Remembering Two Hammer Stars

I received Indicator’s sixth Hammer volume yesterday- as usual its a lovingly-crafted set, this time with a novelty: a nice piece of humour inside regards it utilising dual-disc cases because single-disc cases were in short supply during production – a disc-shaped card sits in the spare hub with a spiralling text of explanation… brought a smile to my face anyway.

Reviews of the actual films will come later but I just wanted to comment here about two featurettes on the discs. On Captain Clegg there is a featurette about Peter Cushing which obviously caught my attention and got a play as soon as spare time arose. Yeah, if nothing else qualifies me as a film geek, its having my attention drawn to featurettes/extras over and above the films themselves. In any case, its a lovely half-hour documentary, mostly appreciations from some actors/backroom staff who worked with him and accompanied by a few words from Cushing himself sourced from a lengthy 1986 audio interview. It transpires that this audio interview forms the basis of a seperate documentary film about Peter Cushing (Peter Cushing: In HIs Own Voice, by Richard Edwards) that was released last year, and which I’d never heard of, which has me scurrying off to a digital purchase on Amazon Prime.

The second featurette I wanted to mention was on the The Shadow of The Cat disc, which was an interview with the wonderful actress Barbara Shelley, possibly the most famous/popular Hammer actress who featured in eight Hammer films (and some of their best) and alongside Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee she is one of my favourite Hammer thespians. Sadly Shelley passed away in January this year, having caught the Covid virus during an hospital stay in December: I remember being especially saddened reading of her passing at the time because of the horrible Covid factor; they were dark times indeed. Shelley was 88, and this interview filmed in 2020 shows her very fragile physically: alarmingly so, really, and I was initially quite shocked both by her appearance and that the film-makers troubled her for an interview when she was clearly so frail. My concerns were alleviated somewhat by noting how sharp and alert she was mentally- she had her wits even if she looks very ill, and I gather from what she said that she appreciated the interest in her work at Hammer and beyond. There are many actors who retire and would no doubt prefer to be remembered as they were during their heyday, and that’s understandable and their right- indeed nothing can be quite so concerning as seeing a film hero of old looking so aged and worn and… human, I guess. Some actors of course turn to cosmetic surgery to alleviate the natural ravages of time (and often this can actually work against the original intent when a 80-year old has the plastic face of a thirty-year old).

But Barbara Shelly certainly had her wits, bless her, and that sultry, earthy voice still lingered in her speech, albeit weakened by time. Its a lovely interview summing up her career and something of a final testament, but it is a rather harrowing experience and I’m still in two minds about it. But she no doubt agreed to it and relished the opportunity, so who am I to argue?

Both featurettes do brilliantly stand as examples of why physical releases of films remain so important and so valid. Streaming services don’t really have much interest in such old films as these and even if they did, they certainly wouldn’t have any compunction to add supporting documentaries or commentaries as these discs do. Without releases such as this we would not see these appreciations of Cushing or see one final interview with the legendary Shelley: in my mind, this is already one of those cases where the extras are worth the price of admission alone.

The Woman in the Window (2021)

If you’re going to steal, steal from the best. Well, maybe that’s not fair. Its possibly not this film that was doing the stealing (one has to point a suspicious finger towards the original novel written by A.J. Finn that this film is based on) but that being the case, visually this film is so wholly indebted to a certain directors filmography its almost brutal; there is no subtlety at all. They even have clips of some Hitchcock films playing on the in-movie television screens as if there’s some knowing in-joke that might escape us. Don’t worry, we get it.

There’s also something sad about A-list Hollywood talent, in front of and behind the camera, slumming in a C-list movie (I write that with all due respect to Liam Neeson). It generally results in a very pretty, stylish, visually sophisticated film with high production values with very good actors in very underwritten roles uttering banal dialogue from  a derivative, seen-it-all-before-in-better-movies script. Which so entirely sums up The Woman in the Window that I really don’t need to write anything more. Amy Adams tries, I guess, although her better roles seem to threaten to fade into obscurity considering some of her later role choices, and Julianne Moore is really good, but the rest, most notably Gary Oldman who clearly seems to be wishing he was someplace else (we’re with you on that, Gary), well, its pretty dire stuff on the thespian front. 

Most damning of all… well, if you’re going to steal, come up to the bat and offer at least one reason why you think you’re worthy of stealing from a classic like Rear Window, some modern twist other than changing the sex of the protagonist. You don’t just put Amy Adams in the Jimmy Stewart role with agoraphobia instead of a broken leg and think that’s twist enough, in a film as redundant as the Christopher Reeve 1998 Rear Window tv-movie remake (albeit I’ll always give Reeve his a pass), and think that your modern production tricks can supplant Hitchcock. Because it can’t and you won’t. 

Apocalypse Now 4K UHD

I finally -FINALLY- got round to watching my 4K UHD copy of Apocalypse Now last night. Although my copy is the six-disc set with the Final Cut and Redux versions I went with the theatrical, as I think less is more for Apocalypse Now. I know Coppola seems as endlessly fascinated (frustrated?) with this film as his buddy George Lucas was with his Star Wars films, but this film is pretty much perfect as it is. I tried to enjoy the Redux version -I’ve watched it twice and always walk away hating it, so I didn’t even consider watching the Final Cut. Maybe one day, as I guess it’d be a shame for the disc to just sit there, but is there any film out there with two alternate cuts as superfluous as those for Apocalypse Now?

This is such a damned extraordinary film. I think every time I watch it, I get more out of it, and enjoy it all the more, and it just seems more and more remarkable that something like this could even get made (I guess you just had to be the guy behind two Godfather films in order to get a pass for a film like this). Its a work of madness. Of mind-boggling crazy ambition. Its an Hollywood epic in the guise of an Arthouse movie, or maybe its the reverse.

It has, without any doubt, the best voiceover narration of any film, ever. Maybe there is some other film to compete, but if there is I’ve never seen/heard it (closest I can imagine is maybe the voiceover narration for  Taxi Driver, although that example feels too obvious).

Some damn fool went and made a sci-fi reboot and called it Ad Astra. Which does make me think, why can’t someone make a sci-film as important and strange and huge and crazy as Apocalypse Now? Maybe Kubrick already did it with 2001: A Space Odyssey. Both films seem as equally important as regards being landmarks in Cinema, although so wildly different.

The 4K disc is pretty much as gorgeous as everyone has said it is in reviews etc. The HDR really does increase the sense of depth and verisimilitude: the Playboy bunnies scene pops out of the jungle darkness and the Do Lung Bridge sequence pops so bright it feels like being stabbed in the eyes. Which does make me wonder about some of these 4K releases, in the case of Apocalypse Now, how it looks with its HDR pass likely surpasses anything cinematographer Vittorio Storaro originally intended or could have hoped for back in its original projection era. Should the film in 4K be considered authentic?

I have one more question if someone could answer it: Apocalypse Now has no title card, no credits at the start and none at the end (the film fades to black and that’s it). I was just wondering how Coppola got away with that or if the film originally had credits during its theatrical release. I wouldn’t have thought the film unions would allow a film to be released without the cast or crew being credited anywhere (didn’t George Lucas get into trouble for leaving Irvin Kershner’s card until the end of The Empire Strikes Back in 1980?).

Alas, no 4K Legend

Oh, Arrow, you tease. Those postcards for an Arrow edition of Legend had me all kinds of (mildly) excited. Legend is a pretty damned broken film in any of its cuts but goodness it sure is pretty, and a 4K edition would be such eye-candy. Alas it seems never to be.

Yesterdays press release actually confirms the worst- Arrow’s Legend in September is a US-only release of a remastered edition of the horrific American theatrical cut (frankly unwatchable in my opinion) and the image-impaired Directors Cut (which is basically a workprint, not a ‘restored’ Directors Cut that many are), on Blu-ray as the only elements good enough for a 4K belong to the European cut that Fox (and therefore now Disney) own and the mouse as usual isn’t playing ball. So not only no 4K, there’s not even an Arrow release over here of Legend as they can’t license that European cut from Disney. Man, its so hard not to think of Disney as some kind of Evil Empire or Bond villain these days, its like they have a corporate memorandum to piss me off.

Predator 2 (1990) 4K UHD

Back when I first saw Predator 2 at the cinema (it would have been late Spring/early summer 1991 here in the UK, as films took awhile getting over the pond back in the days of film prints etc), I really enjoyed it, but that was a rare point of view at the time, as the film was considered a critical disappointment and box-office dud. It was clearly not as good as the original, but back then that was largely a given with sequels anyway. I remember being pleasantly surprised by the twist on the original, moving from the remote jungle setting of Predator to a (slightly) near-future Los Angeles ravaged by gun crime and street gangs. Arnold’s absence is keenly felt (he refused to sign onto the film over a money dispute) as Danny Glover is a poor substitute in the action hero stakes, but then again, after Arnold, who wouldn’t be? Glover plays LAPD lieutenant Mike Harrigan, who leads a team of detectives caught between two drug gangs in a bitter street war and begins to suspect there’s a new guy in town leaving corpses from both gangs in his wake. This new ‘third party’, of course, is another Predator enjoying vacation time on Earth. To be fair to Glover, while physically he is obviously no replacement for Arnold, his strengths as an actor are largely let down by the films troublesome script. 

The thing with these franchises, they can go either one of two ways – if they’d sorted out the financial issues with Arnold and brought him back for film two, Predator would have become an Arnold franchise, in just the same way as bringing Ripley back in Aliens meant that franchise turning into Ripley’s franchise rather than the Alien xenomorphs – in the minds of the execs, you couldn’t make an Alien film without Sigourney Weaver’s name on the poster, which led that franchise down an increasingly twisted rabbit hole. Now, its quite likely that a Predator 2 with Arnold in it would have been more successful – and possibly a better movie too, but I do commend the ‘bravery’ (albeit enforced) in not going that way, and instead trying something a little more different than might be expected for a Predator sequel. 

Indeed, I rather wish Fox had taken a similar path with the Alien franchise. You could still quite legitimately have Aliens as it was without Ripley, easily establishing that Ripley’s shuttle had not yet been discovered (and perhaps never would be). You could still have the terraforming colony come to a bad xenomorph end and the marines called in, but it could have been a different planet, and the alien eggs discovered on some indigenous pyramid like in some of the early treatments of Alien‘s script. Conveniently, this would solve Cameron’s unnecessary and messy interference with the Alien biology (the Alien Queen, which I always hated, its Earth-insect analogy losing the Lovecraftian alien mystery of the original)- different planet explaining a variant xenomorph biology, opening up further possibilities for later films. 

But, I’m going off on another geek rant here and I’m too old for that nonsense. Back to Predator 2.

Released in 1990 in the States, its still undeniably a 1980s movie at heart, saturated with testosterone and violence (and action films were getting very violent during the 1980s, pushing the limits of what censors would allow). There’s a gleeful perversity in all the explosions and gunplay of Predator 2′s excess (it ran foul of censors in several countries) that marks it of the 1980s, or perhaps the bastard child of that decade.

At the time, Predator 2 had limited box office success- likely hurt by Arnold’s absence and perhaps also a reaction against the film’s violence, as if that 1980s action-movie trend had started to run its course (Total Recall would beg to differ). I just think the script needs much more work. The characters are all woefully underwritten, something that largely worked for the first film because of the larger-than-life actors in the key roles, but in Predator 2 the cast is largely made of ordinary-looking actors, physically, and they needed beefier character arcs to make up for it. 

Its because of these underwritten characters and what that does to the drama, and also the rather messy and ill-thought out plot with FBI agents, that the film hasn’t aged as well as it might, certainly when compared to films of that era like Robocop etc. Genre favourite the late, very great Bill Paxton is a joy as always, and with all due respect to Glover, I wish that Paxton had been given chance to shine in the lead role in this- Paxton never seemed to get his due in casting. Paxton’s lead could have been a darker character (why not a Dirty Harry kind of cop, his no-nonsense abrasive attitude a spark against the Predator?). Then again, that’s changing the film entirely and second-guessing all the studio politics, budget and marketing and time constraints etc. But geeks can dream!

The 4K disc is really very good- there is a persistent, authentic grain that lends it a filmic quality and the HDR really helps the explosions etc to really shine. The cinematography is a little soft in places, definitely of its time, but its certainly the best this film has ever looked on a home format. After all, who’d really have expected this film to get a 4K release when so many other films (like Robocop) haven’t? I enjoyed watching this film after so many years (the last time was probably on VHS) and returning to this whole 1980s action flick thing is fast becoming a revelation. 

The Dead Don’t Die (2019)

Here we go, another zombie flick- do we really need another? Well, I liked the setting, and its offbeat, rather kooky feel, which was a little like a Zombie Twin Peaks. If that sounds great to you, then its possibly worth a watch- it certainly appealed to me; oddball characters in a rural, remote setting, there was a lovely mood there. But it doesn’t hold together. The weird thing was, the gentle, almost affectionate tone of the place (“Centerville”) and its laidback characters (this film has a great, albeit terribly wasted cast- Bill Murray, Adam Driver, Tilda Swinton, Steve Buscemi, Danny Glover etc), seemed quite at odds with some of the grisly, graphic gore, feeling rather like two different movies.

The problem for this film was, if it was a comedy, it wasn’t particularly funny; certainly amusing rather than hilarious, and if it was intended to be a horror film, well, it stumbled throughout. In all honesty, it has all been done before: Dan O’Bannon’s Return of the Living Dead was both more knowingly arch regards commentary on zombie flicks and also much funnier, while George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead was far better with the social commentary. Director Jim Jarmusch is rather heavy-handed here with the zombies returning to favourite old haunts and habits of when they were alive, commentating on consumerism and waste – its fine but it was old years ago, and Romero was much more subtle with it. 

I was also confused by some of the plotlines, as characters seemed to come and go- three children, for instance, escaping from a zombie-infested child detention centre find a house for shelter and aren’t returned to again, its like the screenwriter forgot them and left that arc completely hanging. Other characters are followed for awhile -the three ‘Cleveland Hipsters’- and then we find later them dead, their grisly fate occurring offscreen which may have seemed an arch commentary on horror tropes but just left me feeling… not frustrated exactly, but so many of the cast are just thrown in and then wasted. And I’m still not certain there was any point to Tilda Swinton’s creepy funeral director turning out to be samurai sword-wielding alien who calls a flying saucer to come pick her up. 

In the end, I was left wondering “why?”, you know, what was the point of the whole thing? There’s certainly some reward from the kooky feel of the place and the characters but its all quite wasted- I suppose its a case of the director not really being the right guy for this particular genre mash-up. I don’t think I’ve seen anything else Jim Jarmusch has directed, but I gather his background is more arthouse, indie material than this kind of thing: I suppose how this turned out would be akin to someone like Terrence Malick making a horror film or a sci-fi film- an intriguing idea but not necessarily resulting in a successful movie. Maybe Dan O’Bannon was more of a genius than anybody gave him credit for. 

The Dead Don’t Die has recently arisen from its box-office grave and shambled onto Netflix here in the UK. Possibly worth a shot at Halloween, maybe.

 

The Wave (2015) & The Quake (2018)

The Wave is a Swedish/Norwegian production, a disaster movie set amongst some of the most beautiful natural scenery one can imagine, and a thoroughly entertaining film which is perhaps, like The Tunnel, only let down by its reliance on those over-familiar tropes which disaster movies always seem to rely on. So we are introduced to a family unit and the central protagonist of the film, Geologist Kristian Eikjord (Kristoffer Joner) who alone seems to pick up on signs of an impending disaster and is finally vindicated, sadly, when a mountain pass collapses into the fjord Geiranger, creating a deadly tidal wave 85-metres high that rolls down to a scenic town (and the hotel where his wife works). 

So as far as tropes go, we have Kristian’s unconvinced work comrades, who fail to heed his warnings. We have his marital friction with his beautiful wife Idun (Kathrine Thorborg Jo) who resents him prioritising his work over his family (and possibly also the new job he has taken, which they are in the process of moving home for), and his tense relationship with his teenage son Sondre (Jonas Hoff Oftebro) and his younger daughter Julia (Edith Haagenrud-Sande, who possibly steals the movie). Inevitably when the disaster occurs and Kristian is proven right, his family is split up and he has to try to ensure their safety by going into danger and saving them from the episodic dramas, surviving all sorts of related dangers ensuing from the tsunami.

While the film feels formulaic and over-familiar (its a lot like the rather glossier San Andreas, but lots of others too) it wins-out thanks to its refreshing, frankly, European setting and its good cast which doesn’t really fit the usual Hollywood mould- none more so than Joner, whose hound-dog everyman is a very ordinary-looking scruffy hero.

Technically the film is pretty well accomplished, with some surprisingly successful visual effects and convincing physical effects, like semi-submerged sets, water damage etc. The episodic nature is just the way things tend to be in these films (we have to get from here to there, and we have to get past this obstacle there etc) and its perhaps unfortunate that the film finally just oversteps the drama with a nod to The Abyss and a drowning/death scene that really slips, as the one The Abyss did, into overwrought nonsense that threatens to spoil everything. 

But on the whole, The Wave works and was successful enough to warrant a sequel, The Quake, in which Kristian’s family find themselves at odds with yet another natural disaster…

So three years have past and the Eikjord family unit is more fractured (maybe an unfortunate description, considering what comes) than ever: Idun is divorcing Kristian, who has remained in Gerainger, ridden with guilt for having not successfully warned everyone about the disaster depicted in The Wave, while she with the children have moved to the safer (yeah, good luck with that) location of Oslo where she has a new job in a plush high-rise hotel in the city (whoops). Kristian is finally called to Oslo when a colleague who had reached out to him with vague concerns is killed in an Oslo Tunnel collapse. Investigating his colleagues death with the help of the deceased man’s daughter Marit (Kathrine Thorborg Jo), Kristian discovers indications that a major earthquake is about to strike and as usual, nobody believes him until it happens.

The problem with The Quake is really the same as that of The Wave, except that unfortunately for this film, the sense of over-familiarity is only intensified by it happening to the same family (natural disasters for the Eikjords what bad vacations were for the Griswolds). In what is possibly an acknowledgement of this, the raised stakes here actually result in a real cost, and not all of the Eikjord clan survive this one, a surprise loss that doesn’t really land as possibly intended, but, you know, it at least answers some of the plausibility issues some viewers may have.

Like The Wave, the technical side is very accomplished, and the set-pieces are largely just as thrilling as in the first movie, but they do seem more ridiculous/Hollywood than the more grounded reality of the first film (allusions to San Andreas only more pronounced, here). Curiously, while The Wave had a certain unwise nod to The Abyss, this film has a particular set-piece that features a certain nod to a moment in the second Jurassic Park movie that pushes the term ‘homage’ perhaps a step too far, which is unfortunate because I don’t know why these two films felt the need to nod back to Hollywood blockbusters at all. The films are far better when being more their own thing, but maybe it was inevitable making films like this and feeling the need to compete with glossier Hollywood product.

Both films are pretty good though and well worth anyone’s time, particularly if one has an affinity to the disaster movie genre. I only wonder what the plausibility is of Kristian turning his hand to amateur astronomy and discovering an asteroid on collision course with Norway…

 

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Aniara (2018)

Well, this was rather bleak- trust a cautionary Swedish sci-fi to suggest that Despair Conquers All rather than Hollywood’s usual Love Conquers All nonsense. It was also quite brilliant, a sci-fi film which is High Concept to its very core. Aniara isn’t perfect by any means, but its absolutely one of the most engrossing sci fi films I’ve seen for quite some time. When the end credits rolled, I was quite dumbstruck, aware that I’d watched something really quite extraordinary. Again, it isn’t perfect- a few performances don’t quite ring true, there are one or two gaps in logic, a few fairly minor plot-holes likely down to being faithful to its 1950s source (and how space travel was envisaged back then), but its easy to forgive all that when the film as a whole succeeds so well.  

Based on a 1956 epic poem from the Swedish Nobel laureate Harry Martinson, its a really ambitious film that imagines the possible end of humanity at the macro level (humanity abandoning a destroyed Earth to seek possible survival on Mars) and the micro (the steady disintegration of a closed society of colonists trapped on a doomed space vessel). The Aniara is an implausibly gigantic colony ship that ferries survivors from Earth to a life on Mars, but this usually routine three-week voyage is interrupted by a catastrophic impact of space debris, damaging the ships engines and sending it wildly off course. The ships captain desperately attempts to maintain calm when he reveals to his passengers that the incident threatens to extend the voyage by as much as two years while a route back to Mars can be found. 

The beauty of Aniara is how mundane this future is. The colony ship is like a modern cruise ship, a hotel in space full of restaurants and arcades and clubs and theatres designed to entertain colonists for a three-week trip and presumably distract them from the cold reality of space travel and the hard life awaiting them on Mars. But following the incident that damages the Aniara, it is now an enclosed society within a fantasy façade, as if the colonists are suddenly trapped in a failing Disneyland during an Apocalypse. Its the Earth they thought they had all escaped in microcosm, dying all over again.

Aniara throws in ruminations of our place in the cosmos, the passengers increasingly fragile human psyches struggling to cope, collapsing in the face of Eternity and the vastness of the void that has trapped them. It purports an AI which elects for self-destruction rather than continue suffering the pain of increasingly damaged minds it is designed to heal. This subtext, of a suicidal AI unable to face its fate, is mirrored in the reactions of many of the colonists. As time wears them down and the Aniara’s enclosed, trapped society threatens to collapse, the whole fragments, people turning to religion and cults, the sheer physical escape of orgy’s or drugs or drink, while the more desperate souls taking the brutal path of anxiety, depression and suicide. 

Its, er, not an optimistic film. I could easily summarise the film -and I’m sure many have- as Wall-E crossed with the original Solaris movie: indeed it really feels like its from some other era, back when sci-fi films were more cautionary, like Soylent Green or Silent Running, and yet it feels so very timely, reflecting our society and how we live, how we cope through seeking escape from our realities.

Its also one of those films that is made Great by its ending, which I can’t really explain here because I always try to keep my reviews spoiler free when I can, but you know, the ending is perfect. Comparing it to the end of Citizen Kane is possibly misleading, but if you know how that film ends, how its revelation makes the film truly great and leaves it lingering in your head for days afterward, then you might have an idea what I mean. There is no real twist or shock in Aniara‘s ending, but its the perfect denouncement, perfectly sensical and satisfying even if it isn’t exactly reassuring. But yeah, its PERFECT and its haunting me- you just cannot leave this film behind. 

The Boat (2018)

This film is so easily summed up (one can imagine the pitch): Stephen King’s Christine (one of my favourite books, growing up) out on the ocean. A fisherman, ‘the sailor’ (Joe Azzopardi) gets lost in dense fog, his small boat literally bumping into a luxury yacht in the murk. The fisherman calls out but nobody responds, and after tying his boat alongside, he explores the vessel and discovers the yacht is abandoned. Mystified, he moves to return to his own boat but finds it has become untethered and drifting away in the current, trapping him on the yacht. Convinced someone must be onboard after all (how else to explain his knots becoming undone), he sets on another search but again, he finds no-one. But he’s not alone.

Strange accidents and occurrences happen and it becomes clear that this yacht is a bitch (like Christine) or a bastard (like the truck in Duel) out to kill its unwelcome new crewman. Yep, the yacht is possessed; its presumably killed its previous occupants and the fisherman is next. The fog clears and, marooned on the yacht he tries to commandeer it and head for shore (wherever it is, as he realises he is lost out in the ocean and the radio doesn’t work).

Its a simple idea and at times a very involving character piece, but it struggles to maintain its premise for the length of a movie, labouring its concept (a section of the film with him  locked in a toilet cubicle inside the hold of the ship is more interminable than it is tense). I did like the film though. Its really haunted (sic) by too much familiarity to other books and films, but it certainly feels like it could be a great Stephen King novel that he has yet to write. I felt a little cheated that our lonely hero doesn’t find an old logbook which might possibly explain the mystery a little (which itself might have formed a flashback to help fill the running time, but that’s possibly where budgetary issues raise their head).

Stephen King didn’t just show how bad Christine was, he explained it, or at least suggested an explanation- The Boat leaves its evil yacht a mystery; call me a cynic, but I rather suspect this was a deliberate move by the film-makers to leave room for a prequel or sequel. How very post-Millennium.

Predator (4K UHD)

Its easy to forget, as time rolls on, just how wild and special the 1980s were for those of us growing up back then, and just how bloody good films were (I’m conveniently ignoring turkeys like Howard the Duck, admittedly, to make my point, but…).

Even ignoring the glorious summer of 1982 and its own remarkable crop of genre classics, we were graced with two Star Wars films, the Indiana Jones trilogy, Terminator, Robocop, The Abyss, Die Hard, Tim Burton’s Batman and so many others. We had Arnie, we had Sly, crikey, we didn’t know how good we had it: and I’m often surprised just how well so many of those 1980s films hold up still, all things considered, and are often clearly superior to all the remakes/reboots/sequels that they have been mined for over the decades since by an increasingly imagination-bereft Hollywood. Maybe films back then benefited from their photochemical, technological limitations, which grounded them in ways that contemporary films fail to be.

Case in point: Predator, a film which arguably looks better here on 4K UHD than it ever has, in a pretty gorgeous presentation: plenty of grain, yes, but also a delicious ‘pop’ graced from some of the highlights through HDR with a pleasing sense of depth and tactile reality. I rather felt like I was watching it for the first time, back in the cinema again. Of course, the image quality is only the icing on the cake: the film itself is a high-testosterone, gory and over-the-top majestic action spectacle, a high-octane b-movie. Tautly wound, it doesn’t waste a moment and its a magnificent example of Arnie in his absolute prime. Actually, I had to double-check the year Predator came out, because looking at Arnie’s physique in this film -he’s pretty huge- reminded me so much of his 1982 Conan The Barbarian (how dearly I’d love to see THAT in 4K) that one could be forgiven thinking he’d made Predator directly after that John Milius sword and sorcery epic.

I’d forgotten just how good Predator is though. Its simply glorious stuff, even the cheesy, 1980s-at-their-worst stuff feels like a breath of fresh air after the last several years of anodyne Hollywood blockbusters. Stogie-chomping Duke (Arnie) and old war-buddy-in-a-tie Dillon (Carl Weathers) can’t say hello without flexing their biceps for a contest of physical prowess. Jesse Ventura chewing up the scenery along with his beef jerky. Big guns! Big explosions! Boy this film is loud. The glorious Alan Silvestri score that reminds just how great movie scores could be, and how much we’ve lost with what they have lately become. By the time Arnie yelled “Get to the Chopper!” I howled with joy and high-fived my wife. What a ride this film was in 4K. Absolutely thoroughly enjoyed it and there’s no better way to experience it than in this new 4K incarnation.