Prey (2022)

Prey (2022) Director: Dan Trachtenberg Starring: Amber Midthunder, Dane DiLiegro, Dakota Beavers, Michelle Thrush, Julian Black Antelope, Stormee Kipp .USA. 1h 39m

Generally I never get sucked in by the hype for new movies, after all the hype train is designed to get bums on seats and money in pockets, you’ll be 10 seconds into the movie and realize you’ve been tricked again! touch! I think a lot of hype is blown up by kids who either haven’t seen the “original ” or previous movies who find everything all shiny and new, but these old eyes have seen this all before.. But despite this I went into Prey with an open mind and was ultimately pleasantly surprised but there was a mess to trawl through first.

The Silencing (2020)

Director: Robin Pront Starring:Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Caleb Ellsworh-Clark Josh Crudda, Annabelle Wallis, Zahn McClarnon . Canada. 1h 33m

Backwoods horrors seem to have traveled from the deserts of the southern American into the cold forests of the north, incorporating indigenous folklore along the way. The Silencing tries to keep itself in the here and now, offering a grimy armchair detective mystery with icy drama, some daring thrills and a fathers promise to find his missing daughter at all costs.

Wolfen (1981)

Director: Michael Wadleigh Starring: Albert Finnery, Diane Venora, Edward James Olmos, Gregory Hines, Tom Noonan, Peter Michael Goetz. USA. 1h 55m Based on: Wolfen by Whitley Strieber

Hoax (2019)

Director: Matt Allen
Starring: Brian Thompson, Ben Browder, Shoshana Bush, Cheryl Texiera, Adrienna Barbeau. USA. 1h 32m

Matt Allen follows up his Aces and Eights short movie with a debut feature HOAX! which turns out to be a quirky faux mockumentary thriller about an investigation into the existence of Bigfoot, after a spate of teen disappearances in the Colorado mountains.

It’s easy to call it just another Bigfoot movie: but there has been a recent run of lowish-budget features that have broadened the creature featutes horizons by taking things to a new place, especially the fan favourite Bigfoot: The Lost Coast Tapes (2012). Somehow, without many clues or prompts or evidence, it does keep the question open in order to keep the viewers guessing until the very end, but does bigfoot exist or is there an alternative reason why teens are being slaughtered in the hills? And either way why would you want to go out with limited resources to find out?

The Neanderthal Man (1953)

Director: Ewald André Dupont
Starring: Robert Shayne, Joyce Terry, Richard Crane, Doris Merrick, Beverly Garland, Tandra Quinn USA/Germany. 1h 18m

One of my movie weaknesses is vintage sci fi movies, I just adore the heroism and pure wonderment and moral dilemmas they still offer, the 50’s were a golden age for the beginning of big scale science fiction, from mad scientists to space exploration, monsters and space exploration. Things might not really work how they were depicted, the same generation who were sure radioactive insect bites would only enhance a man also encouraged their kids to smoke, but sci fi wouldn’t really be sci fi without a level of taking things too far and being outlandish.

The Neanderthal man is a prime example of a down trodden scientist who pushes the envelope and takes things to the extreme The mockery of a brilliant scientist Prof. Clifford Groves (Shayne) by his peers, pushes him to the dangerous edge of self exploration, after being publicly ridiculed the professor continues his feverish work to prove that our cells remember their prehistoric past and turns himself into a Neanderthal man, his cat into a Sabretooth and his housekeeper into some scary beastly wild woman. The trio have little recollection of their primal actions and terrorise the wildlife and residents of their small town.

The Hunter (2011)

Director: Daniel Nettheim
Starring: Willem Dafoe, Sam Neill, Frances O’Connor, Morgana Davies, Calian Mulvey, Finn Woodlock . Australia . 1h 42m

Based on : The Hunter by Julia Leigh

It’s not often a wild storyline produces such a masterpiece of a movie but there’s a lot to be amazed about in this redemption thriller surrounding the extinct Tasmanian tiger a biotech company and a hippy conservationist family living in the Australian sticks.

Heavily based on a book of the same title by Julia Leigh, the film managed to capture the essence of the original novel and sets it perfectly in the lush wilderness of Tasmania, it doesn’t look like the typical Australian film and is quite refined, with it’s far out story, which is empowered enough that at times it’s easy to find it plausible.

A weathered and extremely diligent mercenary, Martin David (Dafoe) is hired by a military biotech company called Red Leaf to go to Tasmania, gathers samples of the Tasmania Tiger, with a further instruction to kill all the reaming tigers so their rivals won’t be able to get ahead of them in the game. Now I’m pretty sure that the Tasmanian tiger has been extinct since the olden days, the last remaining tiger looked as if it were photographed in the late 1800’s to my untrained eye. But here we have a race to a fabled last remaining tiger and to harvest it for a lab.

Happy Hunting (2017)

Director: Louie Gibson and Joe Dietsch.
Starring. Martin Dingle Wall, Ken Lally, Kenny Wormald, Connor Williams, Gary Strum,CJ Baker. USA. 1h 31m.

Gibson and Dietsch have produced a gory little survival horror filled with little surprises and a strange story of redemption, reform and recovery.

Predators (2010)

Predators  – (Action, Adventure, Sci Fi,  2010) (18) D: Nimrod Antal W: Alex Litvak, Michael Finch,  C: Adrien Brody, Laurence Fishburne, Topher Grace. 1h 47m. USA.

It had been quite a while since the release of Predator 2 (1990) which took the alien from the hot jungle into the equally hot city and after the failure of Alien vs Predator (2004) and it’s predecessor AVP requiem (2007) we were finally treated to a third installment of the Predator trilogy, And luckily it went old school and gave us some of the thrills that the original movie created and then in perfect homage to the original movie it mimics the original soundtrack but unfortunately fell short on bravado and instead opted for a slightly different less military, tough hombre approach.

Starting a movie in free fall  is slightly unusual but this is how Royce (Brody) is introduced into Predators, along with a few other tough guys and gal, from various war zones around the world and a strange doctor they find themselves being dropped into the jungle and are supposed to be the lucky ones as their shoots managed to work… They discover the corpses of the unlucky souls who had crashed straight into the jungle floor and some unknown cargo cases that held something which was obviously not human or pleasant, and possibly very hungry. After lots of tense suspicion and fights for the alpha male role the group eventually they band together to try and find a way out.Unfortunately for them, even their finely tuned skill and expert guerrilla, homicidal and military experience they could never be quite prepared what they have to face here on an alien game preserve.