Dredd versus Things with Teeth

Here are two Dredd collections linked by the rather toothy nature of the monsters he is up against, and by artist Henry Flint.

First up is The Hunting Party by John Wagner with art by Flint, Sean Philips, Trevor Hairsine, Jason Brashill, David Bircham and Callum Alexander Watt. It originally ran in 2000AD progs 1014-1049 back in 1996. The story seems like an interesting midway point between some of the early epics from the 1980s and the more gritty story lines we have come to expect from later Dredd. After an attack on the Mega-City wall by ferocious Dune Sharks the Chief Judge details Dredd and DeMarco to take a group of cadets out on a Hotdog run to hunt down and destroy the sharks in their cursed earth lair. Along the way they will have the usual run-ins with mutants, madmen and crazed militia.

Henry Flint draws the opening episodes and then returns to do the finale. This was his first work on Dredd and he's already head and shoulders above the other artists in this book. The only piece of original 2000AD art I own is a colour page from the first part of this story which Flint signed for me at Thought Bubble, and it hangs framed on my wall as I write this. The next artist in the book is Sean Philips who was also fairly early on in his career at this point and his art is some way from the brilliant noir stuff he produced in Ed Brubaker's Criminal.

A cadet hotdog run is always good fun although this is not vintage Wagner. It feels much nearer to those weird and wonderful stories from the early days of the comic. Dredd's assessments of the cadets is interesting and surprisingly lenient, something that the 2012 movie got right, Dredd will make exceptions if he thinks cadets show potential. Apart from that the best thing here is the Henry Flint art.

Next is Judge Dredd vs Aliens: Incubus by John Wagner, Andy Diggle and Mr Flint again, with colours by Chris Blythe and letters by Tom Frame. This one ran in progs 1322-1335 in 2003. The story is a version of the second Aliens movie set in the bowels of Mega-City One. All the usual tropes turn up, face-huggers and chest bursters, acidic blood, a Queen alien, and eggs, lots of eggs. There is even a Ripley and Newt like connection between Dredd and a rookie Judge although I don't believe he would descend down into the Queen's lair to try and rescue her. I think Dredd would be far more likely to seal the hole and then nuke the whole site, just to be sure.

Minor quibbles aside this is fun stuff, who doesn't want to see Dredd face off against a fully grown Alien, or fighting off waves of face-huggers all intent on getting him to take off that helmet. The supporting characters of the rookie Judge Sanchez, and a group of vermin exterminators who want revenge for their fallen colleagues are well done and add a nice human element to the battle between the Justice department and the alien invaders. Once again Dredd makes allowances for Sanchez because he sees her potential. There's an introduction written by Simon Pegg who discusses Dredd as a substitute father figure and there is something interesting about the mentoring role he takes on in these two books.

Henry Flint's art is, as ever, sublime, he is right up there with the top Dredd artists of all time. Along with the Simon Pegg intro this book also has a short piece by Andy Diggle about the origins of the story, and there are a couple of pages of sketches by Flint. An introduction and some extras in a Rebellion trade, what a great idea. More please.

Overall the Aliens book is probably the pick of the bunch but there's plenty of entertainment and great art in both of them.

Alienating your audience

I should be doing other stuff. There is a lot of real world stuff going on but I need to get something off my chest (or out of it?). Last night I finally got to see Prometheus and complete my Alien marathon. The reviews were all fairly poor so my expectations were set very low and this film still managed to get below them.

The budget for this film was $130 million. Really? Couldn't they have spent some of that money on checking that the script made sense? I suppose with one of the writers from Lost we can expect some confusion. I watched every episode of Lost and that was a load of nonsense, and so is Prometheus.

For starters let us consider the shuttle medical pod that gets used in the ridiculous self administered surgery scene. Charlize Theron has her own shuttle/life-boat on the Prometheus with its own special medical pod, so why when Noomi Rapace tries to use it for an emergency caesarean does the computer state it is set for male procedures only? Are they trying to give us some sort of weird clue about Theron's character? Seeing as how she spends most of the movie wearing a skin tight bodysuit because, well because she can, there doesn't seem to be any doubt about her gender.

All the medicine in this film was terrible. Rapace performs her own emergency caesarean alien-ectomy and delivers a squid baby. She then pulls out the umbilical cord, but what was that attached to? You need to remove the placenta as well, Ms Rapace, or you're going to bleed to death. And another thing, let us assume that there is some good reason for wearing bandage boob wraps when in hyper-sleep but surely when you wake up you would put some more functional underwear on?

What do alien squid babies eat? There has always been a problem in the Alien franchise about how the beasties go from pretty small to enormous without apparently consuming anything, but this example is particularly extreme. Maybe it has been munching all the bandages they use for underwear while it has been in the medical pod.

But by far the biggest problem with Prometheus is that the highly paid, brain-box scientists act like such morons. The examples are too numerous to mention. It is left to Idris Elba and his fly-boy crew to act with a bit of sense, at least when he's not trying to do his own gender test on Charlize Theron.

This film is truly terrible, but you have probably seen it yourself by now and know that already. £130 million to make and takings in excess of $400 million. Meanwhile Dredd 3D cost £50 million and is currently struggling to make even half of that back. There is no justice.

At the time of writing life is being particularly unfair to someone I love so the fortunes of multi-million dollar Hollywood movies are mere trivia, but what rubbish trivia this is. Even the AVP films were better.

Predatory Instincts

My plan was to watch all of the Alien movies before setting off to see Prometheus. Some family business has meant that I haven't managed to see Ridley Scott's new film but I did watch Alien vs Predator and Aliens vs Predator: Requiem.

 

These are two terrible films. The first one is just about watch-able and the lead female character is pretty good, but AVP Requiem is truly awful. Every possible action and horror film cliché is used, some of them several times. Characters wander off on their own, "bad" people get punished for their character flaws, while the good guys have some unresolved business which will lead to a neat pay-off at the end of the film. Heroes and villains spout terrible action film nonsense and both movies are devoid of any horror or tense moments.

The second film is slightly interesting as an exercise in film making. It starts out as a standard "teens under threat" slasher movie. Then about half way through the production team appear to have had a discussion about how good Aliens was and decided to remake it with their cardboard characters. Except without any of the wit, verve and slowly building tension that James Cameron added to the Alien franchise.

At least the monsters are mostly of the man in a suit variety as opposed to terrible, lightweight CGI sprites. Unfortunately that does lead to some odd moments when the tall and slender actors in the suits look rather ungainly and lumbering instead of the fast Aliens or powerful Predators they are playing. This could have been fixed with clever editing but even that is a disappointment.

Really, these two films are best avoided. Stick to the original Alien movies. Let us hope that Prometheus does not disappoint although early reports are not good.

Alien Resurrection - Four most in my mind

Alien reaches its fourth instalment and it comes from the unlikely pairing of Joss Whedon writing and Jean-Pierre Jeunet directing. Whedon is everywhere right now thanks to the success of The Avengers movie and Jeunet is best known for Amelie, although it is his dark fantasy The City of Lost Children that this most resembles.

200 years after the last film and Ripley is back, somehow. And there's a crew of weird space pirates which means we get Ron Perlman, Winona Ryder and the great Dominique Pinon. The only problem is I've never understood the whole weapons potential of the Aliens which seems to drive the plots of the sequels. I suppose if you could contain the beasties somehow you could fire them at your enemies. Clearing up afterwards might be a problem and there would be a lot of collateral damage. And as this film illustrates the whole issue of containing the Aliens is a bit of a problem. Acid blood seems to be a way out of every trap.

Still the whole idea of cloning Ripley to get Aliens to use as weapons does mean we get my favourite mad scientist Brad Dourif in charge of the whole experiment. And after an early exit he reappears at the end of the film to explain the science bit and let us know why Ripley is so cosy with the Alien hybrid thingy. I love Brad Dourif, he plays one of my all time top fictional doctors in Deadwood and he is great here. In fact the cast are generally fantastic.

The direction seems a bit strange and I still cannot quite understand how Jeunet went from this straight on to Amelie but that is the mystery of movies. The actual Aliens themselves are fine when they are the man in the suit but they turn to nonsense again once the CGI kicks in.

It's actually all a lot of fun and a fitting end to the series. Well, until the Predators got involved. And Sigourney Weaver actually did make that over the shoulder basketball shot!

Next is some AVP nonsense

Alien 3 - Third amongst equals

Moving rapidly on to the always difficult third film in any franchise. Alien 3 came out in 1992 and was directed by David Fincher, what ever happened to him?

Sigourney Weaver returned but this time insisted that there be no guns after the military free for all in Aliens. The pre-production was incredibly troubled. William Gibson himself wrote an early script which you can read on the internet. Directors and actors came and went and Fincher was handed the project with little time to prepare and without a finalised script. So it is not too surprising that this one is a bit odd.

Again I watched the theatrical release rather than the special edition which gives us a strange Bull-Alien rather than the original Dog variant. Every British actor with a shaved head turns up including the great Brian Glover, along with Ralph Brown, Pete Postlethwaite and Paul McGann (four years before he would become the Eighth Doctor Who. Charles Dance provides a brief romantic respite for Ripley and proves that you should never have sex in a horror film.

It's all dark and violent and looks very brown. There is the feeling that there's a good movie struggling to get out of the murk here but it never quite makes it. And it is rather spoilt by the first CGI Alien which looks awful and much less scary than the man in a rubber suit varieties we have had so far. There are clues that Fincher would go on to much better stuff with more creative control but all in all Alien 3 is a diasappointment.

Next up is current fan favourite Joss Whedon, and the director of Amelie making part the fourth. That can't be right can it?

Aliens - Guns, lots of guns.

In 1986 James Cameron brought us a sequel to Ridley Scott's masterpiece. Aliens starred Sigourney Weaver, Carrie Henn, Michael Biehn and Lance Henriksen.

Let me start by saying that this is one of my favourite action films of all time. Frankly it is probably nearly everybody's favourite action film. So I will refrain from the superlatives and just make the following notes. Once again it is only the character of Ripley who seems to be thinking clearly throughout the film. Her Colonial Marine colleagues are supposed to be tough and smart and turn out to be neither. The company man is exactly what we thought he was and we get the second in our alphabet of androids "I prefer the term 'Artificial Person' myself".

There is, of course, the famous line but I was also struck by Ripley's earlier line when they first raise the idea of returning to LV-426, "I am not going back ... and I would not be any good to you if I did." Fortunatley for us and the character of Newt she is spectaculary wrong. Speaking of Newt  I decided to stick to the theatrical releases for the rest of the series so I missed the stuff about Ripley's dead daughter and Newt's family going out to investigate the alien spacecraft. But frankly those scenes are not necessary, the bond between Ripley and Newt is obvious, and the family they form with Hicks and Bishop is quite touching.

It's a terrific film. Obviously the genre has switched from horror to all out action and yes it is quite militaristic, but it is as good now as it was in 1986. James Cameron used to make great films in the 80s. Next up is skinheads in space.

Alien - The monster inside us

My Superman marathon is stalled while I wait for a copy of the Donner cut of Superman 2. It occurred to me that it might make more sense to embark on an Alien view-through as we wait for Prometheus, which will be with us soon. So here is the very first Alien film from 1979.

"In space no-one can hear you scream" but they can hear you blow up a huge oil refinery platform as my physics teacher pointed out at the time. My brothers and I were discussing the late 1970s on Facebook recently and, in particular, the movies and music concerts we went to see then. I remember going on a school organised outing to see Star Wars in 1977. I don't know how the teachers got that one by the Headteacher and parents but they did. Likewise in 1979 the physics and biology of Alien were the subject of much discussion with our A level tutors.

We also look back fondly on a time before internet spoilers and trailers freely available at the click of a button. Yet I remember that we all knew that something was going to come out of John Hurt's chest. Maybe it was word of mouth but it was common knowledge by the time I saw the film. Not that that detracted from the shock of the moment, it still caused quite a jump for myself and the young lady friend who was with me. Our box of Maltesers clattered their way down the rows of seats in front of us as they flew from our startled laps!

There are several more memorable moments in this film, not the least of which is Ripley's final confrontation with the Alien on the shuttle. Watching it again now just confirms how good Sigourney Weaver was right from the start. Her character seems to be the only one thinking clearly out of the whole crew. It now seems obvious that there was something weird about Ash right from the start.

The effects hold up very well, although the clunky computers with their bizarre methods of data input now seem very strange. Point and click was only a pipe-dream then I suppose. There is one rather strange shot of the larger Alien moving forwards which is clearly a model on a rail but apart from that everything looks great. I watched the more recent Director's cut which gives us the sequence of Ripley discovering Dallas and Brett in Alien cocoons. This was in the novelisation of the film which I read at the time, but in light of what the sequels told us about the Alien life cycle the scene doesn't make sense and it seems odd to have included it.

The film is still very shocking and watchable. I enjoyed it as much as I did the first time. Next up is Aliens with and those guns, lots of guns.