Rock's Cheapo Theatre of the Damned

I also nearly ordered that Brigitte Lahaie box set with the book but held off because I'm trying to be good.


I'm like Travis Bickle holding his fist over the lit stove.

__________________

Also like Travis Bickle in terms of his viewing habits.


But I'd like to think I'm a nicer man.

Give in to the temptation….

Hey man, I was ready to, but once I saw the shipping, which was almost as much as what I'd be paying for the movies, I could not justify the purchase.

What movies interested you?
I haven’t bought anything from them yet,

A bunch of Jess Francos and a few scattered titles I didn't see on Tubi.

The original Predator starts off guns blazing but soon settles into a certain quiet suspense. It satirized the meatheaded action of Rambo: First Blood Part II and its ilk and deflated the bombast of those movies. Predator 2 followed the loose cannon cops of Die Hard and Lethal Weapon and takes a similar approach to its protagonist (who also starred in the latter, more on that later), but the effect is anything but deflationary or low key. This is an almost unceasingly cacophonous movie, one that feels like it might explode out of the screen at any moment. We begin with a shootout between cops and Latino gang members where the amount of gunfire exchanged feels closer to a war zone than the inner cities. Characters are shouting and blasting away, or themselves getting shouted at or blasted to pieces, with an unlucky few getting brutalized by the Predator itself. Even worse is that the movie gives the impression of being set during a heat wave, so that characters are drenched in sweat and additionally aggravated. (It also probably doesn’t help that the gang leader prepares for battle by sticking a palmful of cocaine in his face.) This opening shootout feels like a scene set right in the fires of hell.

The movie is so intense in this respect that the characters even bond through shouting matches. Hero cop Danny Glover greets hotshot new recruit Bill Paxton by chewing him out, which I suppose is better than Maria Conchito Alonso greeting him by crushing his balls in the middle of a crowded police station. Glover was supposed to be old in Lethal Weapon, too old for this shit, one might say, and he seems even older here, perhaps because he’s wearing what looks like a Depression era suit. (The ‘90s were very much an age of hideously baggy tailoring, as the relaxed silhouettes pioneered by Giorgio Armani ballooned to embarrassing proportions, but this thing looks like it’s been sitting in Glover’s closet for over half a century.) Paxton is very much in slicked back douchebag mode, but it’s Paxton so he manages to make us like him anyway. (It helps that he seems to yell less than many other characters.) Glover gets his ass chewed out by his politicking superior Robert Davi, and regularly butts heads with sinister government agent Gary Busey, who is always accompanied by a bunch of lackeys in sunglasses and windbreakers and plays his scenes in classic Busey fashion, snarling and chewing his lines like a lion feasting on a gazelle.

In terms of what’s actually shown onscreen at any given moment, the movie is perhaps not more violent than the average hard R release at the time outside of a few key moments. But the movie feels extremely violent, the corrosive atmosphere giving every squib and gore gag and additional kick, and the Predator’s habit of leaving corpses strung up from the ceiling feels additionally unnerving. Roger Ebert likened the movie to angry, ugly dreams, and while it wasn’t a compliment, I think he captures the movie’s essence perfectly. This sense of excess carries throughout the action, with the brutal murders of a group of Jamaican gang members and a massacre on the subway (the latter captured with a stylish strobing effect) both playing out to harrowing results. This movie, like many action movies of the era, was not what you’d call racially sensitive, and its depiction of Jamaicans in particular is indefensible. I must ask though, was there a reason this particular group was singled out in 1990 by both this movie and Marked for Death? (The latter at least presents us with some positive Jamaican characters and has a character address his own prejudice late in the movie to cover its ass.) It seems like a very specific demographic group to target for fearmongering.

The cacophony lessens sonically but amplifies visually during the movie’s best scene, where government agents plan to trap the Predator in a slaughterhouse. The temperature seems to drop significantly as we cut between the freezing blue interiors of the slaughterhouse, all surfaces bathed in frosty radioactive dust while the agents traipse through it in their dehumanizing hazmat suits, and the darkroom-red interior of the control room, where the hero and a few others watch the action unfold, the steady beeping of all the monitors and displays slowly building suspense. This scene borrows heavily from the initial ambush in Aliens, but if you’re going to steal, steal from the best, and this kicks a fair amount of ass. Director Stephen Hopkins is no James Cameron, Ridley Scott or John McTiernan (all of whom this movie owes some debt to), but the sturdy level of craft, atmosphere of brutality and bursts of style converge very nicely in this one sequence and make most of the other action scenes pretty diverting too. And hell, even Gary Busey gets to kick a little ass in this scene, if only for a minute or so. In Gary We Trust.

I still think the finale with Glover in his old age taking on the Predator in hand-to-hand combat is extremely lame, but I think this has grown on me quite a bit, considering I used to think the whole movie kind of sucked. Maybe because my appreciation for this era of filmmaking has grown and The Predator (one of the most embarrassing things I’ve seen from a major studio) has given me some perspective, but barring the unfortunate racial aspects, I thought the movie held up quite nicely.

It's the same rating I gave Predator 2 (maybe within a half star?).

I have a real soft spot for Predators, and I watch it all the time. For me it's about on par with the original in terms of enjoyment, even though they have really different vibes.

I remember enjoying Predators in the theatre. Back in the shakycam era, it was refreshing to see something so...sturdy. I remember liking Vacancy from the same director as well.

There’s a joke in this movie I want to tell you about, because many movies of the era and since have had similar jokes, and in many of those movies the jokes played out crudely and cruelly, while here it mostly doesn’t. During a moment respite in the convoluted, action-packed espionage plot, the CIA hotshot Jim Belushi takes our hero John Ritter to meet his parents. Belushi goes into the kitchen with his mother Barbara Barrie go into the kitchen when who but the great Dyanne Thorne appears and tries to make out with Ritter. Belushi and his mom return and Belushi, beaming, introduces Thorne to Ritter as his father. Now, a transgender character being used as a punchline is not ideal, but the joke here ends up being that Belushi and his mother are fully supportive of Thorne’s coming out and they appear to have a healthy, loving family dynamic. Now, the movie’s pronoun game is not that strong (which is not unexpected for a mainstream ‘80s comedy), but the warmth it shows to Thorne’s character has it compare favourably to the bulk of comedies that opt for similar jokes. Now, as a cisgender straight man, I perhaps don’t have the same sensitivies to this material, and perhaps I was a little excited just to see Dyanne Thorne onscreen, but I’m gonna give the movie a few points for this. Now, Thorne does not play a dominatrix type as she’s best known for, but there is a dominatrix in this movie, who is picked up by Belushi in a bar expecting a mousy librarian type, and for whom Belushi falls in love with. As you can see, this is a movie of many surprises, not the least of which is that Belushi is pretty funny in it.

When I watched Taking Care of Business, the switcharoo non-classic where escaped convict Belushi takes the place of neurotic white collar lackey Charles Grodin, I reached a few conclusions. One, that Belushi’s own natural presence was not especially appealing. Two, that he lacks the innate forcefulness of his late brother John. And three, that he was best when directly playing off another actor (the few scenes he shares with Grodin, his performances in Thief and Salvador). Real Men wisely addresses all three by having him play an actual character, do a fair amount of deadpanning, and most importantly share every scene with the much softer Ritter. Belushi spends much of the movie trying to build up Ritter’s confidence to ensure the success of a harebrained plan of which Ritter is an integral part, and finds ways to slide in gentle sarcasm and barely masked frustration, while reacting to the increasingly unlikely circumstances in amusingly relaxed ways. The pep talk he gives to Ritter as they prepare to fight a group of rogue agents dressed as clowns is much funnier than the actual confrontation and later pays off in a great moment when Ritter pulls a gun on actual children’s entertainer clown.

If anything, the weakest part of the movie might be Ritter, who is not bad, but plays his comic notes less surely than Belushi does. Ritter is an unassuming, decidely beta family man who gets swept up into the proceedings because of his resemblance of the CIA agent who was supposed to...well, it’ll sound like nonsense if I try to explain it. When we first meet him, we see him given a none-too-reassuring wink by the milkman leaving his house, who apparently has been paying extra visits when his wife’s been home. (Credit to the movie, the payoff to this is pretty unexpected. Again, this is a movie full of surprises.) Even worse, when his kid’s bike is stolen, the guys who took it beat him up. (I suppose Ritter’s character is still more dignified here than the grown men who stole a child’s bike.) I think Ritter is widely considered a likable actor, but I do not have the same history with him, and I think he plays his character a little too softly for the first two thirds of the movie. (I mostly know from the Three’s Company reruns I watched on a cable channel we got free previews of back in high school. He was the guy I was hoping would get off the screen so we could have more Suzanne Somers.) Luckily, like with Belushi, the movie does give him an arc, and after his transformation into cocky tough guy (punching out a clown, staring down rude bar patrons, beating up the jerks who stole his kid’s bike) results in him giving a much more fun performance.

This is another area where the movie is complemented by Taking Care of Business, as it represents a certain fantasy for men cowed by the suburban white collar existences, although this finds ways to poke fun at alpha male stereotypes. (The event depicted in the poster, of Belushi and Ritter being crushed by the title of the movie, does not happen literally in the movie, although one can argue it’s a metaphor for masculine pressures.) In this sense, the flimsiness of the plot (which sounds suspiciously like Belushi is making it up as they go along) works in the movie’s favour, although the straightforward handling of the action scenes (spiced up by the occasional gag, but not as often as I’d hoped) does not. Still, I was expecting this to be a relatively lame, low energy viewing and it surprised me by actually being good in a few ways, including, most shockingly, Belushi’s performance.

I actually used to like this movie a decent bit... except for the hand-to-hand business. That kinda moved it from "this is good" to "this is silly but I like it anyway".
Part of it though is that I have always really liked Danny Glover. He is such an interesting dude.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/23/m...er-oscars.html

If I'm going to watch a Jim Belushi movie (meaning he is the star) it's going to be The Principal.

(Obviously, if a movie that he is merely in, then Thief.)

Ngl, I confused The Principal with The Substitute for years. Never seen either one.

Does Belushi say "Class dismissed" while firing a gun at any point?

I've seen both and, with respect to Tom Berenger, The Substitute is not nearly as fun as The Principal.
Of course, for sheer visceral school-gang unpleasantness, nothing really beats Class Of 1984.

I mean, he must, right?