Seen A Bad Film This Year? Chances Are 'The Predator' Is Even Worse

THE PREDATOR

*SPOILER ALERT*

Jesus fucking Christ. The Predator is the year’s stupidest film, bar none. Shane Black’s revival of the alien franchise is a pile-up of poor choices, worse writing, cacophonous editing, a sustained air of idiotic machismo, and constant automatic weaponfire. It’s like the cinematic equivalent of someone playing a shoot-em-up video game and holding the trigger down the entire time. To watch it is to submit to a two hour assault on your brain. Coming out the other side, you can only feel dumber for the experience.

It’s hard to know where to start, so let’s begin at the beginning... which involves a spaceship dogfight, where a rogue Predator, being chased by his fellow aliens, opens up a wormhole, and returns to that favourite holiday planet of dreadlocked, alien killing machines: the planet Earth!

In revelatory exposition delivered later on, it turns out this runaway Predator has come to Earth to save us, theoretically from global warming, but actually just with anti-Predator guns. He may be a member of an alien race that travels from planet to planet killing species for kicks, but he’s also half-human, somehow; and has thus suffered a crisis of conscience. It’s possible he gets concussed in the crash landing in Mexico, though, because when he gets here he begins his saving-humanity mission by, um, killing people. In the jungle, obvz. Hot on his tail will come another Predator, an unstoppable killing machine who brings with him Predator dogs, which are like Gargoyles by way of Barkley from Sesame Street, albeit with luminescent green blood and doggy dreadlocks.

Rather than staying in the jungle, like the original, we soon head off to a generic middle school in Nowheresville, America (AKA: it’s shot in Vancouver). There, Jacob Tremblay plays a kid with Asperger’s, who starts out scared of loud noises, but is a mathematical savant, yet will soon enough be delivering cool dude one-liners, rebellious swears, and death threats. He even ends the film getting a job in a top-secret government laboratory. Even though, y’know, he’s 11.

If seeing the kid from Room decoding alien language isn’t 'enough actor-synonymous-with-excellent-prestige-pic-falling-into-the-worst-genre-trash-imaginable' depression for you, wait ’til you see Moonlight’s Trevante Rhodes playing an ultra-violent solder whose real name is — ‘hilariously’ — Gaylord. In Barry Jenkins’ Oscar-winner, Rhodes’ hulking buffness and bro’d swagger was revealed to be but a suit of armour, a macho pantomime worn as protective outer shell. Here, there’s no such critique of masculinity: this a film where men fire guns, crack wise, then fire some more guns. The men in question are all ‘crazy’, a platoon of soldiers who’ll throw themselves into the fray with no regard for their life, or anyone else’s. They’re like some kind of… suicide squad.

The leader of the gang — and our ‘hero’, I guess — is Boyd Holbrook, who backs up his ridiculous Logan turn with one of the most boring performances of the year. He’s the soldier who first discovers the crashed Predator, and also the dad of Tremblay; this yet another idiotic genre-flick courting entry-level emotion by making it about a parent who’ll do anything for his kid.

“He may be a lousy husband, but he’s a good soldier!” yelps his estranged wife Yvonne Strahovski, right after she’s recited all his ‘confirmed kills’ in the military like a breathless fan reading stats off the back of a baseball card. You get the feeling that the father/son bonding of trying to escape from killer aliens is going to bring this family back together — there’s nothing sexier than an ex-husband bursting into your house, then threatening to kill people — but, Mrs. Soldier is left behind mid-way into the film, last seen trying to avoid being killed by a Predator. Did she live? Die? Spawn? You either don’t need to know, or aren’t expected to wonder. Or, perhaps, she was lost in editing; the whole film having the air of run amok edit-bay butchery.

The Predator is that kind of film. Characters come and go. Storylines rise up out of nowhere, then abruptly fall away. Logic, plot, and the art of screenwriting die a painful on-screen death; like everything else, herein, they’re riddled with bullets. The pace relentlessly throttles forward, music blaring all the way; Black less concerned with coherence than with making sure The Predator doesn’t stop for a second, as if by barrelling along you won’t notice how deeply idiotic and offensive this all is.

But your old pal Film Carew takes notes (one of them literally reads: “this sucks”), and so, thus, took note of all the stupidest fucking shit that happens in The Predator. Like: the moment where an evil Predator struts past a flaming cop car and spits like a tough guy. Or how Tourette Syndrome is played for laughs. Or how “shut the fuck up!” becomes a repeated refrain. Or how hilariously monosyllabic the subtitled Predator-speak is. Or the moment where Keegan-Michael Key and Thomas Jane, both fatally impaled in a forest, gaze into each other’s eyes and mutually put themselves out of their (tragic lovers?) misery, and the sentimental music swells up for a split second, before someone else shoots something or cracks wise, and we instantly forget about them.

The whole thing is deeply fucked, utterly unfunny, and not even worth watching as celebration of ridiculous Hollywood trash. Which, of course, means The Predator predictably ends with a scene desperately pandering to possible sequels. Can’t wait.

MANDY

Mandy has been billed as if it’s some work of cinematic craziness: Nicolas Cage let loose in a B-movie conversant rumpus seemingly tailored for Nicolas Cage memes; the trailer literally ending with a bit in which Cage, wielding a chainsaw, takes on some masked strongman wielding a far-longer chainsaw - phallic symbolism not coincidental. But Panos Cosmatos’s film is, as work of art, anything but crazy. Whilst Cage is allowed to get suitably Cagey, herein, Mandy is an astonishing work of control, one of those cinematic experiences in which all the elements of sound and image are precisely employed, cohering into a magnificent, never-before-seen, hallucinatory vision.

Like Cosmatos’s previous flick, 2010’s Beyond The Black Rainbow, it’s again set in 1983 (AD), in some soupy, grainy, nocturnal dreamscape informed by degraded VHS tapes and psychedelically-aided flights of fantasy. Turning low culture into high art, the best comparisons for Cosmatos aren’t fanboi-directors trading in cheap genre-nostalgia, but filmmakers like Peter Strickland and Cattet & Forzani, who riff on old tropes/visual elements in hopes of achieving cinematic transcendence. Here, that may come with Cage fashioning a giant space-age axe and going on a rampage of bloody revenge. But, it also comes with some of the most beautiful imagery (courtesy cinematographer Benjamin Loeb) and sound (a score by the late, great Jóhann Jóhannsson made in collaboration Sunn o))) dudes) you’ll ever see on a cinema screen.

THE HOUSE WITH A CLOCK IN ITS WALLS

A family-friendly riff on gothic horror, The House With A Clock In Its Walls is a fantastical tale of magic, necromancy, school bullying, and chocolate-chip cookies, produced by Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment, and seemingly modelled after Tim Burton’s non-threatening, cutesy-haunted-house larks. The strangest element to the film is that it comes directed by Eli Roth, the grindhouse goon funnelling his normal bloodlust into assembling an array of creepy wind-up toys and toy clowns.

Though blessed with the presence of Cate Blanchett (Australia’s national treasure), Jack Black (and his sculpted facial-hair), and Kyle MacLachlan playing an evil wizard brought back from the dead (alrighty, then!), the film manages to be, somehow, ho-hum. Its best stretches are when it plays with visual old-timey-ness, as when a backstory is recounted via faux-hand-cranked Nickelodeon, the distant past evoked in ghostly, silent black-and-white images. It makes for a stark contrast with the cutesier CGI slathered all over the flick, with evil Jack-o'-Lanterns and an animate couch delivered with artless cartoonishness.

GHOSTHUNTER

Ben Lawrence’s documentary starts with a cute opening: we meet the film’s subject, a night-shift security guard in Western Sydney whose side business, and passion, is working as a ‘ghost hunter’. But, soon enough, the film becomes a dark, unsettling chronicle of a completely different kind of ghost hunt: for a long-lost birth father, for vanished childhood memories, for repressed childhood traumas; and, in turn, for truth, closure, healing. As it investigates the past, Ghosthunter slowly turns into an investigation of its subject, the divide between his behaviour, on and off camera, suggesting greater themes about internal conflict.

Lawrence (son of acclaimed director Ray Lawrence) remains in the film throughout. He’s the first voice we hear; and we see him, in front of his own camera, again and again. This isn’t a documentary made at some objective remove, but a study of the relationship between subject and filmmaker. It’s very human, wearing its flaws openly, but it’s also undeniably grim: the buried history that’s unearthed is full of horrors, and even the narrative present delivers destruction, denial, loss, the same mistakes made over and over. There are ghosts, here, but they’re the dark phantoms of human behaviour, the entire narrative touched by the lingering spectre of abuse.