We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.
Aliens and martial arts.
PREY (2022)
There were eight years between the releases of the well-received Predator sequel Predators and the next film in the franchise, The Predator – and since The Predator was quite poorly received, it would have made sense for the franchise to go dormant for several more years after that. Thankfully, that wasn’t the case. In fact, the next installment was already in the works during the production of The Predator, because director Dan Trachtenberg and writer Patrick Aison had come to franchise producer John Davis with a pitch that impressed him and the production president at the studio. So, just a year and a half after the disappointment of The Predator, the film that would become known as Prey was already in pre-production. Then it had to pump the brakes due to the pandemic – but a year and a half later, it was able to start filming. Using the codename Skulls, the filmmakers tried to make this new Predator movie in secret... but, of course, the internet found out about its existence long before that information was supposed to be shared. And the hype started to build.
Prey was released through the Hulu streaming service in the summer of 2022 and was incredibly well-received, with a lot of reviewers saying it was either the best Predator movie since the first one, or even better than the first one. The original Predator is untouchable as far as I’m concerned. No follow-up will ever be able to reach that film’s level for me. But Prey is pretty good.
At the end of Predator 2, Danny Glover’s character defeated the alien hunter that had come to Los Angeles with some time to kill. As a reward, another Predator gave him an antique flintlock pistol that had "Raphael Adolini 1715" engraved on it. The story of that pistol was told in a Predator comic book – but Trachtenberg and Aison decided to give the gun a different origin story.
Their movie is set in North America in 1719. Amber Midthunder stars as a young Comanche woman named Naru, whose tribe believes should be a healer, but she dreams of becoming a great hunter. She gets her chance when a Predator, played by 6’8” former basketball player Dane DiLiegro, drops down onto the Great Plains and starts searching for the most dangerous game in the land. This particular Predator is presented in kind of an odd way because you’d assume (and Alien vs. Predator has showed us) that the Predators have been coming to our planet for a long time and have been extremely technologically advanced for a lot longer than since 1719. While this guy is capable of interplanetary travel and equipped with a cloaking device, he has more primitive versions of Predator weapons than we’ve seen before, and even has a primitive helmet, which appears to be made out of an alien skull. He also seems to be unaware that man is the most challenging game around, because he works his way up to attacking the Comanches by taking on things like a rattlesnake, a wolf, and a grizzly bear. I know this was meant to be his first hunt, but couldn’t a fellow Predator have given him a heads-up about what to expect?
Meanwhile, Naru has been trying to prove her abilities by taking part in a cougar hunt, but that doesn’t go well for her. She is, however, the only person who’s truly aware that “there’s something else” out there in the wilderness, so she heads out to confront it with her dog Sarii. And that’s how she finds the Predator. The set-up is interesting, but I find it tough to sit through for multiple viewings, and it’s not nearly as exciting as watching Arnold Schwarzenegger and his team wipe out guerrillas in the original film. It takes way too long to get the point where the Predator starts killing people. Sure, it took 42 minutes to get to the first Predator kill in the original, but at least we had a shit-ton of dead guerrillas by then. This Predator doesn’t kill a person until the 50 minute mark, and confrontations with CGI animals are no replacement for some good old Predator-on-human violence.
Thankfully, there is plenty of that kind of violence in the second half of the movie. In addition to the Comanche tribe, there are also a group of French fur trappers in the area, including an interpreter named Raphael Adolini, and they end up crossing paths with Naru and the Predator as well. By the time the credits roll, this Predator has killed around thirty people. The highlight is the sequence where the Predator slashes and smashes its way through the fur traders.
When some fans found out this movie was going to center on a young woman, they would ask questions like, “How is Amber Midthunder going to defeat a Predator when Arnold Schwarzenegger could barely do it?” She does fare surprisingly well in a fight with the Predator, but we’ll chalk that up to this guy being a knucklehead who thought he came to Earth to kill snakes. And Schwarzenegger didn’t take down the Predator down because he was a muscular man anyway. He found a way to outsmart it. That’s exactly what Naru does at the end of the film – and what I really like about the conclusion is the fact that it involves quicksand, something that seemed to be in movies all the time when I was a kid, but then faded away for a while. Prey reminds us just how dangerous quicksand can be.
Prey isn’t my favorite of the Predator movies. It’s not even my second favorite. But it is a very good entry in the franchise, especially when you revisit the second half of it.
Moviegoers in the 1950s loved to see radioactive mutants and threats from outer space – and when filmmaker Roger Corman was just starting to get his career rolling, he brought his share of radioactive mutants and threats from outer space to the screen. Coming off the success of one such movie, Day the World Ended, Corman hired Lou Rusoff to write the script for his next one... but Rusoff’s brother died during the writing process, so Corman had to bring frequent collaborator Charles B. Griffith in to do an emergency rewrite just two days before filming was scheduled to begin.
The script turned out just fine, and Corman assembled a strong cast to bring it to life. Lee Van Cleef plays scientist Tom Anderson, who tried his best to warn the U.S. government not to launch a satellite into orbit because alien lifeforms are watching our planet and don’t want humans to overstep their bounds. But, of course, the satellite was launched – so Anderson covers his own behind by getting in contact with a being from Venus who plans to carry out an invasion of Earth. Anderson and his wife, Beverly Garland as Claire Anderson (who doesn’t agree with her husband’s decision to side with an alien invader at all), will be spared by the alien, whose first goal is to wipe out emotion.
The invasion begins near Anderson’s home in small town America. The alien lands, cuts out all electricity (except at Anderson’s house) and renders all vehicles (except Anderson’s) useless, and sends out winged creatures that implant mind control devices into people through a bite, then drop dead. Anderson sits back and watches as people all around his town fall under the alien’s spell... but someone who’s not content to just watch all of this go down is his friend Paul Nelson (Peter Graves), who is so ready to stand up to this invasion that he even executes his mind-controlled wife.
It Conquered the World is fun, somewhat goofy movie that delivers exactly what you expect to see when you put on a low budget creature feature from the ‘50s, particularly one from Corman. It works for the most part – but one thing about it that doesn’t work very well is the design of the alien creature. Designer Paul Blaisdell figured that the alien would be low to the ground, since it would have to deal with heavy gravity on its home planet, and that it would most likely have evolved from some sort of vegetable life. So we get a small creature that looks like an angry vegetable, which is quite an amusing sight. But, the movie around the creature is entertaining enough, and the fact that the alien itself provides some laughs doesn’t ruin the entertainment at all. It just makes the movie even better.
BREAKER! BREAKER! (1977)
1977, the year the world was gifted with the trucker comedy classic Smokey and the Bandit (one of my all-time favorites), also brought us the first movie that gave a lead role to Chuck Norris: the trucker action movie Breaker! Breaker! Norris had small roles in a handful of movies before this, including a villainous appearance opposite Bruce Lee in The Way of the Dragon, but this was the first one that he was given to carry – and while it’s not exactly a classic, it is an entertaining movie that would fit in a double feature with Smokey and the Bandit just fine.
Norris plays arm-wrestling, martial arts-practicing trucker John David 'J.D.' Dawes, whose dirt-biking brother Billy (Michael Augenstein) joins him in the trucking business and immediately falls prey to the authorities that run a small town called Texas City, California. Headed up by the drunken, Shakespeare-quoting Judge Joshua Trimmings (George Murdock) and the corrupt Sergeant Strode (Don Gentry), the folks in Texas City play by their own rules, ripping off truckers, running moonshine, and locking up innocent people.
When Billy goes missing in Texas City, J.D. goes searching for him – and when the locals try to play their usual tricks on him, going so far as Judge Trimmings giving him a death sentence, he uses his martial arts skills to fight back. Texas City never counted on a truck driver who’s also a martial arts expert. And he’s got backup, thanks to the CB radio community.
Directed by Don Hulette from a screenplay written by Terry Chambers, Breaker! Breaker! was a low budget AIP release. Chuck Norris was paid $5000 to star in it, and the production schedule was only eleven days. Norris movies would get bigger and occasionally better from here, but his first starring vehicle has its charm. As the star himself described it in the ‘80s, “It's a down-home kind of movie.” Due to that charming, down-home quality, it remained his father’s favorite of the movies his son made.
Breaker! Breaker! has been given the Rifftrax treatment and some viewers prefer that version of the movie, but I didn’t need the mockery to get through it. Sometimes a down-home country movie like this is exactly what I need.
TIGER CLAWS II (1996)
The first Tiger Claws movie was about a serial killer called the Death Dealer (Bolo Yeung) taking out martial arts masters, and most action movie filmmakers would have made sure to take the Death Dealer himself out in epic fashion in the climactic moments. He would have been shot multiple times, or knocked off of a building, or set on fire, etc. But that’s not how Tiger Claws did it. The Death Dealer was just rendered unconscious and apprehended by the authorities, leaving the door wide open for this sequel, which sees the martial arts-skilled maniac escaping incarceration and hitting the streets again, setting up a rematch with the cops who brought him to justice: Jalal Merhi as Tarek Richards and Cynthia Rothrock as Linda Masterson.
But the sequel isn’t that simple. Directed by J. Stephen Maunder, who crafted the story with Andreas Kyprianov, decided to have the Death Dealer get mixed up with a criminal organization, which not only gives our heroes more villains to take out over the course of the movie, but also involves an unexpectedly supernatural story element: the head of the organization (Ong Soo Han), who knew the Death Dealer when they were young, is planning to open a magical portal to the past, or a "time corridor," so they can greet their ancient martial arts masters. He'll do this after he holds a fighting tournament, of course.
Tiger Claws II has plenty of action scenes, but Rothrock is, disappointingly, sidelined for much of the action and isn’t given a whole lot to do until we’re already an hour into the movie. Up to that point, her most notable moment involves her making a phone call while wearing some black lingerie. Another odd thing about this movie is how much respect Tarek shows toward the Death Dealer, who was a mad dog serial killer the first time around. Merhi has admitted that they were trying to give the character a redemption arc that would lead to him being a good guy in the third film, which doesn’t make much sense to me. That idea got tossed out anyway, since Yeung left in the midst of production of Tiger Claws II due to a pay dispute.
Tiger Claws II is a step down from its predecessor, but it’s a decent follow-up, albeit a messy and strange one.
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