Stephen Hopkins
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Next came 1990’s Predator 2, directed by Stephen Hopkins and starring Danny Glover as an unhinged cop in cartoon-war-zone Los Angeles, where another Predator is vacationing for reasons that are never entirely explained.
McKenna is pursued by Brown’s Will Traeger and his operation of exploitative agents and technicians, including Jake Busey’s Sean Keyes, the son of Gary Busey’s Peter Keyes from Predator 2, and Munn’s enlisted stargazing biologist Casey Brackett, looking to capture and study the invasive foe.
There are moments in the film that suggest Black is attempting a new angle on the story of the silent alien villain that’s stalked action heroes such as Arnold Schwarzenegger (Predator), Danny Glover (Predator 2), and … Adrien Brody ( the serious misfire Predators).
Belatedly following on from the events of the cult classic Predator and its urban sequel Predator 2 (and thankfully ignoring the Predator/Alien hybrids), the film picks up mid-pursuit between two Predator space-ships.
It (2017)
Directed by Andy Muschietti
influenced by A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Dream Child (1989)
While King’s book was set in the Fifties, the film loses little in its updating to 1989 and indeed employs a cinematically sublime specificity of time and place – A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child is on the local bijou’s marquee – in the seemingly bucolic but small Maine township of Derry.
Best of all, Pennywise is every bit as threatening here, a supernatural pall whose paint-faced circus visage superficially shields a monster.The specificity of the movie's era (" A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child " is playing at the local theater during the August scenes) and location (Derry is fictional, but widely based on King's real-life stomping ground of Bangor, ME) only adds to the vividness of its plot, and it is a testament to the screenplay that the alterations made from the author's text (like updating the time period from the late-1950s to the late-'80s) are never needless, used to benefit the telling of this particular version of the story.
Make no mistake, these are still two-dimensional characters with one or two defining traits: Amanda (Deborah Ann Woll, TV’s True Blood and Daredevil ) is a war veteran, Zoey (Taylor Russell, Netflix’s Lost in Space ) is intelligent but introverted, Ben (Logan Miller, Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse), is frazzled and apathetic, Danny (Nik Dodani, Alex Strangelove ) is an escape room expert for some reason and Mike (Tyler Labine, Tucker and Dale Vs.
A brief opening act lets us meet the shy but very smart Zoey (Taylor Russell of “Lost in Space”), the high-powered stock broker (Jay Ellis of TV’s “Insecure”) and embittered grocery strockroom drunk Ben (Logan Miller).
There’s Zoey (Taylor Russell of Netflix’s Lost in Space ), a shy-genius college student.
Some, like veteran escape room player Danny (Nike Dodani, Alex Strangelove ) and savant physics student Zoey (Taylor Russell of Lost in Space ) are helpful; veteran Amanda (Deborah Ann Woll, True Blood, Daredevil ) is an asset to the group but has her own secrets; and friendly dad-type Mike (Tyler Labine, Tucker and Dale vs. Evil ) tries to keep spirits high.
Enter Zoey (Taylor Russell of TV’s good, not great “Lost in Space”), a math and physics whiz so shy she can barely bring herself to speak in class (perhaps it’s because her teacher comes across as way too creepy).
Based on the 2015 YA hit novel by Camille DeAngelis adapted to the screen by director Luca Guadagnino’s frequent collaborator David Kajganich (“Suspiria”), “Bones and All” starts out sometime in Reagan-era Virginia when its heroine Maren (Taylor Russell (TV’s “Lost in Space”) gets out of her room in which she had been locked by her father to attend a sleepover with a friend, who seems to have a crush on her.
Taylor Russell ( Waves , Lost in Space )stars as 18-year-old Maren, a cannibal adolescent whose father (played by André Holland) leaves with no other means to help his unique daughter.
Taylor Russell (who played Judy Robinson in the Netflix reboot of the space sci-fi series Lost in Space ) is Maren, abandoned by her father (Andre Holland) after she turns 18.
Set in the early 1980s, the story begins with 17 year-old high schooler Maren (rising star Taylor Russell, from Lost In Space ) sneaking out for a girly sleepover and getting very cosy with her female classmate, in a scene that seems like it’s setting up a charming, intimate and female-focused coming-of-age / coming-out story.
Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard acquit themselves well in such moments, plus, any action scenes nodding to Aliens/Predator 2 play just fine with me.
Even though the film offers plenty of "not a white guy" faces on "team good guy," it says something when a 2018 actioner is less racially sensitive than Predator 2 (which I rewatched yesterday for obvious reasons).
The film completely eschews the kind of Hollywoodised conceits found in Speed or Blown Away (both 1994), and instead displays a genuine fascination with the day-to-day procedures of bomb disposal in a combat zone.
Called “The Reaping,” it consists of children being randomly selected to fight to the death in what has been known as, for the past 73 years, The Hunger Games.
At “The Reaping,” a boy and a girl between the ages of 12 and 18 are taken from each district—with odds determined by age and the number of rations they accept throughout the year—and thrown into a controlled arena, where they’re forced to kill each other until only one survives.
For someone familiar with The Thing 1982, you spend a lot of the time watching the new one waiting for something new to happen, and when it does, it totally whiffs it (the climax in the UFO is unforgiveably sloppy, with special effects that reminded me of 1997’s Lost In Space, not Rob Bottin).
On the other hand, I don't suppose that even just two years later, anybody still cares, just like I probably hadn't thought about Lost in Space for the better part of a decade prior to researching this paragraph - truth be told, I thought that U.S. Marshals was the film to knock out Titanic , and I'll bet that's another movie that nobody has thought of since some time in 1999.
There, for reasons I couldn’t quite work out, a previous explorer (played by an uncredited major star: IMDb it unless you’re spoiler-averse) attempts to sabotage Cooper’s mission, and suddenly we’re into a hyper-austere remake of Lost in Space.
Nolan pumps the film with intensity that rivals last year’s “Gravity,” but “Interstellar” finds a closer bond with “Lost in Space” than the Sandra Bullock thriller.
Setting his bigger-than-life sights on a high-concept space genre flick, director Christopher Nolan appears to have cribbed the smarter parts of the scripted Lost in Space movie before retrofitting it with The Hand of God.
The series has been criticized for this “subtle racism” all the way back to Roger Ebert’s review of Predator 2 in 1990.
While I wouldn't call most of these movies terrible (and in fact, "Predator 2" is a little underrated), none of them ever quite recreated what made McTiernan's original such a now-iconic action-horror-sci-fi movie.
As with its first installment, 1987’s “Predator,” and its first sequel, 1990’s “Predator 2,” “Prey” involves a violent, often-invisible, hard-to-kill alien visiting earth to do a little hunting and a small group trying to stay alive long enough to somehow take it down.
But at the same time, he does so while maintaining certain bits and pieces of worldbuilding and callbacks, where the former includes the origin of the flintlock pistol first seen in 1990’s sadly underrated Predator 2. The latter, in the meantime, is a nice touch that will definitely satisfy fans of the first Predator.
In past instalments, such as Predator 2 and Alien vs. Predator , it has been hinted that these masked hunters have visited Earth in the past, seeking human sport.
Predator 2 held the title of “best locale” for a long time, with its quasi-futuristic urban hellscape feeling like it was ripped straight out of a Marvel comic from 1990, complete with holographic cover, and Predators at least tried something interesting even if it wasn’t memorable.
And the supporting cast of actor/musician Ruben Blades, Maria Conchita Alonso, Robert Davi, and genre fave Bill Paxton (Aliens, Near Dark) delivers as well.
Bill Paxton (even hammier than in Weird Science), Maria Conchita Alonso (whose pregnancy is revealed as a tantalizing subplot, and then totally dropped), Morton Downey Jr., and porn legend Teri Weigel round out a cast of campy over-actors, and director Stephen Hopkins’ absolute inability to create tension or excitement from his lame special effects and boring set pieces – such as a nonsensical chase through a meat-packing plant – only further compounds this ludicrous B-movie’s goofiness.
It can be thought-provoking life After Yang , menacing like 2001: A Space Odyssey , or could flip about in between, such as Lost in Space .
It’s like watching a rerun of “Lost in Space.”
But Bud's aiming (like Seth) for the quick, easy bucks -- he wants to work for Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas: A Perfect Murder, The Ghost and the Darkness ), who's either a genius financier, if you ask Bud, or a "two-bit pirate," according to Gekko's rival, Sir Larry Wildman (Terence Stamp: The Phantom Menace, Bowfinger ).
And despite the similarities to the kicking off point of the TV show "Lost in Space," it's not an act of sabotage that alters the mission of planet colonists.
Danny Glover was one of the first black action movie heroes in Predator 2 , and was a lead in the hugely successful Lethal Weapon action series.
Under the direction of Aussie Stephen Hopkins–who helmed A Nightmare on Elm Street 5 and filmed all the action sequences as second-unit director on Russell Mulcahy’s Highlander–the pieces come together for a horror/sci-fi gem that will please most action-oriented fans.