31 Days of Horror Reviews Day 31: Prey

Day Halloween: Prey (2022), dir. Dan Trachtenberg

Streaming Availability: Hulu

"You think that I am not a hunter like you. That I am not a threat. That is what makes me dangerous. You can't see that I'm killing you. And it won't either."

Is this Prey the best Predator movie? 

Well, it is the only good one following Predator 2. For this series I skipped over Predators and The Predator, the two non-Alien related sequels, and you did not miss much. Both of these movies were trying to be the next Predator 1, with these big casts of badass action heroes. The Predator even brought back Shane Black to direct... and what a shame thaat was. He's trying his best with quips! Sterling K. Brown sure is chewing a lot of bubblegum and smirking in that movie. Predators 3 and 4, I guess you can call them, are both really messy script-wise. Both movies feel like they're missing scenes. The Predator, for example, posits a theory that neurodiversity is the next stage in human evolution, that old savant trope which was offensive already before we learned the Predators want to steal an autistic boy because he's the greatest threat in the world. I think Hollywood has finally stopped doing this gross shit, and thank god.

These movies that miss the Predator for the jungle, if you will. They do not realize what makes the Predator work as a creature, where this monster needs to live. This alien is not just an action movie villain, the Predator had a very specific niche in his first two movies. This monster lives in places of conflict, invisibly between enemy lines. Predator 1 is all about US interventions overseas, Predator 2 could be argued to be about that violence coming home (negatively in the form of scary immigrants, but that movie's politics are bad). This isn't merely a scary hunter with Batman gadgets, it is a parasite on conflicts. And none of the Alien vs Predator movies get this, Predators thought it was all about The Most Game Dangerous aspect, and finally The Predator thought it needed to be a complete piece of shit.

Prey actually gets it. There is the Prequel aspect where they feel the need to explain the antique 1715 pistol at the end of Predator 2. I never felt any need to meet Raphael Adolini, and honestly Prey isn't interested in him either. He's such an incidental part of this movie, like the studios demanded this intertext fanservice and director Dan Trachtenberg had to oblige. The movie is really about the ongoing conflict between Native Americans and Europeans. Of course a Predator would be drawn here, right at the moment that Europeans began conquering the entire Earth. If they're nibbling at the borders of the American Empire, they also should have been here in our origins too.

I've said this before, but aliens typically represent the future. Speculative fiction is rarely a period piece. However, the alien concept fits extremely well right here. What's happening to our characters, members of the Comanche Nation in the early 18th century, is an invasion by two different kinds of alien peoples. Our protagonist, Naru (Amber Midthunder), comes across a herd of slain and skinned buffalo. Cow mutilations are another element in the seemingly endless varieties of modern UFO mythology. You assume what's doing this is the invisible Predator (Dane DiLiegro), who Prey cuts back to multiple times to show murdering animals for sport. Naru's tribe is strangely nervous about going beyond the ridge line, not telling her what has them so spooked. But the Predator does not kill herbivores. There are things from another world that are much worse: French fur trappers.

The early eighteenth century is the first time trapper parties begin showing interest in North America's interior. Europeans had been in the New World for centuries, conquering the empires further south and taking small bites at the Eastern Seaboard. This was going to radically change the lives and societies of every Native culture. The Comanche in 1719, for example, are not yet the mounted steppe nomads they would become by the mid-century, with the entire nation traveling by horseback. Horses were only just being introduced to the Americas by Europeans, and wild herds of horses would eventually make their way to the Plains. Naru's main companion is a dog, Sarii (Coco).

Oh, we've had a very rough history with dogs this month. There are a lot of dead pets in alien movies: The Thing from Anther World, The Thing, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Alien³, Signs, etc. etc. Well, I have good news: Sarii lives! Good dog.

I cannot say with 100% certainty how accurate the depiction of Comanche life is in Prey. I'm extremely not an expert on this stuff. Prey was shot in English but Hulu offers an alternate dub in the Comanche language. I can only assume the dub is authentic. One thing that's interesting is that the European characters speak in French in both dubs. Movies make conscious choices when they choose which people get to speak English for their audience, The Hunt for Red October famously turns Russian into English so audiences feel more connected to the Soviet crew. (Whether or not this is a good thing is another question, I'd rather hear Russian or Comanche, but mass English-speaking audiences prefer English.) In Prey, French is purposefully left untranslated in the subtitles. The trappers are not your people. They're filthy, nasty, dangerous fools, and Prey has no hesitation to murder dozens of them.

One thing that's became clear to me watching all these Predator movies is how much more violent things are in the 2020s than in the 1980s. John Wick's effect on action cinema over the last decade has been enormous, fight choreography is much more impressive now than it was then. Arnold would just spray and pray, Naru in this movie is fast, nimble, and fatally creative in her stabbing. There is just an overwhelming amount of talent to make - there's no other word it - awesome fight scenes in modern filmmaking. Naru starts this movie hesitating and unable to kill a mountain lion. Later it comes to the French, she'll kill six or seven of them in the span of two minutes, stabbing away like a very bloody superhero, to rescue Sarii. The Predator too gets to massacre these guys with gleeful abandon, they are cannon fodder. It really makes the finale of Predator 1 seem slow and cruddy in comparison.

Prey ends up being a less comedic movie, there's few gags in the script. Naru struggles all movie to prove to her tribe that she can transcend gender boundaries. The Comanche were a patriarchal culture, nobody is pretending otherwise. It is actively a question whether or not she should be out there, especially when she's making simple mistakes and unable to kill a normal Earth bear. She has a good relationship with her brother, Taabe (Dakota Beavers), the golden child of the family, already war chief at a young age. Taabe at least will give her a chance. The other teenagers in his group are cruel bullies. There's a scene where Taabe is absent and his gang capture Naru to bring her home, and this scene is really disturbing, you're afraid where it might lead. Same with the French later. It is a far cry from "goddamn sexual tyrannosaurus".

I'm less in love with the design of this Predator. I like that he's lean and Dane DiLiegro gives him height and speed, versus the plodding lunks from AVP. But there's something weird about how the script calls this one a "Feral Predator", which is bringing in some ugly politics. He's less civilized than the previous ones? I would not think in such terms if your movie is championing peoples who were themselves widely considered "feral" and "savages". One major change is that the Predator's face is fully CG, so the jaws open much wider. The costuming looks different. The new mask evokes a cow skull, he's shirtless, actually he's dressed like a Native American in some ways. The Predator monster has been racially-coded in ways I'm less and less comfortable with, so it is weird to see him look more like our heroes. Script-wise, this one is less "honorable" than the Predators that have come before (which is horses shit, Predators have been sore losers since 1987). Taabe actually is giving this alien a good challenge before the monster cheats with his invisibility cloak.

It therefore comes to Naru to finally complete her hunt training. The final fight is great. It also is one of those times that a very neat script actually works to a film's advantage. Everything Naru has learned about these woods and how the Predator works is used in this fight: the quicksand swamp, her magic herbs that lower body temperature, Sarii as a distraction, the Predator's laser guidance system. Sometimes it's really clever, who could not cheer when Naru tricks the Predator into cutting off his own arm? Or when he auto-locks onto his own head? I wish this movie had come to theaters so I could have heard a crowd roar at that one.

Yeah, movies are good sometimes, man. I stand by it: best Predator movie. Prey even avoids 90% of the cliche call-back quotes of the other movies. Taabe does say if "it it bleeds, we can kill it", and to the script's credit, it makes sense at the moment and is not groan-worthy.

Dan Trachtenberg is making a whole new Predator movie for 2025 called "Badlands", which sadly will not bring back Naru. I would love to see more of Amber Midthunder and Dakota Beavers, just recast them in new roles please. Then like this very week, I found out there's a different currently unnamed Predator movie coming out before that, also being directed by Trachtenberg. So there's a lot of Predator coming down the pike. (Plus an Alien TV show set on Earth created by Noah Hawley!) Disney is gonna exploit the heck out of their Fox alien properties, I guess. But if you come out with good actors, creators with ideas about what to do with the material, you can keep franchises rolling. Being the seventh movie in your series need not be a sin. Even Alien: Romulus was promising in its first half with a young cast and a good idea, until it turned into schlock replays of the other movies.

Uch, I still hate that movie.

...

And that wraps up that. Spooky Season ends with Halloween. A lot of good movies this year. Turns out thirty-one reviews was woefully insufficient to cover the whole history of aliens in horror films. Just off to the top of my head, I should have covered Planet of the Vampires, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the other two Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Pitch Black, Virus, The Vast of Night, Nope, Under the Skin, the Quiet Place series, Critters, could I write a whole review of Annihilation again? Why not? Annihilation is one of the best movies ever made! Obviously we'll have to do this again. I really should try to cover more alien films that are not Anglo-American and don't star white people next time. It felt overdue to watch Prey in Comache.

So aliens will be back one Spooky Season or another. Not next year though.

Happy Halloween! Be very generous to the like two trick-or-treaters you might get.

31 Days of Horror Reviews Day 30: Prometheus & Alien: Covenant

Day 30: Prometheus (2012), dir. Ridley Scott

Streaming Availability: Hulu

-"Why do you think your people made me?"

-"We made you because we could."

-"Can you imagine how disappointing it would be for you to hear the same thing from your creator?"

I actually wrote a review for Prometheus back in college when it first premiered. I'm not terribly proud of that. I was a bad writer back then - might still be a bad one now. I was very loud back then.

Ridley Scott is emphatic that he's never seen Alien vs. Predator. "I couldn't do it", he told Empire Magazine in an interview. It is therefore very curious that Prometheus' script has so much in common with AVP: Ancient aliens that inspired dozens of unrelated civilizations, a precursor race breeding the xenomorph-ish creatures, a dying Weyland corporation patriarch looking for a final answer sending out an expedition to a harsh dead land. There's full identical scenes. Prometheus has two credited writers, Jon Spaihts and Damon Lindelof. However, the story concept belongs to Ridley Scott, with the rough idea predating AVP. He was talking about making a prequel origin story all the way back in 2002. I wonder if Paul W.S. Anderson had more access to Scott's notes and borrowed some of them for his dumb creature feature. It's hard to believe this was entirely incidental convergent evolution. Either Scott stole from Anderson or Anderson stole from Scott, somebody is not being honest.

This is hilarious because Prometheus was meant to be a return to form for the Alien franchise, a more serious reboot after decades of slowly descending into schlock. I remember the pre-production speculation around this thing being wild, with 20th Century Fox acting weirdly evasive about whether this was a xenomorph movie at all. This was the era of "viral marketing", so there's a few scenes shot specifically for internet videos. Guy Pearce as Peter Weyland did a fake TED Talk set in the then-distant year of 2023. Which explains why in our final movie, set in 2093, Pearce is given a horrendously-bad old age make-up effect. (I beg of you, Hollywood: please just cast the elderly in movies, they're good actors, don't do this.) And of course, this was the triumphant return of Ridley Scott to the franchise that made him. He didn't need to come back to this, he was a bankable director with a run of hit and had been nominated three times for Best Director and made a Best Picture in Gladiator. If Scott is coming back, we're told it is because he has big important capital-F Filmmaking to do. The hype could not be higher.

The AVP similarities are only part of the issue. Prometheus in retrospect is a messy movie, probably a movie that's too short at two hours. There's too much cast with not enough space to work. It seems like Prometheus will map onto the plot of the original Alien, then breaks away in unsatisfying ways. We have two alternate Nu-Ripleys in Noomi Rapace and Charlize Theron, one of which is murdered violently by the script, her sin being the one person who never believed in any of this shit. Also, this movie is a weird combination of high-minded concepts of a search for human creators and the ultimate meaning of life, that's also living in a gross exploitation monster movie. It is gorgeously shot by Dariusz Wolski using wonderful landscapes in Iceland and Scotland. This might be, production-wise the single best looking Alien movie. There's great character actors like Idris Elba and Kate Dickie and Rafe Spall and even Benedict Wong in the background. Then there's weird tendencies towards slasher movie rules: the first two deaths are these bozos who get lost in the alien ruins and decide to smoke dope through their astronaut suit respirators. There's two separate alien infestation threats that generate independently of each other, and a then a third villain entirely in the Engineers, our precursor race. There's a lot that's great here and also a lot that you want more of

Personally, I've never been curious about the origins of the xenomorph monster. I never cared about the 'Space Jockey', the big elephant-nosed creature they find already dead in the first Alien movie. Now they're called Engineers and turns out the elephant face was just a mask, instead they're pale bald human-ish giants. Aliens in general are not really monsters that need much history. They're a dark futurism, they don't need to exist in the past. They're twisted reflections of some aspect of humanity, be it our drive towards emotionless modernity or sexual terrors or a wish for the fantastic and spiritual. Prometheus, to its credit, combines all these themes into one story. However, no matter what the alien means, their backstory is irrelevant because they are not real things and they're not supposed to be. Who cares where any random horror movie monster came from? Have you ever cared where IT came from? (Oh, by the way, WB is making a Pennywise prequel, enjoy!)

The origin of the xenomorph becomes bizarrely complicated and confusing. Our heroes travel across the universe to where we think the Engineers have been calling us, led by archaeologist Dr. Elizabeth Shaw (Rapace) and her dipshit husband, Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall-Green). Holloway believes he's about to find God and all the answers, instead he finds a dead world full of X-Files-esque Black Oil that mutates in random ways. David (Michael Fassbender in a tremendous performance) is the local Android, with his own agenda, and poisons Holloway - who was so obnoxious he was asking for it. Dr. Shaw ends up pregnant with a tentacle baby and there's a terrifying abortion sequence, a masterpiece of body horror right here. Then through seemingly random circumstances, her baby, a now-giant Facehugger creature grabs an Engineer and makes a creature that kinda looks like a xenomorph ...but isn't quite? Why is its head pointy?

Disappointment and lack of answers is a core thing of Prometheus. Nobody sums up the entitlement of gratification like Holloway, who instantly descends into drunken asshole territory the moment he does not get to meet his Space Dad and be told how special he is. We never find out why the Engineers made humanity. We never find out why later they want to kill us by dumping Black Oil all across our world. Our selfish, desperate quest for answers is contrasted with our own relationship with David, the next generation of life. Who is treated as sometimes a butler, an irritance, or just a tool. There is much more happening with David than the previous Androids. He's got the same creepy agenda as Ash from Alien, but is also much more, there's a vast interior life for him. Maybe the best sequence of Prometheus is David alone on the ship, modeling himself off Peter O'Toole in Lawrence of Arabia. He alone figures out anything on this dead world, and he's not sharing that information with the fleshbags.

There is something really brilliant in the self-absorption of these humans, be them Holloway or Weyland or Dr. Shaw, and their desperate need for some greater spiritual answer, while never considering how little meaning they put into creating David and his kind. The fact we never get an answer is probably because there isn't one: we were made to be useful in some way and failed. The universe really does not care. The final child born is a xenomorph(-ish) monster that was never part of anybody's plan. Dr. Shaw keeps her faith in a God we know isn't real. I can even forgive the Ancient Aliens stuff (plus several characters in Prometheus laugh it off as complete nonsense). Since it creates the stage for such profound existential bleakness. Aliens have usually been proof of the mystical in our series (Signs, Communion), in Prometheus they're exactly the opposite. You go to heaven to find God, and God isn't home.

Honestly? This rules. My only complaint is that there is not enough Charlize Theron. Her character wakes up doing push-ups after years of hypersleep, and is the only one trying to stop an alien infection from taking over the ship.

David and Dr. Shaw end up being the only survivors, and they fly out to space to find the Engineer planet. Well, we'll see if they get any answwers in the next review... starting immediately!

Day 30-2: Alien: Covenant (2017), dir. Ridley Scott

Streaming Availability: Hulu

"No one understands the lonely perfection of my dreams. I found perfection here. I've created it. A perfect organism."

Five years after Prometheus, Ridley Scott went back to the drawing board with another Alien movie, this one seemingly to clear things up from his first swing. This was supposed to be a more satisfying versus Prometheus' philosophizing. Prometheus met a lot of mixed reviews and the audience seemed to turn on it just a few months after release. You can see why Fox would want something that was more traditionally "Alien". Instead, Scott made practically a replay of Prometheus, just in case you did not get it the first time. We have a different ship, now a colonization craft, that lands on a different spooky abandoned Engineer world, full of slightly different xenomorph(ish) monsters that eat the cast, and starring Daniels (Katherine Waterson), pretty much the new Dr. Shaw. There's even a new David in Walter, a less advanced but more stable model, with Fassbender using an American accent to differentiate the two.

Oh, and there's tons of Selfcest homoeroticism between the two Fassbenders. "I'll do the fingering." That is really weird and really hot, I applaud this decision.

Alien: Covenant leans even more traditionally into out-right horror than Prometheus did. Ignoring the space concepts, the movie is basically The Rocky Horror Picture Show, where our colonists are Brad and  Jet and have some car trouble in the form of a violent solar flare that kills Daniels' husband (a corpse played by James Franco, who thankfully is not in this movie). They land in David's nightmare castle for the night, and come up to the lab to see what's on the slab. David has fully become a Dr. Frankenstein in a Gothic ruin, he's a mad scientist and our heroes are the very dumb, very clumsy fools who get to suffer for his science. There's multiple allusions to Milton's Lucifer. Ridley Scott even considered calling the movie "Alien: Paradise Lost" at one point. Plus, the weird slasher rules come back: two characters banging in the shower get eaten. It is almost comical how fast the colonizers completely fuck up everything, step on every possible rake, and David gets to run the show.

Back on the theme of religion, David is not just Lucifer in that he's now rebelling against his fleshy creators, he's also this vampire feeding on faith. He sees in Daniels another Shaw, which is terrifying. It turns out he's killed our first heroine between movies in his various experiments, and he has similarly twisted plans for his new lady. Shaw carried her faith forward to doom. Similarly, the acting captain, Oram (Billy Crudup), is a single-track mind about divine plans. He walks right into a xenomorph egg, even after David has given him every indication to not be trusting. God did not protect anybody.

The creature that is born is like, 90% of the way to being a traditional Alien-ass alien. I saw this whole movie and did not realize it was supposed to be different. The Alien Wiki calls this thing a "Praetomorph". There's also little white monsters called "Neomorphs". The monster born at the end of Prometheus is unrelated entirely, apparently it was called "The Deacon". Honestly all these flavors of alien just feel like we're making shit up to sell toys now, like they did in the Nineties. I had a xenomorph-bull toy as a kid, by the way.

There's a great father-son scene where David meets the newborn Chestburster and stands proud over this tiny monster covered in Oram guts. After all these generations of accidental or purely utilitarian creations, a new God has finally imbued his creation with love and purpose. And the creation is the most terrible being in the galaxy, a monster that just eats and consumes.

Alien: Covenant is very far from a perfect movie. It is disappointing compared to Prometheus' ambition that it leans so heavily into schlock. It is nowhere near as beautiful a production, it has a worse cast. Maybe the correct move was to dump the xenomorph entirely. Or don't use the xenomorph in these stories, it is only a distraction. Covenant, to be positive, is maybe the single bleakest movie of the franchise. There is not even a hope against oblivion like in Alien³. No, David just wins, and everybody on board the ship is going to be his canvas for his art. We never got answers to the lingering questions left by Prometheus because there were no answers. The fact the movie is silent on this is the highest level of darkness. God never wanted us. Instead we built a mad God who wants to make.... purity. The kind of organism that an Ash from Alien would admire.

More or less, Alien: Romulus becomes a sequel to Covenant. The Black Oil shows up again in increasingly goofy ways. There's a wacky giant Engineer baby for some reason. Romulus has no ideas of its own so inevitably ends up borrowing images from Prometheus and Covenant. It does nothing with the concepts of faith, existence, or creation. It just thinks this stuff looks cool. And that movie sucks. I got so mad at Romulus I rewatched the entire franchise just to confirm my initial reaction, and thus this entire series. Yeah, it's disappointing trash.

Next time! Let us wrap up with an actually good sequel. Prey!

31 Days of Horror Reviews Day 29: The Fourth Kind

Day 29: The Fourth Kind (2009), dir. Olatunde Osunsanmi

Streaming Availability: YouTube

"The fourth kind, there's nothing more frightening than the fourth. You see, that one is when they abduct you."

The Fourth Kind is one of the most experimental movies we've covered this month. This is part of the late-2000s found footage horror boom following Paranormal Activity; found footage itself a new wild production method. Things like The Blair Witch Project could explain the camera in the diegesis of the film, giving this bold pose that what you were seeing was "real". 'Did those kids really die in those woods?' It all fits well into UFOs, considering how our experience of these things are usually cruddy footage shot by a shaking POV. The found footage subgenre is daring you to believe the same way spooky documentaries or X-Files episodes dare you to. The Fourth Kind goes all the weirder with it by pulling in traditional film scenes with professional actors mixed with a mockumentary of supposedly "real" footage. It is trying to make the found footage aspect seem more convincing by leaning on the artificiality of filmmaking. In one version there is a supermodel actresses performing melodrama. Meanwhile the "reality" has a sickly woman with blemishes and less favorable lighting.

Few movies open with their star introducing themselves and explaining the role they're playing. The Fourth Kind intrigued me right here, this is why I chose to cover this.. Milla Jovovich comes on to tell us she is playing Dr. Abbey Tyler in a "dramatic reenactment". .Meanwhile, there is archive footage and audio we'll see, often side by side with the "fake" stuff. The "real" Dr. Tyler is played by Charlotte Milchard. Either Abbey is a psychiatrist working in Nome, Alaska, helping patients tormented by alien abductions. 

The duel level of reality is strange even within the metanarrative of The Fourth Kind. History Channel documentaries would sometimes add color between the various academic talking heads with little reenactment scenes where extras might play some Confederates in costume, maybe at best you'd get a few lines by a guy playing Napoleon. You never have a full Hollywood movie living side by side with what is supposedly a real document of the material. Why would you do this if you're the in-universe documentarian (played by the director, Olatunde Osunsanmi)? It is interesting as a commentary on the blend of fact and fiction that is core to the found footage genre, but it has no further strategy I can understand.

I kept waiting for The Fourth Kind to really get funky and start messing with this bizarre mechanism it has built. It is establishing layers upon layers of artificiality, I wanted that structure to collapse. Get Jovovich and Milchard to interact in the same scene to mess with our heads. Have the fake movie also get tormented by aliens, suddenly our actress is experiencing what her inspiration has been through, like Wes Craven's New Nightmare with Martians. But that never happens. I cannot explain the motivations of the in-universe Osunsanmi when he decides what parts Jovovich will recreate and what parts he'll leave 'real'. We don't have our big star performing the final climax scene. Sometimes the two kinds of footage are shown literally side by side, split screen, sometimes not. I really wanted that border to break down, the 'safety' of what we're told is real and what we're told is pretend to become blurry and messy. It never does. It never is more than a gimmick, which was sadly the key problem of this whole brief found footage craze. This style persists, but the P.T. Barnum showmanship trickery aspect died out.

Worse, I'm not terribly impressed with even our universe's Osunsanmi as a director. The Jovovich portions use a lot of handheld photography. Why would you do that when the footage is consciously un-real? Handheld photography is supposed to create intimacy, as if you're living and breathing in the scene with the actors. But this is all fake and The Fourth Kind wants us to know it! I would gone much harder with the formalism. Put Milla Jovovich on very obvious sets, with blatant CG aliens. Maybe even put her on a stage doing overly-dramatic reads. We could have four or five levels of adaptation happening here at once blurring everything.

What I'm saying is that Wes Anderson needed to make The Fourth Kind. And in fact, did he not? Last year, he made Asteroid City, I picked it as my favorite movie of 2023.

As an abduction movie, The Fourth Kind is decently scary. I don't think the gimmickery contributes much to the horror, and the movie seems to know it. That's why Jovovich disappears in the big scary climax. The Fourth Kind understands the assignment of an alien movie better than say, Fire in the Sky. It has to play with the audience's reality enough that they just start believing in the story. I don't think the budget was very high so we never get footage of the aliens in either plane of reality. Instead there nice frightening scenes of characters seemingly under possession. Milchard's Abbey Tyler has great screams. I do not begrudge you if you lose sleep to The Fourth Kind.

I even think its concepts of aliens are interesting. There's this recurring archetype in every patients' dreams, this white owl that appears at night when they cannot sleep. This is lifted directly from Whitley Strieber who theorized that 'the owls are not what they seem', to quote Twin Peaks; that these nocturnal visions are fake memories replacing a Gray alien. And owls do look spooky sometimes, there's a viral video of two baby owls in a crawlspace that look terrifyingly like space aliens. It is an effective bit of economical imagery, the zoomed-in shots of owl eyes fill in for big effects shots well.

More interesting is the mythology. I have to wonder: Is The Fourth Kind even about aliens? At a certain point we discover the creatures tormenting Nome speak Ancient Sumerian, a la Pazuzu from The Exorcist. Everybody keeps waking up at 3:00 AM, the witching hour like in The Exorcism of Emily Rose. We get vague references to Ancient Astronaut theories (which are still all horseshit but I won't relitigate all that). There's multiple hypnotic regression scenes where uncovering the memories takes on a demonic quality. Characters float in their beds and speak in tongues. Abbey Tyler will break her neck trying to speak with the voice of the creature. During that portion, with the standard dropped camera and spooky effects of static on the digital camera, the alien announces that "I am God". Abbey explains it merely believes itself to be God, reminding this writer of Yaldabaoth, the gnostic demiurge. 

We get a flying saucer on camera though. Demons do not use flying saucers. So who knows?

Less great is the use of Nome as a setting. The Fourth Kind exploits this region's history of missing persons and high fatalities. It is one thing to make a fully fictional movie saying aliens are attacking Alaska, but when The Fourth Kind has these pretenses of reality, it feels more than a bit tasteless. There's real pain here, do not pretend that your shitty horror movie offers answers or closure.

The real flaw of these found footage movies is that ultimately they need to end with you dazzled by the magic trick. Once they've conned you, that's it. There is no definitive statement on what is going on with the demonology or aliens. Tyler's daughter disappears and is never found. We discover very late into the movie that her husband, who we were tricked into believing was murdered (possibly by aliens) actually committed suicide. Documentarian-level Osunsanmi, why would you fake-out your audience that way? Nobody making a documentary would do that. The Fourth Kind is ultimately all a tease. There's no juicy conclusion, nothing is really done with the metafiction. There just is no there there.

Next time! The remake of AVP without Predators, Prometheus! (Oh and Alien: Covenant too.)

31 Days of Horror Reviews Day 28: War of the Worlds (2005)

Day 28: War of the Worlds (2005), dir. Stephen Spielberg

Streaming Availability: Paramount+

"They defeated the greatest power in the world in a couple days. Walked right over us. And these were only the first. They'll keep coming. This is not a war any more than there's a war between men and maggots. This is an extermination."

The opening scenes of Spielberg's War of the Worlds were shot in my hometown, Bayonne, NJ. I know exactly where Ray (Tom Cruise)'s house is, I used to commute over that bridge in his backyard to school in Staten Island. This movie was a big deal back then in my city, I remember they were doing camera tests a block away from my house. We Bayonners (Bayonnites? Do we have a demonym?) were all annoyed when between cuts, the movie implies that you can turn a corner and teleport to the Ironbound neighborhood of Newark, several miles and an entire harbor away. Plus, somehow the family ends on the Staten Island Expressway, a bad idea even in peacetime, now impossible thanks to the alien attack. These are the kinds of Cinema Sins complaints that really matter.

All around, I am disturbed how well War of the Worlds maps onto my life. I was a teenager in 2005, I had a divorced dad living downtown. I remember terrible, awkward nights of staying over his depressing bachelor apartment with my younger sister. We had lots of pointless arguments over nothing. I walked home once just to piss him off.

Also, remember that time aliens nearly conquered the world in Bush's second term? That was weird.

War of the Worlds does have a real, traumatizing event on its mind, and much like Signs, it is the September 11th attacks. Bayonne is not far from Manhattan. You can see the skyline from taller buildings, say the third floor of my elementary school, where I saw one of the towers burning that morning. Everybody in the Tristate Area has their story about that day and how they got home. My mom walked and hitchhiked home because of the traffic jams. A huge smoke cloud hung over New York Harbor for days afterwards. Signs is about the distant fear of watching these attacks on CNN all night. War of the Worlds is about being at Ground Zero, being covered in soot, watching debris float from the sky. Aliens have been representations of our wars since the beginning of this series. How America begins fearing the skies because we were afraid we were due for the horrors of the Second World War we had escaped. Well, the September 11th attacks are when that happened for real. You had good reason, finally, to fear what was above you.

It is fitting that Spielberg chose the novel War of the Worlds as his inspiration. He was not the first to adapt this novel, he was not the last, but his version stands alone as a unique nightmare. In 1897, H.G. Wells was terribly prescient about the Total War future to come, he imagined mechanized war from the air destroying every ability of an innocent nation to resist in mere hours. He imagined a Martian race doing to Britain at the height of her empire what Britain was doing all across the planet. In his writings, he directly referenced the 19th century Tasmanian genocide. 9/11 was America's airborne acts of violence coming home. We had ruled the skies for sixty years raining death without meaningful response. And we followed 9/11 by doing yet more war across the Middle East. Only twenty years later when our client governments are bombing hospitals in Gaza and Lebanon, it is clear that terrorism only begets more terrorism. It is disturbing how quickly we forget our own experiences.

Spielberg has another fascination, and that's of course: dads. His works are full of guys who either fail as fathers (Close Encounters of the Third Kind) or are forced by circumstances to become fathers (Jurassic Park). War of the Worlds features Ray, a patented cocky Tom Cruise character, a guy so divorced he's turned his kitchen into a garbage to work on an engine. He has to watch his two kids, Robbie (Justin Chatwin) and Rachel (Dakota Fanning) for the weekend while their mom and step-dad are out on a trip. Ray is irresponsible and blue-collar clearly disconnected with his children and their more affluent lifestyle. One visual metaphor of the divide between father and son is that Ray is a Yankees fan and Robbie has a Red Sox hat, which in 2005, would've gotten that kid punched in face in Bayonne. (We're still not over the '04 playoffs.) Ray is at least capable and knows exactly which magic thing in a car's starter motor you need to replace to get around the alien ETM blast. He can get his kids out of danger, he is properly cynical and prepared for the dog eat dog violence to come. All told, he does a great job under the circumstances, at least until Robbie goes full quixotic teenage jackass and runs up a hill to join the army and gets himself exploded.

In terms of technical execution, War of the Worlds is as good as anything Spielberg has done. These CG effects by ILM still look great. There's great sets later in the movie. There's a lot of long-takes which are clearly enhanced with a digital camera, a lot of impossible camera moves through a windscreens and such. Spielberg gets a lot done with night scenes and big lens flares - JJ Abrams' entire aesthetic is lifted from this era in Spielberg. There's an amazing set piece where Ray walks through the ruins of a crashed Boeing 747 in the suburbs (probably a reference to crash of Flight 93 on 9/11), and that's a real destroyed plane he's walking through on the Universal backlot. The plane is still there if take the tour.

War of the Worlds is an unrelenting movie for most of its runtime. From the moment Ray is escaping the alien lasers to Robbie's foolish death scene, it is practically non-stop action. There's a car chase scene, a terrifying ferry boat attack, and a bitter misanthropic set piece where a gang of survivors kill each other over the one working SUV. The horn sound effect of the alien Tripods is great sound design. War of the Worlds slow down in its second half with Ray and Rachel forced to hide in the basement of a crazed survivor named Ogilvy (Tim Robbins). And just part of the bleakness here.. Ray has to strangle his host to keep him quiet and his daughter safe. Rachel knows her father is in the other room doing murder and trying to not see or hear it. This is not a 9/11 of people coming together and trying to help. It's a total breakdown, grab what you can and run now.

On the aliens. They "Martian-form" our planet, creating a red weed environment that is lifted from the Stephen King's novel, Dreamcatcher. We actually see the aliens, which was probably a mistake. Their design is clearly taken from Independence Day. They're a lot scarier when they're up in the skies operating these invincible death machines, a lot less scary when they're little goblins playing with bicycle wheels and passing around photos. It feels like they're all about to start cackling like the goofballs in Mars Attacks!.

We do need to talk about the ending. The aliens dying from Earth's microbes comes straight from H.G. Wells. Signs did basically the same miracle thing. Independence Day at least got clever by making it a computer virus, so playing with the concept, and forcing the heroes to be proactive to save the planet. Wells is a Victorian so can thank God's wisdom more than we can. That is a little less satisfying in the 21st century where the inevitability of God's plan comes off more forced and corny. Even more miraculous is that Ray's ex-wife is exactly where he told Rachel she would be: Boston. And Robbie is here too!

Somehow. He clearly exploded and died.

Whatever. Don't worry about it. The movie is over.

Morgan Freeman is doing the narration, get your leftover popcorn and go home. I don't think anybody in 2005 wanted an ending as bleak as "Tom Cruise could not mend his relationship with his son and let him die". But let my official position be this: Steve - can I call you Steve? - you should have killed that kid.

Next time! I probably should have covered Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Oh well. Well, I'll do one better: The Fourth Kind!

31 Days of Horror Reviews Day 27: AVP: Alien vs. Predator

Day 27: AVP: Alien vs. Predator (2004), dir. Paul W. S. Anderson

Streaming Availability: Hulu

"This is like finding Moses' DVD collection!"

I've never liked AVP: Alien vs. Predator. I tried to open my heart for this review. There are people who like this movie, James Cameron said it was the third best Alien film. At best it is like a bad version of Event Horizon.

Even as a kid in 2004, I never found this concept all that terribly exciting. There's a whole cadre of nerds who read the Alien vs. Predator comics and played the video games, I never knew about any of that stuff. Dark Horse has an entire genre of wacky media crossovers, such as RoboCop vs. Terminator, Green Lantern vs. Alien, and of course, we cannot forget Archie vs. Predator. These sound like fun novelties, they're not for me, but I can take some comfort knowing somewhere out there exists Freddy vs. Jason vs. Ash. However, let us be honest, this is not the most serious or dignified artform.

If you really think about it, Aliens fighting Predators doesn't really work in terms of wrestling booking. The draw is two iconic film monsters fighting it out. The problem is that these monsters are very good... at killing humans. This is not like the classic Toho monster crossovers, say King Kong vs. Godzilla, where it's two giants smashing up a miniature model of Atami Castle. A kaiju wrestling match is classic. Aliens and Predators are two monsters whose primary attack is stealth ambushes. Even the names are redundant, it's a species of alien predators fighting a different species of alien predators. Yeah, they could be very well-matched on paper, but does that make a good show? It is like watching the Jets and the Broncos try to play their game last month, two stout defenses and bad offenses, so nobody could do anything. Close game, bad match.

About forty-five minutes into AVP, Paul W. S. Anderson stages the big Alien vs. Predator fight, and... it is okay, I guess? This is why we're here, it does complete the assignment. I'll give Anderson credit that the creature work still looks decent twenty years later. There's plenty of practical effects and guys in suits and real sets. Unfortunately, I think the Predators look way too bulky as played by Ian Whyte. They're like Kane Hodder's Jason as a fully-rectangular slab of meat. You really miss the physicality that Kevin Peter Hall gave the first two movies. The Predators lost the ability to speak, so that's yet more personality removed. And the sets are endless repetitive poorly-lit dark gray corridors.

I don't think this fight scene is the greatest thing put to film. But it does do the thing, at least. The problem is that there's a lot of uninteresting movie around it.

20th Century Fox rushed Alien vs. Predator into production following the surprise smash hit of 2003, Freddy vs. Jason. That also was a fundamentally bad idea for a fight scene, but at least that movie was smart enough to know it was trash and so leaned 100% into comedy. The alien fight is not aiming for vast melodrama or anything, but it is a much less fun movie. One major flaw in Alien vs. Predator is just a lack of character actors. There's Ewen Bremner at least. But it is a cast full of serious people lacking much depth to them. Our protagonist Lex Woods (Sanaa Lathan) is good enough as an action star, but she really needs bigger personalities around her, such as Ripley got in all her movies. Or that filled the screen in the Predator movies. Where's Bill Paxton or Jessie Ventura or Brad Dourif? Instead we get Raoul Bova, who plays a very handsome yet very dull Italian archaeologist guy.

AVP is set in modern times, I guess as a nod to the Predator setting, but the plot has bigger roots in the greater Alien mythology. Lance Henriksen plays Charles Bishop Weyland, the CEO of the early Weyland Corporation, a reference to the android Bishop in Aliens. He's dying of cancer and wishes to achieve one great final act in his last days. That final act being an investigation a pyramid from an ancient human-alien culture buried thousands of feet under the Southern Ocean ice. (Please hold your objections, I got you.)

There is an attempt at first to make this movie concerned with the threat of the cold and the Antarctic. Lex is an explorer here to lead the team and make sure nobody freezes to death or do anything stupid. But by the halfway point AVP forgets that Antarctica is even cold. At the end, Lex is left wearing only a fleece in the middle of winter and never shivers. Nobody's breath is visible. I don't know why they bothered with the location therefore other than to be an extensive reference to Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, a novella about discovering an ancient civilization in the ice. Turns out the Predators raised humanity to be hosts for the xenomorphs.

You'll also notice also that this is the plot of Prometheus, supposedly the more serious Alien franchise reboot, which is interesting. We'll get to that in a few days.

Alien vs. Predator is a very dumb movie but not in the fun ways of being goofy and exploitative. (It is PG-13 as hell.) Instead Anderson's script is full of preposterously bad ideas of history, ones that even the ancient aliens guys would probably groan at. Such as the notion that there was a civilization in the Antarctic when that region of the world has been uninhabitable by humans all throughout our species' short history. Then there's the pyramid design, which the script tells us incorporates features from Ancient Egyptian, Mesoamerican, and Cambodian cultures, the implication being that this is the common origin point of all three people, even with a shared origin language. Now I'm sure linguists are rolling in their aisles in objections, but even in terms of timeline this makes no sense. The Egyptians built their pyramids thousands of years before even the earliest verses of the Bible. The earliest Mesoamerican culture begins thousands of years later, and the Khmer culture began a thousand years after that. Plus this movie never decides if it is talking about Mayan or Aztec cultures, which would mean the timeline of alien successor states is between 2600 BC and 1600 AD. These civilizations share nothing in common except that they built monuments in a pyramid-shape, which is not the most sophisticated construction. You're just building upwards by securing most of the mass at the bottom, like how a child makes a sandcastle. Why were Mesopotamian ziggurats excluded? Why leave out the mounds of North America? You're telling me San Francisco didn't come from the South Pole too??

So let us talk about Erich von Däniken and Chariots of the Gods? and all this psuedohistory and pseudo-archaeology. There's an entire system of alternate narratives of the human story coming out of the Sixties and Seventies. This has the air of a kind of alien religion, where instead of the Abrahamic God creating our humanity and giving us knowledge, there's extraterrestrials. Believe whatever you want to believe, if you worship aliens, I do not begrudge you. There's darker implications though when this presents itself as "history". A lot of this gets wrapped up in White Supremacists theories, it is only a hop and skip to truly nasty Aryan Thule culture nonsense. And even then, the very assumption that "primitive cultures" could not be capable of major works of monumental architecture has a very paternalistic bent to it: "the aliens had to colonize apes to make us people, so we must do the same to lesser peoples". Finally, all this has an aggressive and toxic bent to it, that "established" history is some great conspiracy to hide the truth from us. There's plenty of guys making documentaries like Graham Hancock with big chips on their shoulders, with seemingly more interest in disproving skeptics than performing an actual scholarly process of finding evidence and testing theories.

Let me tell you, the increasingly-poorly funded history departments at universities are not your enemy. Historians are not a monolith, they disagree about everything, and will freely tell you how little they know. Narratives and interpretations change all the time. New evidence can radically shift assumptions. I can tell you within my lifetime the scholarship around the Second World War has shifted drastically thanks to access to Soviet Sources, freed up after with the fall of the USSR. And those are events still within living memory. Due to a lack of written records, we know a lot less than we'd want to about the Khmer Empire that Alien vs Predator claims descended from an Antarctic nation bred by Predators. All we have are the inscriptions on the ruins to go by. That history is going to change radically as more and archaeological work is done or new sources are discovered, if we're lucky. That's how you do the work of history, not by coming up with a theory you like and running around the world pointing cameras at bundles of stone in Malta to prove Atlantis was real or something for Netflix.

This is all ultimately irrelevant for Alien vs. Predator, which is pure schlock, it doesn't even do anything ultimately with these concepts. But it is more interesting than the movie itself. AVP gets close at times to being more than junk. At one point Anderson shoots a scene like our heroine Lex is about to fall in love with the Predator she allies with to fight the Alien Queen. And you know what? If Lex had stuck her tongue down the Predator's "pussy face" as Danny Glover called it, I would change my opinion entirely. 10/10 movie, masterpiece.

But no.

There was a sequel in 2007, Alien vs. Predator: Requiem, a movie I have bashed for decades due to its awful dark lighting. There are a lot of sequences in the sewers which are almost fully black, you cannot see anything. That one was Rated-R and tried to be more violent and nasty. But also, it is a fully generic creature feature. I have nothing to say about it. The Aliens and the Predator crash land in Middle America and kill a lot of people in a remarkably unremarkable cast. That's it. Even its big gimmick "the Predalien", the fusion of a xenomorph and Predator, is not that cool.

Because let's face it: xenomorphs are way more awesome than Predators. This is not even a competition! What does a Predator body bring to this? Nothing. Ash told us that they were "the perfect lifeform" back in Alien 1. They're sleek, iconic, gorgeous dragons with a terrifying life cycle with disturbing psycho-sexual elements. Predators are guys in costumes with a cool rock lobster face, that's it. Aliens win. It isn't close. Freddy is cooler than Jason, Batman is cooler than Superman, "Roe" was cooler than Wade. Fucking waste of time.

Next time! Mars attacks! 9/11 returns in War of the Worlds.

31 Days of Horror Reviews Day 26: Signs

Day 26: Signs (2002), dir. M. Night Shyamalan

Streaming Availability: Hulu and HBO Max

"See what you have to ask yourself is what kind of person are you? Are you the kind that sees signs, that sees miracles? Or do you believe that people just get lucky? Or, look at the question this way: Is it possible that there are no coincidences?"

Alright, let us get this out of the way: the aliens are weak to water. 

And, yes, that is extremely stupid. Signs' entire ending is obnoxiously "neat". Four dozen things set-up by the script all come together as a pattern of miracles to save the day. The "swing away, Merrill" part might be the most painful and corny for me. But, of course, there's the water crap. If you're the slugs from The Faculty, Earth is a fertile paradise. However, if you're a hydrophobic species, be you the Shai-Hulud or the Little Green Man from Signs, Earth would be a hell world, and humans would monstrous creatures with acid for blood like the xenomorphs. Besides the fact the aliens seem woefully unprepared to conquer a species as well-armed and violent as yours truly. Water or not, we'd roll these fuckers in a day. 

To appreciate Signs you gotta get over this, and there were times in my life that even I could not do that. This is all intentional, there is a creator's design at work, and the painful deus ex machina is not by accident.

I can tell you this: Signs is a better movie without the ending. I've tested this. When I was eleven my whole family drove to Elizabeth to see this at the brand new AMC theater, and it was truly terrifying. We only got to see the first eighty or so minutes before the power went out - because the aliens were actually attacking. (Nah, it was a big August thunderstorm.) We went back the next day to finish it, and even on first watch we thought the ending was lame. But "lameness" is the point, just like Hootie and the Blowfish songs.

Signs is an extremely impressive movie twenty years later. The narrative around M. Night Shyamalan was that each of his successive movies were always worse than the ones that came before. You start with a masterpiece in The Sixth Sense and then you descend down to The Last Airbender. We're past the point where I can say "Shyamalan is cool again", we're nearly a decade deep into his comeback now. And he's a an oddball writer whose particularities can be frustrating. Old features a rapper character named "Mid-Sized Sedan", there's a long speech about the nutritional benefits of hot dogs in The Happening. Beyond quirks, Shyamalan is a guy who is very demanding that the world open itself up to the supernatural or the divine or just conspiracy theory thinking. It's all exists on the same spectrum to him. Sometimes this is positive and inspiring (Unbreakable), sometimes it is utterly miserable (Knock at the Cabin), sometimes its just fucking pretentious (Lady in the Water, his actual worst movie). But he's never boring, I'll give him that. Signs might have once been narrativized as the film proving Shyamalan was losing his grip and giving in to his own hype. Now, it's an interesting movie from one of our greatest working horror minds. Check out his new movie, Trap, it's hilarious.

The water thing fits into Signs' inspiration, War of the Worlds. Shyamalan is following in the footsteps of the preposterous Nineties blockbuster Independence Day, and comparing the Clinton era War of the Worlds to the two films during Bush's reign is night and day. Signs' version is much smaller than a nation-wide scale, it chooses to shrink things down to the experience of one family in Bucks County, PA. (M. Night always repping Philadelphia and its suburbs.) Independence Day was this glorious statement of the End of History, how modern liberal democracies had defeated Communism, Racism, and would defeat aliens too, why not? Just a few years later, we got a dramatic reminder that history never stops happening in an event I'm sure you know well: the terrorist attacks of September 11th. And Signs will not be the only post-9/11 we're doing this month. Just three years later there's another War of the Worlds, equally rough and intense, this time directed by Spielberg.

Signs must have begun production in 2001 before the attacks, but Shyamalan felt something. This is as 2002 a movie as it gets. That was a year ripe with paranoia, it is easy to forget now how bad it was. 9/11 was several separate attacks in one day, followed quickly by anthrax attacks merely days later. (Turned out to be totally unrelated but nobody knew that then.) We therefore grossly overestimated the scope and power of Al-Qaeda's networks, never realizing that the hyjacking attacks were their best - and ultimately only - punch. I can remember the news coming up with all kinds of fantastical theories of where and how the next attack would come. The Bush Administration introduced this ridiculous Terror Alert Level, always left at 'Elevated', never did dipping down to 'Low'. So it never gave anything like actionable information. The news would run a rumor that Al-Qaeda might be targeting banks in New Jersey, or the mass transit system. And what do you do with that information? I still don't know. All we could do is be terrified for years until the 2008 financial crisis gave you something else to worry about.

Now of course, there actually are regular terrorist attacks in the US by mass shooters, but people seem surprisingly calm about that. Angry reactionary guys with AR-15s are acceptably "part of the plan" if they're home-grown, I guess.

Signs really plays into this gripping uncontrollable sense of your world falling apart - all on TV. We're just pre-internet for most audiences, so these terrible events played out on CNN or the radio in real time. This allows it to be practically a found footage movie. For much of its run-time the only alien you see in Signs is a blurry Cryptid at a birthday party in Brazil. "ES BEHIND!" The only spaceships appear in news reports. Every character has their own theories, often nonsensical or based on untracable rumor. The famous image of the family wearing tin foil hats turns out to be useless since the aliens are not psychic this time. The titular 'signs', the crop circles, are debated for most of the movie whether they're a hoax, some weird joke, or actual coordinates for a mass invasion. (Since even by 2002, we crop circles had been proven to be a hoax, even Signs admits how easy they are to make.)

The other major theme is more dear to Shyamalan's heart, and that's faith. 'Signs' could mean the crop circles, or it could mean the random items strewn across this scrip that add up like the lines of a conspiracy board into evidence of a full Divine Plan. It is a very Christian view of the universe, that all events all add up, no matter how mysteriously, into salvation. The exact mechanism of the mystery does not matter, faith is all you need. Our protagonist, Graham (Mel Gibson in his final major role before... all that stuff...) is this badly depressed widower, a half-asleep lapsed pastor. He has decided the death of his wife in a random car accident proves there is no God. He's joined by his loser failed baseball player brother Merrill (Joaquin Phoenix) to help raise his two kids, Morgan (Rory Culkin) and Bo (Abigail Breslin). The 'Signs' are all here: Merrill was an Aaron Judge-esque player with a huge swing but too many strike-outs, so he's ready to beat the bop the shit out of the aliens when the time comes, and Bo leaves water all over the house to supply us with the alien key weakness. Morgan has asthma so the alien gas weapon fails. The mother's last words were "swing away, Merrill", and Signs will make sure you do not miss any element of how heavenly contrived all this is.

As a thriller and family drama, Signs is fantastic. We have four good actors in this family. The tension of grief and the children forced to grow up to fill in for their two damaged male parents is a good dynamic. The growing terror of this small helpless farmhouse all alone with unknowable things crawling outside is masterful. Tak Fujimoto shoots the Hell out of this movie with great shots with a lot of depth across the house, across rooms. Signs is a less than perfect alien movie because the CG effects do not look very good and ultimately they're disappointing creatures. But it's a great movie when the aliens are not seen, I cannot deny that. The last act is terrifying and heartbreaking, full of what feel like these forced moments of good cheer before the end, even they break down. James Newton Howard's score is living up to the Hitchcockian comparisons critics gave M. Night Shyamalan back in 2002. All-around really well-done.

There's also a very meta cameo by our director. Shyamalan plays the man who accidentally ran over Graham's wife. He finds himself apologizing to his own character for making him so miserable. He also hands out the secret to solving the movie. If you want divine Signs, here's a creator giving them to his fictional people.

Next time: ...Oh fuck me. ...Maybe I'll like it more twenty years later? It's AVP: Fucking Alien vs. Fucking Predator.... Yay...

31 Days of Horror Reviews Day 25: The Faculty

Day 25: The Faculty (1998), dir. Robert Rodriguez

Streaming Availability: YouTube

"I'm not an alien, I'm discontent."

Congratulations, folks, we've traveled semi-linearly through time far enough to reach... my era. I was seven-years-old in 1998, and I remember this movie very well. It got tons of advertising, Dimension Films thought The Faculty would be a huge deal, a Scream-level smash hit. Instead, it's just one of dozens of teen horror movies in the late-Nineties boom. Not that I'm complaining, I like these kinds of movies a lot. (Check out Urban Legend sometime.) These slick thrillers were proudly self-aware of their genre influences. They're movies full of characters reading their own TV Tropes page, years before that website existed. The Faculty is The Thing for kids too young to remember Ronald Reagan. It's Invasion of the Body Snatchers for the MTV generation. 

(In case you don't know, there once was this thing called "Music Television" that was considered extremely important for youth culture. The Faculty's soundtrack is full of Nineties rock bands like The Offspring, Creed, Garbage, Oasis, and notably, Class of '99. That was a "supergroup" manufactured specifically for this movie, consisting of a very unwell Layne Staley, Tom Morello and some guys from Jane's Addiction. They do a mostly unnecessary cover of Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall (Part 1) and "(Part 2)" and that was their only songs. The whole Alt Rock teenage rebellion scene had mere years to live before Nu Metal took over. Indeed, MTV itself would lose all relevance as any kind of music/youth culture concern, becoming just a reality show network seemingly overnight. This all feels like a completely different universe now. Nobody cares about being "sell-outs", nobody is selling any kind of counter-culture "revolution" through music unless you're a reactionary country singer angry about participation trophies, and more importantly: do they even make movies for teenagers anymore? If you wanted to sell a movie to Gen Z, do you partner with streamers now or something?)

"Irony" was a big thing in the Nineties, even if the word started making less and less coherent sense. The Faculty is part of the Ironic Horror movement. These movies are full of characters who have grown up renting genre movies from the video store, so now live in a scary movie. Reality has been rewritten by the genre, so why not acknowledge it? Scream is full of characters who know "the rules" and yet still perform to exact genre expectations. It never gets to the point of full Fourth Wall breaking, if anything, the metafiction is like a crash course for new audiences. "This is how the slasher movie works, please enjoy." The self-aware aspect is never a negative, this is not a question of immersion. The cast of Scream are a bunch of kids who love slasher movies. Meanwhile, in The Faculty, there are characters debating whether this invasion follows the rules of Robert A. Heinlein or Jack Finney's novel. This is not about tearing down the alien movie, we're not mocking it, the post-modernity actually enriches it.

The Faculty straddles another genre, so it is just as much a metafiction on Teen Movies, specifically the rigid RPG Job Classes established by things like The Breakfast Club. You know: The Nerd, The Jock, The Cheerleader, The Rebel, Etc. Its conception of high school is built around these defined roles, so any deviance from the archetype is an offense to meta-reality, and thus is evidence that you're less than human. If the outcast girl is suddenly hooking up with the star quarterback, something cosmic has gone wrong with the fabric of space-time. High school subjectivity itself is completely artificial, so why not extend that to the artificiality of genre tropes?

There's a lot of pressure to conform to social norms in high school even outside Hollywood's ridiculous role-playing idea of it. The passage to adulthood is scary, there's an identity transformation involved. This whole Alt-Rock youth movement was built to "fight" against it. Therefore, a Body Snatchers plot works perfectly.

Kevin Williamson wrote Scream and The Faculty and quite a few more movies in this mold, always working with the Weinsteins (unfortunately). Those are not good people, but they threw real money behind their teen horror movies. They all ended up with incredible casts. The Faculty is stacked top to bottom to almost preposterous levels. Our creepy alien pod teachers are Robert Patrick at max ham, Salma Hayek, Famke Janssen, and Bebe Neuwirth. There's actually too many character actors because Piper Laurie and Daniel von Bargen end up left out of the movie halfway through. A pre-Daily Show Jon Stewart gets stabbed in the eye by heroic students. Within the young adult cast there's Elijah Wood, Clea DuVall, Jordana Brewster, and Josh Hartnett. An up-and-comer by the name of "Usher" is on the poster, even though he has a very minor role.

The cast is so immense that Laura Harris and Shawn Hatosy feel out of place because I did not immediately know their names or could recall at least six movies they've done. They're not bad, Laura Harris gets to do a hysterically fake Georgia accent as The New Girl, Marybeth. (And to The Faculty's credit, that bad accent is entirely intentional.)

Interestingly for a movie so willing to carry its inspiration on its sleeve, the characters never mention The Thing, because that movie is all over The Faculty. The bad boy, Zeke (Hartnett with some tragic Nineties hair) has invented a kind of drug called 'Scat' that rapidly dehydrates you along with giving a high, and that serves as the big "test" scene, replacing the blood sequence. Later, Famke Janssen will get her head ripped off and it will wander around on its own on tentacle legs. Since this is PG-13, nobody is allowed to say "you gotta be fuckin' kidding me..." but don't worry, I said it for the movie. There's that same paranoia of who is who and whether anybody's story adds up, which fits well into the Scream who-done-it mold.

The way the alien possession works is never all that clear. (Not that this mechanism makes that much sense in any version of Body Snatchers: why does sleeping kill you anyway? You never needed to ask because it never mattered.) Principle Drake (Neuwirth) is murdered by her teachers in the opening of this movie when she's still human. She comes back later, possessed, now dressed in a scandalous blouse for a teacher. However, the aliens just seem to be a kind of slug monster that burrow into your flesh to control you, not sure how there's a healing factor here. Everybody will come back as human again, even Famke Janssen, who was briefly decapitated. Mr. Furlong (Stewart) dies outright and still comes back with just an eyepatch. There seems to be some kind of meddling involved to keep the rating PG-13, which might be why the Scat drug is basically cocaine but we're told is actually crushed up caffeine pills. Can't have kids doing hard Schedule I drugs, can we?

The Faculty is the first movie we have that's using extensive CG effects. Some of them are not great - The Thing did the head crab gag a lot better than The Faculty does. But there is a final giant slug monster that's a decent practical effect. I like the design of the little slugs. I like the detail that these creatures are very hydrophilic, so their hosts need to drink ample water. Robert Rodriguez does a good job filming adults sipping from the water fountain with a lot of menace. Robert Patrick sure stands creepily in the middle of sprinklers like he's Michael Myers.

Next time! Sometimes aliens like water, sometimes they don't. Signs!

31 Days of Horror Reviews Day 24: Fire in the Sky

Day 24: Fire in the Sky (1993), dir. Robert Lieberman

Streaming Availability: YouTube

I'm not happy about this: Fire in the Sky is a bad movie. It is really disappointing considering its reputation as one of the scariest alien abduction movies ever made. Yes, it has the single most terrifying alien scene in film history, and I'll luxuriate in the horror of that moment. But that's ninety minutes into Fire in the Sky and after that's over, the movie ends on a thud. The rest of it is a mediocre melodrama in a small town about a mystery that is never much of a mystery. It is a remarkably unambitious movie in many ways, there is very little on its mind about aliens, or the supernatural, or even the small town politics its wasting our time with. Fire in the Sky is just not a horror movie for most of its runtime. It is a very boring movie.

With one really great sequence. Go skip to one hour, twenty three minutes in. Then at an hour thirty-five, you're done. Turn it off.

Fire in the Sky's abduction is so terrifying, and it is in a different movie than everything else. It is night and day between that sequence and the rest of the movie. So let's just go right into it, it rules. The plot involves the disappearance of Travis Walton (D.B. Sweeney), a logger in Arizona who reappears five days later after much controversy that never matters for anything. During his 'Welcome Home' celebration, he starts having severe PTSD, and after some syrup lands on his face, he remembers his experience.

The best thing about Fire in the Sky's vision of SciFi is how filthy it is. The ship is full of dusty surfaces. There's random trash all over the place, weird objects these creatures collected from their victims. Their technology is not sleek, it is more than lived-in, it is unclean. Like a hoarder's house, some environment ruled by creatures with bad hygiene. This cannot have any practical purpose, there is no science happening, just the work of wicked goblins relishing their nastiness. Travis has to put his hands in slime, and gets some nasty brown crap poured down his throat. He awakes in this zero gravity chamber and has to tear through this rubbery film to get out of his cell. Over to the side there's a half-rotten corpse that might still be alive somehow.

The Grays that show up are not the cute little men of the cover of Whitley Strieber books. The iconic face is just a suit. Underneath are these wrinkled creatures with beady crossed-eyes and a cruel expression. They carry Travis onto the operating table to smoother him in tight latex, crushing him to the table. Very S&M in the most unpleasant ways. It is unrelenting in its painfulness. Travis has weird instruments pushed into his screaming mouth and other things jammed into his neck. They leave one eye open and pour some milky fluid right into the open socket. So he can peer through this foggy liquid to see a needle slowly extending to his eyeball.

This is masterful. Bill Pope put all his energy into this, then he went to sleep for the rest of the shoot. Industrial Light & Magic made the effects, and they're great. D.B. Sweeney does a lot of floating in zero gravity and the effect is flawless. Truly bravo.

Now I have very few positive comments left to say.

A cast member on Red Letter Media once muttered cynically during a Best of the Worst review, "you have to put something in the movie!" And beyond all the artistry of movie-making, it does really boil down to that: there have to be images on screen to fill time. Fire in the Sky is not a hideous movie. The camera is moving, a lot of shots have a nice autumnal orange glow to them. But so many scenes... just exist. There's entire subplots that never really add up to anything. Relationships that feel like sketches of characters. It feels unfinished, frankly.

Fire in the Sky is based on the "true story" (in the scariest of scare quotes) of the real Travis Walton, who reportedly was taken by aliens in 1975. I've said before that this field is full of charlatans and bullshit, Walton's Wikipedia page implies heavily that he is full of shit. His friend Mike Rogers (played in this movie by Robert Patrick) admitted in 2021 that the whole thing was a hoax before choosing to recant the recanting. The film's October color pallet might be its attempt to look more Seventies. This is one of those movies that does so little to commit to their settings that you could watch half of it without realizing it is even a period piece. I also suspect that this movie was made by people who did not believe Walton. They love his story for its exploitation value, but also are fundamentally uninterested in his life. The fact the horror does not add up to a real theme has a nasty cynicism to it when you realize this a story told by a liar. Of course it is empty and shallow.

In the movie, Travis and Mike are best friends and future brother-in-laws living a meager a blue collar life. Mike is struggling to pay his mortgage and keep his marriage together, Travis's big ambition is a crayon drawing of a motorcycle dealership he dreams they'll open together. He's a boy whose best friend has had to become a man, it could be a good relationship is this were more sketched and they had more time together. While working in a six-man logging crew, one night they see a UFO up in the trees. The giant red object appears to be a forest fire, until they realize it is a craft with a lava-like texture below it. Travis gets out of the pickup truck and is taken by a beam of light. The other five flee back to town to tell very dubious local cops and a hot shot out-of-town detective, Frank Watters (James Garner) their story.

Most of the plot ends up therefore being Mike and his gang having to fight off a swirling police investigation and the heavy insinuation that they killed Travis. There's lots of details to this that do not matter. One member of the crew Dallis (Craig Sheffer) has a criminal record and likes to hang around a junkyard to sleep with Mexican ladies. There's a dorky scumbag UFOlogist hanging around. Everybody takes a lie detector test which reveals nothing because polygraphs are total pseudoscience. Watters knows they're lying. The crew seem to be leaving out details and hiding something from the police, but we never find out what. They give Robert Patrick a big speech at the town hall demanding they believe him, which is corny and forced, even though Patrick is a very good actor.

There's just big things missing in this script. Travis and Mike, and Mike's wife Katie (Kathleen Wilhoite) might be suffering in a homoerotic love triangle. I'm grasping at straws here, because that at least is about... anything! Versus the nothing we have otherwise. Fire in the Sky is a really dull movie for such long stretches, just a drama about regular slobs dealing with too much media attention, and it does not have much to say about the media. Or policing. Or aliens, even. We've seen that aliens can represent so many things: creepy modernity, religious awakenings, sexual terrors. The aliens in Fire in the Sky are basically not in this movie except that flashback, so they cannot represent anything except some spooky freaks doing some fuckery. Even the ending is a shrug. Mike loses his family, Travis gains a family, they hang out one last time, and the movie ends. If there was a final revelation that Mike had also been taken by aliens, that would work better. It at least leaves you with a fear that the aliens might come back.

This is the Nineties. We're about to hit the high water mark of UFO fascination. The X-Files will premiere a few months after this movie comes out, and Robert Patrick will eventually be the star of that show in its last seasons. And that show worked so successfully in the unknowability of the aliens, it had this impressive schizophrenia to it. There was always some conspiracy, Mulder and Scully were always just within reach of cracking it open, and it never would add up to anything concrete. Because there is nothing concrete in this worldview, it's just a deep unease that the universe is broken. But broken in a kind of reassuring way, that it is not random chance and lucky breaks that make the world work, instead a malevolent demiurge in flying saucers ruling from the skies. The X-Files episode of Fire in the Sky would know how to end: with its hero staring at the stars, unsure of what happened but still looking for an answer. Cut to that great piano theme. This movie ends with two dudes hanging out in broad daylight.

Fire in the Sky is such a fundamentally boring object I started talking about a TV show instead. I'm sorry I rewatched this movie because all I remembered was the abduction sequence, and that's the only part you need to remember.

Next time! Invasion of the Student Body Snatchers, The Faculty.

31 Days of Horror Reviews Day 23: Communion

Day 23: Communion (1989), dir. Philippe Mora

Streaming Availability: Tubi

"Is that someone there?"

It is hard to know exactly what to make of Communion, since this is a movie that is unsure of what to make of itself. That is baked right into the dough of the thing: uncertainty, a lack of answers. Communion is a movie where our protagonists never find out what exactly is happening to them, are never in a position to ever resist what is occurring, and cannot solve anything. The "happy ending" is merely a family unit choosing to continue to exist, with our hero writing a book about his experiences. Whether the aliens win or lose, whether these are aliens at all, is immaterial. At a certain point the character just need to accept their existence is no longer rational, there's an of acceptance of the mystical in their lives. It is a journey towards faith, but not in a kind and loving Christian God, but just faith that there is more to this universe than we can understand.

Communion is based on the 1987 memoirs of the same name by horror author, Whitley Strieber. In these horror reviews, we've run into adaptations of his work in the past with The Hunger, and when I choose to do Werewolves one year, we'll meet him again with Wolfen. (Trust me, we're doing Werewolves eventually.) Strieber was part of the Seventies and Eighties horror literature boom along with folks like Stephen King and Peter Straub. Unlike his contemporaries who stayed more or less grounded in fiction, Strieber became a major figure in the UFOlogy space, he's still writing sequels to Communion to this day. He's part of a lurid, pseudoscientific field, so he's contemporaries with a lot of hucksters and sensationalists. The X-Files would base the character of Jose Chung off of Strieber, who is proudly a cynical con-artist. I don't get that sense reading about him that he's trying to scum anymore. I'm not sure how true anything Stieber experienced was, from what I hear the Commuion book seems very honest (I haven't read it), and is full of his own confusion and difficulty in processing these experiences.

But ultimately, I'm not here to doubt him. The reality of aliens is sort of immaterial to Communion, this movie does not need to prove anything to you. It also is not merely exploitation of the phenomenon. A more direct horror movie about abductions would play into the fear and violence of these encounters. We'll see that tomorrow with Fire in the Sky, as a matter of fact. Proof of the supernatual would be more terrifying, but also would be clear and satisfying, that's too neat for a movie like Communion. This is real to the characters, whether they can it explain it nor, whether they like it or not.

The film struggles with Strieber and his material in fascinating ways. Apparently, Strieber was not pleased with the final product even though he's got screenplay credit. At times it does appear to be mocking him and his alien visions. Christopher Walken plays Whitley and he is making big choices right from the start. If you are a Walken fan and love him doing his wacky "more Cowbell" thing, Communion might have the most Walken-est performance of his career. Within his family the film version of Strieber is sort of a big kid, this wild ball of energy. He's slapping his computer, giving aliens high-fives, and dancing merrily to "Putting on the Ritz" when he's about to walk out on his family. There's so much comedy early on that it gets hard to read what is a joke and what isn't, should I be laugh when Walken is shouting at strangers because he thinks they're giant cockroaches? There are moments where Strieber is laughing at the artifice of the abductions. Then the aliens appear as a magician version of Stieber, who laughs right back at him.

These sequences feel as surreal as the Twin Peaks visits to the Black Lodge. It is almost more terrifying because it does follow the clear rules of a spooky alien attack.

At first these abductions are the typical horror narrative of a family stained by inhuman invaders. Whitley, his wife Anne (Lindsay Crouse), and their son Andrew (Joel Carlson), leave their Manhattan apartment to visit their country home in the mountains. That night, these terrifying lights appear, causing missing time and confusion in the morning after. Andrew talks about these "little doctors" that he prays will go away, but never do. Communion takes on the structure of a haunted house movie, think The Shining or Stir of Echoes, where the husband and son have been touched by the supernatural, and the poor wife has to be the voice of reality holding things together. Later, Whitley is having nightmares and is haunted by experiences he cannot understand, and the family is on the verge of collapsing. At one point he nearly kills his wife with a rifle after seeing a dwarf-like creature in the kitchen. This is after a Gray alien jump-scared us by popping out behind furniture.

But then we see more of the abductions and Communion almost collapses as a horror film. Whitley sees a hypnotist (Frances Sternhagen) with a specialty in UFOs, particularly rape cases, and yeah, anal probing becomes a major theme here. It is not shown pleasantly either, not played for laughs, unlike much of the rest of this. The aliens themselves are almost jokes. The effects get more and more unreal. We see a Gray dancing in the background, now clearly a rubber puppet on strings. Whitley sits down next to the head of a dwarf still making its animatronic actions and there's also rubber masks of the Gray hanging there. Later Whitley will pull the Gray's face off like it's a Halloween mask, revealing a lizardlike creature underneath. He tells the aliens that he does not believe in this form either, describing this all to be a "Chinese Box", just one illusion after another. It is all very hallucinogenic, to the point that the final "abduction" ends with Whitley waking up in his car, as if this really were all nothing more than nightmares.

By the way, this is our first Gray in a movie. There have been a lot of aliens with a lot of shapes, this is first time we're getting the classic alien face from the emoji. The new movie V/H/S/Beyond features a character who claims that the Gray shape was made popular by Whitley Strieber, which I don't think is true. You can see Grays already in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The 1965 abduction account of Barney and Betty Hill mention Gray aliens. As a pop culture villain, they're an evolution of the earlier 20th century aliens, "the Little Green Men" from pulp SciFi illustrations, a similarly wicked exaggeration of the human form. And all these aliens have a lot of similarities to goblins or fairies, Communion even makes a reference to legends of "the Kobolds".  There's thousands of years of legends of little trickster creatures taking people, often for sexual reasons. The fairies are always taking infants or maidens in the stories, completing some part of their reproductive process we humans cannot understand. The Grays, the science fiction 20th century fairy, also probe and violate.

In Communion, there's no sense that any of this has malevolent scientific aims, it's all so magical and preposterous. Maybe the aliens are just here to fuck with you. Yet, that's no less disturbing. I think the film gets all the scarier when it acknowledges its own formalism. Even with characters breaking the fourth wall and trying to laugh away at these goofy trolls and their o-shaped singing mouths, they're still trapped in the nightmare. It does not go away just because you know it isn't real. If Whitley is suffering from a disease, knowing he's sick is not going to turn his life back to what it was.

That title "Communion" is a religious reference, a Christian rite where you receive the Eucharist. And that's one of the weirdest rituals, a magical transmogrification of food into the flesh of God, a cannibalistic human-divine sacrifice. And please forgive this Jewish author, I say with no malice intended, that is bonkers. Yet a Communion is a core part of the lives of billions of people who imbue it with deep importance and even beauty. That it is inherently irrational and mystical is not a problem to them. Whitley's pain comes from battling all this, either refusing to accept it exists or trying to banish it. He finds a salvation of sorts not from an alien Christ giving any sort of answer, but just, in the fact he's choosing to continue living, knowing he has sensations opened to forms of reality he cannot ignore.

There's something really special there for me, I think Communion might be a really great movie, as strange and off-kilter as it is. Christopher Walken might be trying to ruin Communion with his antics, or maybe he understands the material better than the author did. There are not many movies that handle this topic this way. Most horror movies need to commit to the tone of total negative assault. Communion is trying to be more. I've seen this film twice and find more intriguing about it each time.

I do not have any mystical organs. This might be why I watch and study horror so closely, because it is simulations of things I might never experience. I've never been kidnapped by aliens, I've never been visited by a ghost, I've never been possessed by a demon, I've been to the Holy Land and stood on the Temple Mount and felt nothing. If you want cosmic horror, imagine being at the font of God's power on Earth, the most holy spot in the universe so your people believe, and instead seeing nothing but the infinite void of nothingness. It's painful, like I'm colorblind or incapable of falling in love or some other key aspect of the human experience has been amputated from me. But also, there is comfort there, my world is only ever what I can explain. In the Bible, the prophets shake in fear when the Lord comes to them. Whitley and his family are tormented and nearly destroyed by goofy puppet creatures. Meanwhile, I just get to watch movies, and often really good ones, thought-provoking ones, and maybe I'm better off.

Next time! A movie that will inspire much less thought, tragically. Smoke on the water, Fire in the Sky!