Silver Bullet (1985)

The peaceful US small town of Tarker’s Mills is suddenly hit by a series of incredibly brutal murders. Curiously enough, the killings always take place on the night of the full moon. The local sheriff (Terry O’Quinn) isn’t terribly successful at finding the killer, and soon enough, the natives are growing restless enough to start on acts that will go on to influence some of the most idiotic bits of the pretty damn idiotic Halloween Kills; also, these acts will get some of them killed in unpleasant ways.

Paraplegic kid Marty Coslaw (Corey Haim) figures out that the killer is a werewolf, and will eventually even find out the monster’s true identity, but he’s not exactly in a position to convince anyone to believe his wild tales. Eventually, he finds allies in his sister Jane (Megan Follows), who gives up some fine times of mutual sibling hate for it, and even an actual grown-up in form of his eccentric Uncle Red (Gary Busey). But then, Red is the kind of guy who turns a kid’s electric wheelchair into a motorcycle, so he’s not exactly firing on all cylinders, unlike the wheelchair.

After this, his only feature film, Silver Bullet’s director Daniel Attias would go on to a successful TV career that still continues today. From time to time, there’s a whiff of mediocre TV about this Stephen King adaptation, mostly when it comes to its treatment of the more emotional moments between the Coslaw kids. There’s something too treacly and pretty unconvincing about those scenes, which isn’t helped by a King script that feels stilted and uncomfortable in those moments in ways his books aren’t when treating comparable material.

Tonally, the film is somewhat inconsistent, at least on first thought. There’s the afterschool special feel of the sibling scenes, the love for the mild gore gag of the werewolf attacks, and, for most of the film’s running time, a love for broad and curiously artificial performances and writing that can suggest a live action cartoon. Or, going by King’s influences, pre-Code Horror comics read as a live action cartoon. Fortunately, this broadness is laid in the hands/on the shoulders of a cast of character actors (apart from those already mentioned also Everett McGill, Bill Smitrovich, Lawrence Tierney and a host of not quite as well known names) well capable of making an approach that could be annoying in lesser hands interesting and fun to watch, turning things from the cartoonish towards a dream-like feel that has never been typical of US horror filmmaking beyond the regional level.

In the context of a dream, even prime 80s silliness like the motorcycle wheelchair makes a degree of sense, or rather, fits into the curious world where this takes place, where a town can have a prolific serial killer, yet nobody from the outside, neither press nor law enforcement, shows any interest whatsoever in proceedings, thereby turning the dreaded plot hole into parts of the mood.

Once having accepted this about a movie I’ve never clicked with in earlier attempts at watching, I’ve suddenly grown enormously fond of the whole thing, its genuine willingness to go with dream instead of real world logic in telling its werewolf tale. When he’s not doing teen melodrama, Attias is a pretty effective director – not one visually inventive enough to reproduce the feeling of the Berni(e) Wrightson illustrations for the original book (which were my first conscious encounter with Wrightson’s work when I was a kid), but certainly willing and able to find a creepy, comics-like/dream-like (take your pick, I choose both) way to present any given scene.

Carlo Rambaldi’s effects fit into this perspective on the movie as well; while they are beautiful and lovely in the way of good practical effects, they also do tend to look broader and feel more performative than is typical of the work of his peers. In a film whose point clearly isn’t naturalism, this potential weakness turns into a strength, so much so that I can’t imagine a Rick Baker werewolf fitting into the surroundings of Silver Bullet as perfectly as Rambaldi’s creature does.

In short: Lethal Weapon (1987)

Having watched quite a few films written by Shane Black in the last couple of months, I very much saved the best for last, and have now come up with my own private theory (not to be confused with my own private Idaho) about him: Black is a much better writer when he has clear constraints to work in. At the early stage of his career when he wrote this, he just couldn’t quite indulge himself as he can do now most of the time - I assume one reason Iron Man 3 is as great as it is because there are constraints in working with Marvel getting in the way of most of Black’s flaws while helping his virtues as a writer - so he couldn’t indulge in endless variations of having characters mumble “life is pain” but instead had to show us this philosophy (as far as it goes) through the actual plot of the film. There’s also no room for his four-letter word based humour to become obnoxious – there are about half the fucks and bad jokes as in a contemporary Black film in Lethal Weapon, but here all those fucks are perfectly placed and not everyone seems to suffer from Tourette’s, and the jokes are expertly timed at moments when levity is actually useful to the film. Also very atypical for the writer today: the third act is as well constructed and as tight as the rest of the film.

Sure, the action scenes are somewhat more constrained in their dimensions then they would quickly become deeper into Black’s career, but they are tightly constructed and effective, and there’s nothing as lazy needed to set them up as to have a little girl crawl into a truck loaded with explosives. Things are still larger than life, mind you, they are just larger than life in a more effective manner. And the action on screen is great,  showing off stunt work as good as you’ll see it in a US film of any era.

But the human parts of the film work just as well, with leads that are just slightly larger than life (it’s a big screen they are on after all) but have human problems; and when their life is pain, it’s much more believable, and actually a bit touching, which always comes as a surprise in an action film. But then, Black’s script really does seem to know most of the time that the macho culture particularly Riggs breathes is not a healthy place to live.

Acting-wise, this is mostly Danny Glover’s show, who projects a plethora of nuances and feelings through posture and slight changes of the timbre of his voice; Mel Gibson clearly has no idea how to play a guy with Riggs’s problems (as if the first Mad Max didn’t exist) but does his best, even though he tends to default to bug eyes and is usually drawn in useable directions by a Glover who clearly is the Carl Weathers to Gibson’s Schwarzenegger, to stay in 80s action cinema that pairs an excellent black actor with a not that excellent white dude.


This thing is a classic of US action cinema for a reason.

Predator 2 (1990)

In the far-flung future of 1997, LA’s early 90s gang wars have taken on apocalyptic dimensions, with a semi-militarized well-equipped police force apparently unable to even win straight shoot-outs against half naked but at least properly armed gang members. Perpetually enraged Lieutenant Mike Harrigan (Danny Glover) is still trying, mind you, but really, his only ability as a policeman seems to be shooting people really well, so it’s difficult to be impressed by him, or his bunch of doomed side-kicks (including characters played by Bill Paxton, Rubén Blades and Maria Conchita Alonso).

Things in Los Angeles don’t get better once a very rude alien (Kevin Peter Hall) starts murdering gang members, police, and anyone else who isn’t pregnant. Because this was made in 1990, a shady group of government male models under the less catwalk-ready leadership of Gary Busey and Daniel Baldwin gets in on the action too. Time for Harrigan to get even more angry.

Where John McTiernan’s Predator is one of the central masterpieces of US action cinema with a brain, the second film as directed by Stephen Hopkins is just a damn mess that squashes action movie clichés, violent conservative wish fulfilment, and a terrible looking version of the titular creature into a film that manages to be loud and obnoxious yet still pretty damn boring for most of the time. Hopkins just doesn’t have a hand for flair and pacing, and while his mass shoot-outs are competently shot, they never have the impact they should. Which of course might have something to do with the fact that on paper, the cast may be low budget action movie heaven, full of actors to put a smile on every action movie lovers’ face, but in practice could be any group of guys and one gal getting killed for our entertainment, for all the depth and interest these one-note characters have. Somehow the film manages to make me not care about characters played by Bill Paxton and Danny Glover, for Cthulhu’s sake!

Confusingly enough, the script with its pretty damn racist insistence on comparing the black parts of an American city with a jungle in the worst possible ways and gangs exclusively built on the worst stereotypes is by the same guys who wrote the first film, who apparently haven’t understood what they did there, nor how to use the alien monster they created well. But then, the various attempts at more Predator films following all have demonstrated a surprising inability to understand what works about the Predator and why. Though they, at least, won’t have monster suits that look as crappy as this one here, nor a director who is quite as inept at keeping it out of sight as Hopkins here turns out to be. Though they all seem to agree with this film that what the Predator really needs is to be less mysterious and dangerous, and more like a space prick.


Glover’s Harrigan is a pretty sad excuse for a protagonist too. Sure, the film is obviously trying to present him as a man broken by repeated attempts to change the state of the city he is living in for the better, but it never actually seems to understand itself that he’s failing because he’s the proverbial guy who only has a hammer so everything looks like a nail to him, and so can’t actually come up with another direction for him to go into than to stay perpetually angry, shooting at somebody. Which a cleverer movie (say, Predator) might have realized and used to say something profound (or at least mildly clever), or something nihilistic, or perhaps even something hopeful. Alas, Predator 2 only uses it as an excuse for another (and then another) pointless shoot-out, but then doesn’t even have the ability to make that shoot-out at least actually entertaining to watch.

Three Films Make A Post: There is a cat in the brain

Elysium (2013): One shouldn't be surprised about the critical drubbing Neill Blomkamp's neo-cyberpunk movie received by mainstream critics. It's a film far too angry about the state of the world for the bourgeois set to stomach. Particularly since it's not at all graceful about its rage and would clearly love to punch you (and possibly me, too) in the face - for good reasons.
That feeling of well-grounded yet quite consuming rage the film shares with its protagonist Matt Damon (in one of his good outings) does of course also cause its final act to turn into a full-grown violent wish fulfilment fantasy with a dash of deus ex machina but then, how else could Elysium not end in absolute bitterness? Generally, even in the real world, power doesn't sit down with the people it crushes under its boots to build a better world, so I don't know how else the film could have ended. Unless you'd argue for bitter and pessimistic, in which case you could of course kiss the money Blomkamp needed for all the pretty SF stuff on screen goodbye.

Maneater (2007): Gary Yates's SyFy Channel movie is a perfectly entertaining little film about a tiger making its new home in the woods belonging to your typical US small town, eating hunters, joggers, and other undesirables. Thanks to a very entertaining performance of Gary Busey as one of the nicest and more competent sheriffs in this sort of movie, the inclusion of a tiger-telepathic little boy sub-plot, as well as of a great white British hunter with excellent facial hair (one supposes for the screenwriter British colonial India is still a thing) it's really rather pleasant to watch. Of course, originality, etc. etc.


Ritual (2013): Original isn’t what Mickey Keating’s Ritual is about either but this quite low budget piece about an estranged couple’s troubles with some Texan cultists highly recommends itself with as clever a use of seemingly low res footage as one could wish for, an idea of Americana bordering on David Lynch, and a highly effective approach to showing its doomed protagonists stumbling ever deeper into trouble. It’s a very simple story but Keating tells his tale so well and with such a fine hand for pacing only the most churlish would mind. In fact, the simplicity of the plot and the archetypal form the film’s threats take on only help make its best scenes (and there are many) all the more nightmarish.

Under Siege (1992)

The US Missouri – a battleship carrying nuclear armaments – is on its final trip before being decommissioned. A bunch of evildoers under the leadership of one William Strannix (Tommy Lee Jones dressed like Bruce Springsteen circa 1985) has decided this is the best moment to hijack the ship, steal the missiles and sell them to the highest bidder. Because they have the ship’s XO Commander Krill (Gary Busey) – yes, that’s really his name – on their side, the pirates manage to get on board posing as entertainers for the Captain’s surprise birthday party and are so able to ambush the ship’s crew completely unawares and lock them up quite well.

All of the crew, that is, but chief cook Casey Ryback (Steven Seagal). As it happens, Ryback is not just an apparently great cook and a smug bastard but also a badass marine, so before anyone can say “Die Hard on a battleship”, he’s already teaming up with the playmate (Erika Eleniak) the bad guys brought with them for no good reason whatsoever, and starts to solve the little situation.

Ah, the times when some people in Hollywood thought they could turn Steven Seagal into a big budget action movie carrying star instead of the guy not even cutting it in direct to home video films he turned out to be. The positive side of this foolhardy endeavour for Under Siege is that Seagal is teamed with a whole bunch of people who are actually good at their jobs. While repeat-Seagal director Andrew Davis surely will never be confused with a great artist, he was at the time a more than decent director for this sort of bread and potatoes studio action movie, able to stage convincing and fun action sequences, keeping the explosions in focus, and certainly knowledgeable of enough of the tricks of his trade to make a highly entertaining bit of action cinema that looks and feels slick and flows well.

Add to that Tommy Lee Jones and Gary Busey apparently trying to outdo each other with their expressions of cheesy action movie villainy, as well as the horrors the costume department comes up for them - Busey outdoing Jones’s Boss-style with a bit of cross-dressing that isn’t embarrassing and uncomfortable to watch at all, oh no - and the fun factor heightens considerably.

Topping off the good parts of the film is an absolutely shameless script whose silliness only begins with having the villains act as undercover entertainers like the good guys in a 70s Bollywood masala infiltrating a villain’s lair. There is also many an absurd dialogue scene to witness (Wallace’s bizarre phone conversations with the prospective buyers of the missiles need to be heard to be believed), more ridiculous plotting than one could reasonably expect from a single movie, and bonus scenes supposedly taking place in the Pentagon so hokey, the 50s are embarrassed.


The film’s only problem is Seagal. He is, as we all know, a terrible actor with a tendency to exclusively project unfounded smugness, his martial arts skills look worse than anything the actors in the film who don’t pretend they have a martial arts background present, and his line delivery is so wooden as to make Chuck Norris look like an actor. He’s even out-thesped by Eleniak, and the poor woman’s really only in the movie to show off her implants. Seagal just doesn’t work as an actor, an action hero or even just a plain heroic figure, but thanks to the efforts of everyone else involved, he’s not as painful to watch as in most of his other films. Which, given that he’s the nominal lead of the piece, is quite an achievement by Davis and co.

Surviving the Game (1994)

Jack Mason (Ice-T) has hit rock bottom. He is homeless, and making his life even more difficult by torturing himself for something pretty damn traumatic that happened in his past. When his only friend, an elderly white guy, dies, Jack gives up completely and tries to kill himself by walking into traffic. He’s rescued – or at least dissuaded – by Walter Cole (Charles S. Dutton) who works at the local food bank and thinks Jack is just the right man to work for him and his partner as a wilderness guide, even though the only external wilderness Jack knows is on the streets (or probably the Streets).

Alas, once Jack has gone through a curious encounter/job interview with Walter’s partner Thomas Burns (Rutger Hauer in his best creep mode), and he ends up with Thomas, Walter and a group of clients in the wilderness, things turn out to be less empowering for our hero than he thought. In fact, Jack isn’t there to help some rich idiots hunt, but rather to be the human prey of former CIA men and assorted perverts – the most dangerous game, you know the drill. Co-hunting Jack are psychiatrist Doc Hawkins (Gary Busey in a short, surprisingly nuanced and creepy performance), cowboy John Griffin (John C. McGinley), and rich people supremacist Wolfe (F. Murray Abraham) who has brought his son Derek (William McNamara) to make him a real man by making him complicit in sadistic murder. Turns out this amount of injustice and cruelty is just the therapy Jack needed, and soon, he’s rather effectively striking back at his tormentors.

Among the group of rappers gone genre actors, for my taste Ice-T has always been the best one, probably because he usually makes efforts to act his characters instead of exclusively performing his standard persona. So it is no surprise that Ice-T in a film directed by undervalued (most probably because he’s black, if we’re being honest) Ernest R. Dickerson makes a rather fine action hero; and he is the more interesting kind of US action hero to boot – the one with troubles, who isn’t a perfect killing machine. In fact, the film makes rather a point out of our hero not being a killer by nature or inclination but a guy who defends himself with as much force as necessary and who is even willing to give the worst people imaginable a choice and a chance to walk away. Which is certainly more than they did for him.

Another obvious point in Surviving the Game’s favour is its cast of a host of great character actors, all with copious experience at being entertaining Bad People. They all can chew as much scenery as is needed but also don’t chew more than they should this time around. Not that the characters are exactly subtle, mind you: each and every one of them does after all represent something that is very wrong with (white, powerful) America and its structures turned up to eleven. Still, Dickerson treats these crazy freaks at times much more seriously than you’d expect, giving even the worst of them some depth beyond their inherent horribleness. Which doesn’t make them better people or people we as an audience don’t want to see killed or maimed (preferably both) by Ice-T, but sure turns them into much more interesting action movie villains. Obviously this also gives the film’s political arguments about the intersections of race and class in the USA further heft.

Mind you, this is not first and foremost a deep analysis of US society but a great (perhaps the greatest, depending on the day you ask me) action movie version of The Most Dangerous Game that just doesn’t see why it shouldn’t also consciously comment on the world around it; its makers are after all living in it and had to live through part of it.


As US style action director, Dickerson here is as fine as they come, delivering many a tense scene, a handful of pleasantly absurd ones, and nary a moment after the very effective set-up that isn’t exciting. He also really knows how to get the best out of his actors – which isn’t always typical of directors good at action – by leaving them space to work. There’s an incredible monologue by Busey’s character about his fucked up childhood in the film’s big dinner scene that alone would be worth the price of admission but in this film it’s just one of many great scenes, some of them delightfully and cleverly cheesy, some just clever.