Hard Target (1993)

 "How does it feel to be hunted?"

Before I go anything further, something has to be said.

That mullet is not acceptable.

There.

Aside from that lamentable lapse, however, John Woo gives us a well shot and solidly scripted action film with excellent set pieces aplenty, the highlight probably being our protagonist literally standing on the saddle of a moving motorcycle as he sprays his limitless supply of bullets at various expendable baddies.

The concept is interesting- shadowy, cynical baddies recruit homeless military veterans for rich paying clients to hunt and kill, with Jean-Claude Van Damme's Chance getting mixed up in it all. The setting- New Orleans and the surrounding bayou- also adds a lot of flavour. And, while this is hardly a film oozing with subtext, there's a nice bit of commentary on how we ignore and dehumanise homeless people.

Van Damme, shall we say, is probably never going to win an Oscar, decent though he is, although he can certainly kick. But the film lives and breathes by its hugely charismatic baddie, with the superb Lance Henriksen chewing the scenery in the best possible way. His performance is a real highlight.

But, well, the whole thing is just so fun and entertaining, especially the last third of the film,in the bayou, as the final hunt plays out. Yes, Chance and his friends have absurd quantities of plot armour. Yes, Chance shoots a truly absurd quantity of anonymous henchmen with a single shot. But...isn't that part of the fun?

Go on. Switch your brain off and give it a go. You know you want to.

Aliens vs Predator (2004)

 "And they usecus like cattle. They're hosts for us to breed."

 I was poised to watch something su/btitlred and intellectual until, at the last moment, I decided to watch this. Parasite will come later. It's Saturday night, the little one is in bed, the missuys is gaming, and I have a bottle of Rioja.

You know what? This is goodf. Yes, I know: it centres on a mysterious pyramoid found in Antarctica from prehistorical times, showing clear influences from Aztec and Cambodian culturres as well sas Egyptian civilisation, which is orders of magnitude older, making nonsense of the history.

I don't give a shite.

This is, if we ignore the fact it ends in the middke of things and doesn't actually end, actually not a bad film at all. LKet's hooe, however, that we get a resolution.

The script is excellent until it suddenly stops without resolution. It's a plus that the cast abounds with resoected character actors rather than stars. Lance Henriksen shines as a tycoon who is actually acting in the interests of the greater good, if not entirely without the sae desire for glory that they all share. It's interesting that this should be set in comntemporary times and, er, recycle the general vibes from both Sgtargate and Erich von Daniken.

Notghing here is original, But it's actualkly fairly well written with a strong intitial hook, and the cast is superb. It may be exploitative tosh, but thus is avtually pretty decent.

The Terminator (1984)

"I'll be back."

Ahem. Sorry about the obvious quote.

I've seen this film many times, of course, but not within the last twenty years. And is it not brilliant? This is a taut, imaginative thriller focused on one killer, one woman and her lover who, in a wonderful twist, was sent back in time by his own son. The world-building of Skynet and the world of 2029 are not the focus here, just a plot point, and the scenes in 2029 are shot to be deliberately vague and dreamlike- appropriately so, as these scenes are usually being dreamed by Kyle. We aren't even told exactly when everything will go pear-shaped- it's just described as being "a few years from now".

What's especially noticeable now is how very of its time the film is. It has model work! Which is, of course, superb. The hair, on the other hand, isn't. This is the same year that William Gibson published the seminal "Neuromancer" and you can tell. Everything screams Cyberpunk; even the nightclub is called "Tech Noir". And it has to be said that thrillers were much better in the days before mobile phones.

Much of the film's success lies in the fact that the first two thirds are spend establishing just how unstoppable and relentless the Terminator is. It kills the other Sarah Connors, establishing a real sense of fear on behalf of our poor protagonist, and not even an entire station of police officers can stop it. This leads nicely to a bittersweet romantic interlude, a sex scene with truly world-shaping consequences and the tension-filled final confrontation.

I like Sarah. She kicks ass as a female in a very male-dominated genre. Ok, she's still defined primarily as a mother to a male child, and the film fails the Bechdel test spectacularly, but you can't have everything! This is  justifiably acclaimed film and one I've left far too long to watch again.

All this and we get a very young Bill Paxton as a street punk. A real joy to see again after all this time.

Alien³ (1992)

“You’re gonna die too…”

Well, I suppose they can’t all be good. The first two films in this franchise are both superb, but this one… isn’t. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. For one thing, the other two films were both shot by A-list directors, but I’d never heard of David Fincher until I Googled him just now. I certainly should have done, I grant you, but he's no Ridley Scott or James Cameron.

Having said that, though, the film is serviceable. It isn’t awful. It’s just that it’s totally lacking in suspense and moments which make you jump, and has absolutely no sense of the unity of style and content which made the first two films so slickly gorgeous in their very different ways.

There isn’t the same sense of threat, either. After a film with hordes of the buggers we’re now back to just one Alien, which just doesn’t seem as nasty as the one in the first film. Without the constant emphasis on its toughness and its acid blood it’s suddenly a lot closer to being just another monster, albeit a rather cool looking one. And killing Newt and Hicks before the start of the film, while showing us how nasty the alien is, gives us a rather alienating sense of discontinuity. And why do we have to be told that it’s “Ellen” Ripley? First names have no place in this franchise! It might be nitpicky, but I don’t like the fact that Bishop is referred to as a “droid”, either.

It’s a bit jolting, and inconsistent with what’s gone before, that such a large proportion of the supporting cast should be British (complete with phrases like “rubbish tip” and even the pronunciation of “lieutenant”, which really surprised me!). It’s always a joy to see the great Brian Glover, possibly the world’s greatest Yorkshireman, but even Charles Dance can’t hide the fact that Clemens is such a deeply dull character who really drags the film down by taking up so much screen time. Even the revelation of his supposedly great secret is such a massive anti-climax that you’re quite relieved to see him being immediately impaled and killed by the alien.

Charles S. Dutton is magnificent, mind- such charisma. It’s just that he looks out-of-place among such a bunch of wide boys. And the whole concept- a bunch of scum-of-the-Earth criminals who have found fundamentalist religion- is a bit random, to say the least. Nothing much is done with this concept, so why have it at all?

Even the foreshadowing of Ripley’s death is not handled well. There’s a certain neatness in Bishop asking to be killed early on, just as Ripley will later, and the scene of the Alien next to Ripley is nicely iconic. But the inevitability of Ripley’s dying soon, one way or another, actually takes away tension rather than adding to it, and there’s precious little of it to start with.

Lack of tension aside, the general look of the film is certainly competent. But there’s no flair or sense of ownership of the film’s aesthetic. Everything just looks like generic, contemporary science fiction. The aesthetics of the first two films were so much more than that.

Just one Alien film to go, then. I hope it’s better than this one.

Aliens (1986)

“They’re coming out of the walls! They’re coming out of the Goddamn walls! ”

Never has it been more predictable which film I’m going to review next. The next two will be equally predictable. Incidentally, this is the original theatrical version that I’m reviewing.

Much to my surprise, I didn’t remember anything about this film, and I suspect that I may not have seen it in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s as I assumed I had. I’m sure I would have remembered such an excellent film which, it’s immediately obvious, has burrowed its way deep into popular culture.

This is how you do sequels. Yes, it takes elements from the previous films, not least the physical qualities of the aliens. Yes, the suspense is what drives the film, just as is does for Alien. But James Cameron is a very different director from Ridley Scott; he’s much less arty. He doesn’t shoot things to look beautiful. It’s all about the suspense.

Cameron is also the scriptwriter, which gives us a pleasing unity of vision. His script is a little different in that there’s less emphasis on world building (although this is an interstellar future of cigarettes and 1980s style clothes) and an awful lot of emphasis on the US Marine characters. US Marines seem to have been very much in the Hollywood zeitgeist in 1986, the year of Platoon and a year before Full Metal Jacket, and the macho military high jinks of their interactions are so delightfully 1980’s. All the tropes are present and correct: the highly quotable sarge, the inexperienced and panicky lieutenant, the woman who’s more mach than the men, and the annoying one who keeps loudly opining that they’re all going to die.

There’s one minor plot niggle at the start; Ripley’s ship is found, purely by chance, after fifty-seven years. But the chances of this must be infinitesimal! Space is not the sea. It’s unimaginably huge. Also, what’s powering the ship to keep Ripley alive and frozen for all those decades?

Still, let’s handwave these things away. This is a superb, tense thriller, crammed with little moments that make you jump. There’s misdirection; the robot, Bishop, turns out to be a rather heroic chap who’s clearly read his Isaac Asimov (there’s even a semi-direct allusion to the Laws of Robotics), while Carter Burke, the apparently sympathetic company chap, turns out to be this film’s equivalent of Ash. There are plenty of scenes with motion detectors where the aliens turn out to be above the ceiling or below the floor.

But the film is basically about the women. The best soldier is Vasquez, and the most clear-headed and courageous characters are Ripley and her surrogate daughter, Newt. Ripley gets to look much, much cooler in this film. She even gets to wear a badass forklift suit (which looks so, so ‘80s) and fight an alien which is, like, the coolest thing ever. And yet… the first film symbolically had a man get orally raped and impregnated by an alien, where in this film it’s only women who are seen to be threatened by this fate. It seems that perhaps this is the price they have to pay for being so strong.

The aliens are nicely developed, though. It’s Ripley who asks the question that, if the aliens reproduce parasitically, who lays the eggs? Of course, we (and Ripley) see the answer, an end of level boss that is presumably the “queen” of the hive, and it’s gloriously disgusting. Ripley is fantastic; in going back to save Newt she proves herself to be both utterly badass and the perfect mother.

The ending, with its countdown and airlocks, bears certain similarities to the earlier film, but I suspect this is intentional. The ending is surprisingly abrupt, but this is a brilliant film.

Oh, and fellow Doctor Who fans; Tip Tipping is an extra and Stuart Fell is a stuntman!