weekend watchlist: an all man-(and woman)-versus-beast(s), all both-sides-of-the-pond special
in honor of the silly glory that is Idris Elba punching a lion in ‘Beast’
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published September 4th, 2022
both sides of the pond
Maybe you’ve already seen Idris Elba fight a lion in Beast (in cinemas in the US and the UK) and are craving more thrilling tales of humans caught up, literally or figuratively, in the claws and teeth of pissed-off nature. Maybe you’re putting off trips to the cinema at the moment and must look elsewhere to fulfill such cinematic needs.
Either way, I’ve got you covered.
Now, you don’t need me to tell you that, in the face of cravings like these, the obvious go-tos are stone-cold classics Jaws [rent or buy on Prime Video US | UK or Apple TV] and Jurassic Park [rent or buy on Prime Video US | UK or Apple TV; streaming HBO Max US | Sky UK], the latter of which is overtly name-checked in Beast. So we’ll skip right over those.
Instead, I am going to direct you first to an overlooked story of humanity’s neverending contest with Mother Nature: 2016’s Shin Godzilla. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a longtime kaiju fan or you’ve never seen a Godzilla movie before. Japanese studio Toho completely reboots the giant lizard for the 21st century with this dryly, bitterly funny satire about the inertia of bureaucracy in the face of fast-moving events that demand an immediate response. Such as a gigantic nuke-mutated creature rampaging around Tokyo wreaking tremendous destruction, which is depicted here with little of the cheese we expected from these sorts of movies, and lots of intense, inexorable horror.
There’s clear resonance with Japan’s triple 2011 disaster of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdowns. The movie works beautifully as a metaphor for our inaction even as the impacts of global warming ramp up. And, shit, now it rings with truths about governmental pandemic paralysis, too. (Read my review.)
US: rent or buy on Prime Video or Apple TV
UK: rent or buy on Prime Video or Apple TV
It’s a rare example of woman versus beast in the new Prey, a sequel to 1987’s sci-fi horror Predator, in which a badass team of commandos lead by Arnold Schwarzenegger battled an alien sport hunter — of humans — in a Central American jungle. Prey is more of a prequel, in fact: The extraterrestrial this time out has landed on the North American Great Plains in the early 18th century… where he makes the mistake of encountering a young Comanche woman (the awesome Amber Midthunder) with a huge chip on her shoulder and a desire to prove herself as a hunter to her tribe. No spoilers, but this brisk, efficient flick is great fun, and ET gonna phone home sobbing.
US: streaming on Hulu
UK: streaming on Disney+
Much as Beast is all about Idris Elba versus lion, 2006 horror comedy Snakes on a Plane is all about Samuel L. Jackson versus slithery reptiles on a regularly scheduled commercial flight. From my (very snarky but maybe not entirely) review:
It is, as you might suspect, very much in the tradition of that genre of socially aware, psychologically insightful films of the 1960s that Truffaut called cinema du serpent, that wave of deeply cynical yet also powerfully humanist works that rocked the sensibilities of adventurous moviegoers during a period of political uncertainty and cultural upheaval, asked them to reconsider man’s supposed ascendancy to a place of alleged dominance of the planet.
The makers of Beast might think they have made a serious film that just so happens, purely for dramatic purposes, to culminate in Idris Elba fighting a lion, but it is more accidentally in the spirit of Snakes on a Plane than any other movie I can think of. (Read my review.)
US: rent or buy on Prime Video or Apple TV; streaming on HBO Max
UK: buy on Prime Video
Just as Beast seems to me to have been at least partly inspired by the Monty Python Flying Circus episode “Scott of the Antarctic” — which includes a hilarious argument on a movie set over whether an actor should fight a lion onscreen — so does the 2007 New Zealand flick Black Sheep bring to my demented geek mind the Pythons’ “Harold, the intelligent sheep.” When genetic engineering transforms placid woolies into maneating monsters, anyone bitten mutates into a monster sheep, too. With 40 million sheep in New Zealand, and four million people, the odds don’t look good for humanity. Writer-director Jonathan King plays this as totally straight-up horror, which makes it even funnier than it might have been if it were presented as a joke in the first place. Same as Beast! (Read my review.)
US: rent or buy on Prime Video or Apple TV
UK: rent or buy on Prime Video or Apple TV
In my 1997 review (one of the very first I ever wrote!) of 1996’s The Ghost and the Darkness, I said it was “scarier and much classier than that dinosaur movie of a few years ago” — meaning Jurassic Park. I wonder if I’d still feel the same way; I haven’t seen this one in years. But I think it’s still safe to say that, for maneating-lion action-horror-adventure that’s played straight and definitely not even accidentally funny, you probably cannot go wrong with this based-on-fact tale of Val Kilmer’s engineer and Michael Douglas’s big-game hunter tracking the homicidal lion that’s disrupting the building of a railroad in 1890s southern Africa. (Read my review.)
US: streaming free for members on Prime Video, and also on Paramount+; rent or buy on Prime Video or Apple TV
UK: rent or buy on Prime Video or Apple TV
Thanks to djconner for reminding me about Shin Godzilla, and bronxbee for reminding me of The Ghost and the Darkness.
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