken to any of the other Stuart Gordon films I’ve seen. Dolls, his third feature film as a director, did not change that.

Dolls is part of an unrelated series of films about childhood toys that come to life that for some reason were very popular in the late 1980s. The special effects work with the puppets here is a lot of fun, but it comes in very late in the film, and unfortunately the build-up is a bit of a slog.

An obnoxious married couple with a precocious young daughter get stuck in a thunderstorm. A couple of punk girls are hitch-hiking nearby and are picked up by a doofus salesman. They too are trapped by the storm. All of these disparate people make their way into a strange old mansion where they are greeted by a kindly old couple.

Most of the characters are highly unlikable. The punks are petty thieves, and well, punks. The married couple constantly complain and are ridiculously mean to the little girl. The old couple are pleasant enough but of course they are in control of the killers dolls. What’s left is the salesman who is dumb and goofy and the precocious girl.

Naturally, the killer dolls kill the annoying characters first leaving the salesman and the girl to survive the night. Presumably creating and working the puppets was expensive so most of the film they are completely off screen. They don’t really appear until nearly 45 minutes into this 77 minute film. Once they do appear things become a lot of fun, but that’s a long 45 minutes where nothing much interesting happens before then.

I’ll argue that it is worth watching for those dolls. My wife is a doll collector and while she leans heavily into the Barbie world and these are more of the porcelain variety I still got a kick out of watching how they brought them to life (and then found creative ways to destroy them). I’m a huge fan of practical effects and they are well done here.

I just wish their was a better script that moved around the effects.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Companion (2025)

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I sometimes think about how a movie’s marketing is at odds with the movie they are supposed to be supporting. It is a common complaint that movie trailers spoil the movies. Most trailers do seem to give away too much plot, and sometimes they will give away a film’s big twist.

But I also think about the ways in which filmmakers make movies with tension and twists. When watching a thriller you pretty much know that the hero isn’t going to die and yet movies often ratchet up the tension making you “believe” that they will. Other times a movie will be about something – something they have to know will be revealed in the marketing as it is central to the reason anyone would want to watch it – yet they will dole it out like a big reveal.

Companion is like that. And it is here that I have to say *spoilers ahead* I guess.

The main character in Companion is a robot, or a “fuck bot” as one character calls her. She is a lifelike android programmed for love and sex. Her name is Iris and she’s wonderfully played by Sophie Thatcher.

If you’ve seen a trailer for the movie then you know this. If you have read even the most basic synopsis of the film you know this. Hell, if you have seen the poster for the film you probably know this.

It isn’t really even a big twist. It isn’t like Alien where the reveal of a character being an android changes everything. Iris being a robotic companion is kind of central to the entire film.

And yet for the first twenty minutes or so the film makes out like she’s real. We see her and her boyfriend/owner Josh (Jack Quaid) hold hands and talk sweet. We see her memories of their meet cute. She’s nervous about spending the weekend with his friends, afraid they won’t like her. Etc. It seems like they are a real couple, like she is a real human. But also something is off. The filmmaking has an ominous tone. At least one character makes a winking comment about who she really is.

And then they reveal she’s a robot as if it is a bit surprise.

This isn’t really a complaint. I don’t mind the way they rolled out that reveal and if you managed to see the film completely blind it might be a fun surprise. I just find that kind of thing fascinating from a marketing point of view as it would be difficult to make a trailer of this film without spoiling that aspect of it.

There are other surpsrises in store for the audience later in the film. Ones I found quite interesting and won’t spoil. Let’s just say things turn a bit dark and violent.

Using a female companion robot as a way to discuss misogyny isn’t new. I was reminded of last year’s Subservience quite a lot with this film. Companion doesn’t have anything particularly interesting to say about the subject either.

Yet I still quite enjoyed the film. It has that slick quality a lot of modern horror films have. It feels pre-packaged in a way, like it was built by a corporation and not a filmmaker with a singular vision. It is very well made. The acting is good. The script does a nice job of balancing the horror, the action, and the comedy. The characters all seem sort of self aware and say things like “You’re an emotional support robot that fucks.” and Josh’s pet name for Iris is Beep Boop.

I enjoyed myself, but in a week I’ll struggle to recall anything about it.

Dario Argento’s Deep Cuts Blu-ray Reivew

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I’ve talked about Dario Argento, the Italian horror director, many times on this site. He’s one of my favorite horror directors, and certainly my favorite director of Gialli. For a time, during the 1970s and 1980s, he styled himself as something of an Alfred Hitchcock figure – a persona bigger than the movies he made. He produced and hosted several different television series for Italian TV and Severin Films has boxed them all together in this nice little set.

You can read my full review of everything inside over at Cinema Sentries.