June Gloom isn’t just a weather phenomenon.
Blockbuster season is off to a mixed start, with much of the summer crop being either disappointing or surprisingly dour thus far. As in the case of a certain long-awaited zombie sequel, however, sad is preferable to mediocre any time of year. With the new Jurassic World and Superman imminent, expect the box-office returns to rise even faster than the temperature. As to whether that translates to the cinematic equivalent of sunny skies, well, let’s just say the forecast is uncertain.
After decades of intermittent and mostly terrible sequels, the Predator franchise has finally landed on a winning — and, in hindsight, obvious — formula: put the creature in different historical eras and let it go wild. What began with Prey continues with fellow Hulu exclusive Killer of Killers and will continue later this year in Predator: Badlands, with all three directed by 10 Cloverfield Lane helmer Dan Trachtenberg. This animated installment is slight enough to feel like a non-canon spinoff but enjoyable enough for it not to matter much. Its three linked stories pit the predator against the exact foes you’d hope for: a Viking, a samurai, and a World War II fighter pilot who ultimately emerges as the protagonist.
Dividing the action into three seemingly discrete chapters that eventually conjoin has its pros and cons. Each segment wastes no time before giving us the lizard-brain action promised by the premise, but the actual predators going down in about 20 minutes each undermines their status as legendary hunters — these are apparently the lesser specimens unfit to face off against Arnold in the jungle. The nearly dialogue-free samurai section is the best, because how could it not be, and the least compelling of the three would-be trophies becomes the de facto leader, presumably because he speaks English and has plucky-underdog vibes. That’s a shame: with his “think, Torres, think” and “uhh, guys…” energy, he feels more like a Pixar protagonist than a Predator killer. Even so, this is still an enjoyable way for fans of the franchise to kill some time before Badlands arrives in theaters in November.
It’s not the sharks you have to worry about in Dangerous Animals, though they do put on quite the show. Their performance, such as it is, comes at the behest of an Australian serial killer whose victims all have the misfortune of booking a ride on Tucker’s Shark Experience. What he does with them can be likened to the Jurassic Park scene wherein an ill-fated goat is lowered into the T. rex paddock, with Tucker (Jai Courtney) filming the gruesome display on a camcorder for posterity. If man is the most dangerous game, he’s also the most dangerous predator — and one of the few who hunts for sport. Tucker is well aware of this, insisting it’s “not the shark’s fault” as he proudly shows off the torso-length scar he received after being bitten by one as a child. The same can’t be said of him, not that he seems bothered by the unflattering comparison.
The latest fish to find itself in Tucker’s net is Zephyr (Hassie Harrison), a free-spirited American on a surfing trip who refuses to be mere chum. The ferocity of Harrison’s performance matches that of her character, whose calm exterior belies a sea of feeling below. Despite an inventive premise eventually giving way to overly familiar plotting, the third film from director Byrnes treats its viewers to a better time than its protagonist has.
Movies about children visiting their grandparents tend to go one of two ways: heartwarming or horrifying. It should come as little surprise to readers of this august newsletter that Best Wishes to All belongs in the latter category. An elderly woman telling our youthful heroine (Kotone Furukawa) how sorry she is that “young people are sacrificed for old folks like me” offers an early clue as to what’s under the surface of writer/director Shimotsu Yûta’s deeply unnerving thriller, though the true ghastliness of it all takes longer to uncover. The sight of her grandpa standing stiff as a board in the hallway of his rural home, apparently staring at nothing, could be dismissed as a mere senior moment; when grandma does the same thing a day later, it’s clear there’s something deeply wrong beyond the fact that every character is unnamed.
Exactly what that is wouldn’t be out of place in a Yorgos Lanthimos movie, but the exact contours of Shimotsu’s social commentary will be especially resonant in Japan. It’s hardly the only country where the old have failed the young, but a declining birth rate and aging population are already causing problems that will only be exacerbated in the decades to come. The film envisions happiness as a zero-sum exchange in which one person must lose for another person to gain, like a parasite attaching itself to a host and sapping their lifeblood. J-horror is often thought of in the past tense — Onibaba, Audition, and The Ring are all firmly in the rearview at this point — but Best Wishes to All suggests that, unlike Japan’s youth, the genre’s best days might be yet to come.
You either die a villain or live long enough to see yourself become the campy antihero. Such has been the fate of myriad slashers in the past — remember when Chucky and the Leprechaun were meant to be scary, not funny? — and so it is with M3GAN. The endlessly sassy Model 3 Generative Android Human is trying to be the best version of herself after killing four people and a dog, now that a newer, more ruthless model has been built: AMELIA, short for Autonomous Military Engagement Logistics & Infiltration Android. Gerard Johnstone’s sequel to his 2022 sleeper hit ditches any and all horror pretenses in favor of action comedy, which wouldn’t be an issue if it didn’t take so long for something exciting to happen.
The problem with most sequels is that they excise everything but the action, which is ramped up at the expense of mundane details like character development. M3GAN 2.0 has the opposite problem, which isn’t to say that it’s heady or ambitious. The actual issue is far worse: it’s boring. The first hour or so is mostly devoted to M3GAN earning back the trust of her reluctant creator (Allison Williams) à la the Terminator and Sarah Connor, as AMELIA goes about her evil scheme essentially unopposed. M3GAN is initially implanted with an inhibitor chip that curbs her murderous ways, an apt metaphor for the film itself as it marches toward a too little, too late premise. “I was always going to get a sequel,” M3GAN taunts in the fourth-wall-breaking trailer. Fair enough, but did it have to be this one?
Nearly three decades after the zombie apocalypse, the zombies themselves are so diminished in both number and strength that they’re killed for sport as a rite of passage by the residents of a tidal island. The forests on the English mainland are overgrown, the survivors are overconfident, and it’s clear from the beginning that something is on the other side of the submerged causeway. It’s also clear that, unlike 2007’s middling 28 Weeks Later, this is the work of the same writer (Alex Garland) and director (Danny Boyle) who introduced fast zombies to the undead corpus in the original 28 Days Later. Less obvious until the abrupt, bizarre ending is the fact that, far from a farewell to the franchise, this is the start of a new trilogy that will actually conclude the series.
Off-putting and tonally inconsistent in a way that can’t help but be compelling, 28 Years Later benefits massively from two performances: Jodie Comer as an ailing mother and Ralph Fiennes as a reclusive former doctor who’s taken on Colonel Kurtz status for his bizarre, skull-heavy manner of honoring the dead. At the center of it all is the Latin phrase memento mori, a reminder not only that you will die but also that some deaths are better than others; in this zombie-cursed world, a peaceful passing is more than most receive (and, in many cases, deserve). We may not like who we become in the days, weeks, and years following tragedy, but we can follow the island’s mantra: “Fail we may but try we must.”
