Soon, the long national nightmare will be over. Brett Kavanaugh will be confirmed as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States (his reputation forever tarnished by the craven cretins of the Democrat party), or he will not.

While I do believe the psycho-drama of the hearings (the psycho provided by the clearly disturbed Dr. Ford, the drama by Kavanagh who chose not to go quietly into that good night preordained for him by the Stalinist Socialists formerly known as the Democrat Party) is an important event, reflective of our culture and the war for America’s soul, I think we also need to step back and take a break.

I mean, with campaign slogans like “You have no presumption of innocence here” and the equally catchy “Accusations are all we need,” the Democrats will be coming for the thought-criminals soon enough.

Therefore, herewith, some dumb fun movies you might have missed (some with, alas, more dumb than fun).

1. The Predator

A solid C effort. Shane Black did a great comeback with Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, a career resurrection for both him and Robert Downey, Junior. A sassy updating of the sixties private dick pulp novels, it also featured the last good Val Kilmer performance.

Then there is The Predator.

The result is a big budget come-on, preying on our goodwill toward the resurgent Shane Black (Ironman III was better than the second, but that wasn’t very hard to accomplish) and the original film – which was damned original at the time, spawning the inevitable misshapen Mongoloid off-spring, including its own sequel and various wretched mash ups featuring everyone but Abbott and Costello.

But. From the start, the film strains to be something. Anything. The CGI effects of ships in outer space are marginal, at best; Battlestar Galactica looked better. The characters are disposable, with an alleged tough-guy pretty boy as the lead and a collection of racially and ethnically diverse “characters” right out of a “brotherhood in the Army” propaganda film from the early 60s.

The story is daft, the dramatic devices are tired (autistic boy has the special gifts to understand the alien programming language), and nobody has yet had the heart to tell Shane Black that there’s more to writing than finding creative ways for his characters to curse and to try to come on to the token tough chick in the film.

Redbox it.

 

2. Mandy

From the preview, I thought this was going to be a sequel to the best supernatural revenge B-Movie you’ve never seen, the critically hated but clever and funny as hell Drive Angry.

I was wrong. The films are similar in some ways. Normal dude Nic Cage (okay, as normal as he can be… he is Nic Cage, after all) has his woman taken by some weird, creepy cult, and then shit gets real. Because, you know, you never want to get Nic Cage angry.

You wouldn’t like him when he’s angry.

But. For all of its B-movie bones (there are callbacks to everything from Hellraiser to psychedelic ‘60s biker exploitation flix), this film has aspirations. Or pretensions. There’s a lot of colored light bathing the scenes for no discernable reason, the music strives for more than arpeggio jump scares, and when Nic Cage gets going, nobody does Nic Cage like him, and it’s the fully committed (in the psychiatric sense) performance that we’ve come to depend on this Oscar winner for.

After the film was over, my son looked at me and said “What the hell did we just watch?” With a respectable supporting cast (Bill Duke, Linus Roche, and a nearly unrecognizable Andrea Riseborough from Oblivion), the film seemed to be trying to say… something. But overall, it seemed like an argument not to let art school students become directors.

Worth a look. Free might be better, but it is different. Lunatic, but not run of the mill.

Matinee

 

3. The Core

Total B-movie Brilliance.

Great cast (Aaron Eckhart, Bruce Greenword, Hillary Swank, Stanley Tucci, Delroy Lindo, Richard Jenkins, and that’s just the leads), a batshit-crazy, implausible, whack-job science disaster movie about needing to kickstart the core of the earth (think defibrillator for Mother Earth) and it just works. It’s exciting, touching, and very funny.

Terrific featherweight entertainment, wonderfully lacking in any unnecessary political commentary. A palate cleanser for a long week where very little about our political ecosystem has covered itself in glory.

OWN THIS.