Movies: Misremembering to be surprised.

In light of the fizzling firecracker that is media coverage of Predators, I decided to revisit the original flick.

Oddly, I was completely surprised by the very first scene.

And, I should add, I've seen Predator more often than I care to remember. In fact, I got into a nearly four-year long debate in college about whether a weapons system like Old Painless actually existed. That's how into the freakin' film I was. (The answer, then as now, is "kinda, but not the way it is represented in the flick.")

And yet, I realized that I've somehow blocked the very first scene out of my mind.

And I don't think I'm alone on this. Running through the criticism of Predator, both among the pro set and the Holly Hobbyists of the personal blog set, is the idea that one of the things that makes Predator stand out is the unexpected, genre-warping second-act twist that, one first viewing, hit folks from out of nowhere.

This despite the fact that the very first scene - what we see even before the credits - is an image of an alien drop ship dumping something on Earth.

Perhaps all the other pro-am blog types mean their descriptions to be taken in a more nuanced way, but I honestly remember the appearance of the alien big game hunter as a complete surprise. I remember the flick starting with Arnie and Co. landing dramatically on a South American beachfront - imagine a reworking of the Air Cav scene for the Reagan Era - and Arnie bantering with Apollo Creed.

But there it is, clear as day, a big ol' "Hey, this is freakin' sci-fi movie and there be aliens in them there footage" scene as the first thing we see. In fact, it oddly resembles the opening shot of Carpenter's The Thing remake, which hit screens nearly five years earlier. I have no idea whether or not this is an intentional homage or a coincidence. My general instinct is to, when in doubt, credit filmmakers with the talent and background knowledge. Given that one can find similar echos to films as diverse (yet, strangely, alike in their white-folks-in-the-bush anxieties) as Apocalypse Now and King Kong, I don't feel wholly out of place giving McTeirnan the benefit of the doubt that the allusion is intended.

More importantly, weird. Why do I always forget that the movie plays the alien card from frame one?

Now that my weird - though perhaps not so weird, does anybody remember that the second act appearance of the alien is a Chekhov's gun? - inability to remember the flick is out of the way, my impressions of the original, viewed decades later, is how dated it seems. Not the effects, which are still beautiful, if no longer state of the art. Ironically, the original Predator's masking effect actually feels right - it's imperfections suggest an actual device at work rather than the seamless irreality of CGI. Rather, it's the action that seems dated. There's something distinctly early '80s about the action.

Action doesn't seem like something that should age. Sure, there are changing norms of acceptable explicitness in films, curves of fx development, and, like all human creative endeavors, the art of disassembling fellow humans into their constituent humans is an ever eager adopter of the latest technological innovations. But action - boiled down to its basic, we're talking about energetic motion - seems like it should be a constant.

But it's none of the factors listed above that date Predator so distinctly. Rather it's the relentless dehumanizing firehose application of violence that captures a distinctly Reagan Era fantasy about the application of power: The narrative of violence is essentially unilateral and what we talk about when we talk about violence is the imposition of our will on a mute world. Post-Vietnam, we strove to redefine violence in terms of mastering the ability to deal it. Emblematic of the shift is the distinction between John Rambo and the Terminator. Both films deal with characters programmed for violence. But, in First Blood, Rambo's hardwired capacity to kill is revolt against his own nature. It renders him both pathetic and monstrous. In contrast, there's a crystalline perfection to the violence of the Terminator. He's without conflict and built for it. (And, in a neat thematic match, he excuses our heroes violence by being a robot, and therefore okay to kill.) The development of the '80s expression of violence would be the story of Rambo's transformation from a nightmare vision of what we'd done to ourselves in order to create a people who are ready to kill into a story of people always ready to unleash hell for the proper cause.

Predator is a near perfect expression of this in that we get two seemingly contradictory, but self-reinforcing projections of this fantasy: First there's the slaughter of the rebel camp, then the mano-a-xeno combat between Gov. Shwarzenegger and the titular alien (not called Predator or a Predator anywhere in the flick - the alien is simply identified as "the creature" in the credits). In the first fight, Arnie's team brings a beat down that is almost comically one-sided. In fact, not almost: Arnold and a handful of his crew find time to crack a few one liners as they mow down scores of left-wing rebels (we learn later of the rebel's Marxist sympathies - the reason it presumably okay to mow them down wholesale). The "fight" at the rebel compound is massacre. And, in the end, Dutch and Co. learn that the whole thing was a snow job. The Marxist rebels have no hostages and they were sent in as assassins. They are upset about being lied to, though this is more because a bond of personal trust was violated and not because they killed dozens of men under false pretenses. It's the killers that are important. The victims, by virtue of being victims, aren't.

In the second act of the film, by far the most interesting segment, Our Men at War start to get picked off by the Predator. The reason this section has always interested me most is this because it's here that the flick threatens to eat itself. Prior to now, the crew were straight out of central casting: the stoic indian, the weary warrior, the nice guy, the nerd, the redneck - and so on. Suddenly they all begin to crack. They show fear and their personalities cleave in bizarro, not totally logical ways. My favorite scene in the whole flick appears in this section: When Bill Duke's crazed Mac character, nearly exhausted, is chasing after the beast while wheezing out Little Richard's "Long Tall Sally." There are more thematically sound scenes - such as the brilliantly thunderous impotence of the scene where our panicked boys level the jungle in a vain attempt to tag the invisible Predator - but few get at the surreal bad ugly that threatens to engulf this flick like the disjointed, grim nakedness of this moment.

At this point in the film, it would seem like the script's been flipped and it is now the American soldiers's turn to feel what it is like to be on the receiving end of violence. It would seem as if they've been put in the place of the freedom fighters - oh, um, I mean, Communist militants they slaughtered. But, as depicted, the relationship is not all that similar. Even at the worst moments, the mercenary crew is not summarily slaughtered like the rebels were. Right when the flick looks like it's about to spiral into some dark pit of craziness and doom, the third act redeems act one and two by evoking another myth of American might. Less you think that the soldiers' ability to turn the rebel camp into an al fresco abattoir was simply due to their technological superiority, Arnie taps into the rugged lone American archetype, the survivalist killer frontier spirit that allows him to defeat the beast and demonstrate that our dominance is natural, Darwinistic.

He even survives getting nuked, so as to suggest that, while we are the only country to use a nuclear weapon in combat, we could totally take it too if we had to.

Curiously, John McTiernan, the director of Predator, put this kind of supermanish unilateral hero out to pasture himself. Recent Sly Stallone blamed - believe it or not - Tim Burton and Michael Keaton for killing off the muscle-bound action icons of the 1980s. But Sly utterly misses the point. John McClane, with his abused body and edge of panic approach to heroics, was the beginning of the end for Arnie. Not that McClane was somehow less a fantastic projection or any less morally complicated. Heroes always overstep the bounds of the moral order. (Even Atticus Finch breaks the law.) McClane reintroduced an almost Buster Keatonish sense of scale. McClane, even before the first bullet flew, was out of his class. With his informal, off-duty cop clothes in the dapper corridors of high-powered business, he doesn't fit from the jump. And his efforts always seem last second, barely pulled off, half inspiration and half luck. The image I feel most captures McClane's appeal is him, trailing a A Better Tomorrowush ribbon of blood into the bathroom to dig glass out of his feet.

That, it seems to me, was the beginning of the end for Dutch-style action hero. But then I couldn't even remember the whole spaceship at the beginning of the movie, so what the hell do I know?

Magazines: Your editorially-mandated vigor for all thing horror appalls me.

In Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt, there's a scene in which the the reader is subjected to the rodomontades of a city booster organization that exists nominally to promote the attractions of the booming town of Zenith; but, in reality, their utter indifference and contempt for all things not Zenith, means that they function as an echo chamber hallelujah chorus, a fevered roundtable of self-aggrandizement at which every discussion topic, every idea, bends back to the simple conclusion that Zenith is paradise on Earth and its noble citizens the chosen people of the one true God. Underneath all the civic good feeling, of course, is a simmering undercurrent of commerce: Be a good town, bring in more people, make more money. The brilliance of the civic booster organization is that it merges pride and joy with the promotion of naked commercial interest.

One feels the same relentless drive to praise at the core the newly revived Famous Monsters of Filmland. With issue 251, the magazine once again slouches towards magazine racks everywhere. FM isn't a magazine that covers horror-themed events so much as it is tireless advocate for the genre. This isn't journalism or scholarship, it's horror boosterism. And, of course, under it all is the same drive for commercial promotion. One wonders why people buy commercials in Famous. Most of the stories are ads. Take the not one, but two stories about the Predator franchise. Despite the fact that the overall story arc for this particular Hollywood property is that it has been one-hit wonder that people apparently can't stop diluting with lesser follow-ups - a couple of which are spectacularly embarrassing - Famous dutifully retraces the well-tread ground of the original (though this might be the first review of said film that uses the term "gravitas" in earnest while discussing the classic sci-fi/actioner) and breathlessly asserts how the horror community waits, aquiver with anticipation, to see the new one ("Horror-fans went mad with the news . . ."). Not only is this one more story than the franchise rates, but it is impossible to tell which story is less needed. Were the editors concerned that readers were unfamiliar with the original Predator? Or did they think there was a burning desire out there to see the past six or seven months of Internet-based PR hackery collected into a single place, in dead tree format?

Perhaps most notably, by my count, there are only two mentions of the three middling to horrible sequels. The first comes in the piece about the new flick. There's a brief mention that the new monster makers felt Predator designs after the first film bulked up too much. Though, honestly, that was the least of the problems that plagued those flicks. The second is a short reference to the fact that the actor who played the first Predator, Kevin Peter Hall, reprised the role for the sequel. No reference to the fact that the franchise has been slowly rotting ever since the first. No reference to the prevailing feeling amongst fans that Robert Rodriguez's mission was essentially a sort of code blue, last ditch effort to revive a franchise that hadn't delivered the goods in more than 20 years. Nothing to suggest what reviewers are now confirming: Caution is the better part of fanboy exuberance.

I pick on these two Predator articles because they reveal the deadening aspect of Famous's relentlessly promotional style. Despite allegedly having two different authors, there's a sort of monotonous official cheerfulness, blended with a toadying care not to step on the toes of the corporate money, that makes Famous as close to a pop culture Tass as one can get in a free, capitalist society.

Even where the question of slavishly bending the knee before the dollar men is irrelevant, such as the issue opening think piece on "The Importance of Horror" and the profile of Karl Freund, this boosterish quality leads to Mojo-ism. Once, in my impressionable youth, I read a Brit music mag that actually put on its cover the blurb "Nevermind the Beatles, Here's the Shadows." The inner article told the story of how the now relatively obscure Shadows actually made a slight dent in the American market before the Beatles. Though, that wasn't the way the story told it. Drunk on it's own iconoclastic discovery, the article lost all sense of scale and suggested a proto-Brit invasion had been staged by the Shadows all by their onesies. This is, of course, rubbish. The Beatles don't get to be the basis of the term "Beatlemania" because they put a dent in the American pop charts. Anywho, I was suckered and bought this huge old box set of Shadows stuff, waiting to hear music that would make me "nevermind the Beatles." For those unfamiliar with them, the Shadows are a Brit surf band (which is a choice paradox in itself) and take my word for it when I tell you that you don't need to listen to several hours of their music to realize the Beatles' place in rock history is secure. Ever since that incident, magazine overhype, driven by the need to promote an endless stream of new heroes and lost gems, has been know among my people as Mojo-ing. Fall for it, and you've been Mojo-ed.

Famous is Mojo-ing porn.

My favorite example of Mojo-ing comes in the profile of Karl Freund. Now I'll admit that Freund is a sadly overlooked figure in horror cinema history. But writer David Alex Nahmod Mojos the crap out of Freund's career. In this obsessively worshipful piece, we learn that Fruend's camera work on The Golem is what makes it superior to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. On the basis of his camerawork, Freund is compared obscurely, but favorably to director D. W. Griffith: "Lillian Gish said that D. W. Griffith gave film its grammar. But it was Freund that freed film from its constraints." (This is a particularly fine example of Mojo-ing as it is utterly meaningless, but uses a recognizably cliched bit of praise to keep us from unpacking it. What does that sentence even mean? He freed film from Griffith's grammar? From the constraints of stage conventions? Freed film from the constraints of film? What would that even mean?) He knocks Tod Browning down a peg or two. Freund, we're told, is the single person most responsible for the look of classic horror. In his discussion of Metropolis, the writer blames the slow parts of the flick on that hack Fritz Lang and gives all credit for anything that works in the flick to Freund. Freund also built the first commercially viable electric car (Big Oil suppressed his invention), cured cancer (Big Cancer suppressed that), solved the mystery of traveling through time (suppressed by calendar publishers), and definitively located the elusive g-spot (this wasn't suppressed; dudes just ignored it).

This blogger-ish tendency to get its world rocked by every minor connection it finds become clownish after just a few pages. Furthermore, it leads to a level of discourse you can currently get for free on in the horror blog-twitter pro-am. Lazy scholarship defending half-baked theories? You're soaking in it!

Taking the long view, one can recognize the historical roots of this problem. The relaunch issue is bookended by Ackerman: the front features a letter to the fans from the Acker-monster. In the back, there's a collection of testimonials - more like a final fan letter collection than an oral history - informing us what a hell of guy Ackerman was. That the rest of the magazine is basically trapped in the space between monuments to Ackerman is as apt a metaphor for everything that's wrong with Famous as you're going to get. From '93 to '07, the editorship of Famous was, depending on your point of view, assumed or highjacked by a cat named Ray Ferry. The legality of Ferry's assumption that FM's copyright had not been maintained, Ferry's real crime in the eye's of FM-ites is that he didn't worship at the altar of Ackerman. He treated the Acker-monster like the hired help (which, according to Ferry's view of the situation, was exactly what Ackerman was). This toxic business deal turned into a nearly decade long battle between Ackerman and Ferry for control of the rag. In 2000, the courts sided with Ackerman, but - somewhat inexplicably - nobody moved on the bankrupted Ferry and he was able to crank out issues into 2007. The FM War ended in late '07 with another regime change: a private equity investor named Philip Kim bought the distinctive logo and title and negotiated with Ackerman to gain control of attached rights in exchange for guarantees that the mag's look and feel would be maintained.

The result, the decision to save Famous Monsters of Filmland came with a rider that stipulated that the had to stay a museum piece.

FM one-long-huzzah approach to "journalism" was, in Ackerman's day, a somewhat reasonable approach to the imagi-movies (Ackerman's term for the mix of genre's he loved: horror, sci-fi, fantasy, and so on). Not because the quality of films was, in Ackerman's time, any better than our own, but rather because the genre was then a sort of intellectual and cultural reservation for ideas and tropes the mainstream considered infantile, repulsive, foolish, and whatnot. Horror, sci-fi, and fantasy needed cheerleaders to establish their legitimacy. But that battle's over. Genre is the new mainstream. Ackerman won.

Today, the sort of undifferentiated vigor of the rag seems out of step with our times. It seems quaint and bloodless, two traits we don't need in modern horror.