Hunted!
Ooooh – movies about predators, monsters, aliens, creepy crawlies and enemies to human kind! How we love them – the thrills, the sheer terror! Oh the horror…
Jaws (1975) may in fact be uber-director Steven Spielberg’s best film. His adaptation of Peter Benchley’s already scary novel became a ‘phenomena’ – a movie about one giant natural predator with one giant appetite for human flesh… It was a movie that kept Australian audiences in particular away from the beaches. A massive threat patrols the waters of the sleepy seaside town of Amnity USA. Police chief Brody (Roy Scheider) is charged with keeping his ‘every town’ safe and free of shark-side monsters… But no-one believes him when he declares a giant white pointer is on the loose, not only threatening the safety of Amnity’s inhabitants but the valued tourist industry to boot. Jaws all but invented the contemporary blockbuster; interestingly it retained the fundamentals of cinema realism that characterised the period worldwide. Alongside Scheider, Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfus make up the complement of hairy-chested, fearful macho men, who not only confront their fears of the deep, but intimacy, family and staying alive in the modern world.
Spielberg’s adaptation of H.G. Wells dystopian War Of The Worlds (2005) also qualifies as a bonafide, thrilling predator movie – on a grand scale. Forget Schindler’s List (1993) – this is Speilberg’s Holocaust movie... Bloodthirsty machine-like alien predators descended to Planet Earth in search of human haemoglobin, razing contemporary New Jersey to the ground. Tom Cruise gives one of his best dramatic performances; the effects are terrifyingly realistic and the subtext about the frailty of human life in the face of invasion is all too close and poetic… A monster movie that is one tough watch.
Predator (1987) is one of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s best films – another actor not known for his craft on screen. But – like Terminator (1984), another Arnie film and great hunted movie – he gives it his physical all, hunted down by an alien super-killer, which not only ruthlessly and brutally destroys its prey, but can turn invisible at will. Arnie turns the action notch up to 11, sweating, pulsing and exploding with fear, filled with the desperation and survival instinct a soldier needs to stay alive faced with such a ferocious, indomitable jungle enemy. Carl Weathers (Action Jackson) also matches his Austrian counterpart as one of the last true American action heroes…
Then there’s Night Of The Living Dead (1968), George A. Romero’s groundbreaking zombie film that paved the way for every zombie action film thereafter – including the stellar Days Later (2002) and its excellent sequel, 28 Weeks Later (2007). Romero implicitly understands the power of the allegories inherently offered up in the zombie genre. Night made mincemeat of the 1960s US Civil Rights Movement and Vietnam War; the two sequels (Day and Dawn of the Dead) shamelessly also give contemporary cultural commentaries, and let’s not forget the latest, Land Of The Dead (2005), a darkly comic take on gated communities, corporate greed and Bush’s America…
- Megan
Megan Spencer has spent way too much of her life in the dark, all for a good
cause though - watching movies as a professional film critic. For the last six
and a half years she has been serving the ever-increasing hunger for film and
DVD reviews as radio triple j's resident film critic, and a year ago joined the
new line up of long-running SBS-TV film review program, The Movie Show.
Every now and then she pops up into the light to make her own films,
documentaries (her latest is 'Fantastic Brutality', a documentary about an
obsessed wrestling fan, to be released next year). She has also written about
film for many publications including J-Mag, Limelight, Inside Film Magazine and
the Age Green Guide.
And the impossible question to ask a film critic: what's her favourite film?
"Blue Velvet would be at the top of the list, so would Fight Club... But then
again American In Paris makes me cry every time."
Megan has also been part of the Foxtel's Project Greenlight Australia as an
on-air panelist and judge.
