KWIF: Pee-Pee Peeping

 KWIF= Kent's Week in Film. Three "films" that start with "P" completely on accident.

This Week:
Predator: Killer of Killers (2025, d. Dan Trachtenberg - Disney+)
Pee-Wee As Himself (2025, d. Matt Wolf - HBO)
Presence (2025, d. Steven Soderbergh - AmazonPrime)

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The classic Arnold Schwartzenegger-starring Predator from 1987 was quite a successful film, as a group of mercenaries square off against a high-tech alien Predator in the jungle. It's Danny Glover-starring 1990 sequel, taking place in a sweaty, crime-addled futuristic L.A. was less successful but even more popular among the sci-fi nerds for teasing the culture of the Predators. But it was the various Dark Horse Comics mini-series in the 1990s that showed what could really be done with the Predator....

Put him at a disadvantage in a cold-weather climate. Have the Predator hunting during the first World War.  Let the Predators square off against Aliens. Or Batman. Or Tarzan. Or another Predator!

The core idea behind the Predator (their species is the Yautja...first used in the novel Aliens vs. Predator: Prey from 1994) is that they hunt those most deserving of being hunted; other hunters. Earth is so rife with skilled hunters and killers that it's a favourite hunting ground of the Yautja, but not their only one (as witnessed in 2010's Predators). The key to a good Predator story is to not focus on the Yautja much at all, and offer little to no explanation. Shane Black's 2018 travesty The Predator and the awful Aliens vs. Predator movies explained too much, tried to probe the creatures too much. So Dan Trachtenberg's back-to-basics Predator film Prey (pitting a Yautja against a Comanche warrior) came out in 2022, it paved the laneway for what future Predator stories should be... the Predator in other cultures, in other times.

The most obvious go-to would be Predator vs. Vikings, Predator vs. Samurai, Predator vs Kung Fu warrior, Predator vs Zulu warrior, etc.  So it came as a slight disappointment when the trailer Predator:Badlands dropped and it most definitely wasn't the back-to-basics follow-up to Prey I was anticipating from Trachtenberg.  What I didn't know was that the true follow-up to Prey would be Predator:Killer of Killers, stealth dropped on Hulu (in the US, Disney+ globally) last week.

At first blush, it appears to be an animated anthology film consisting of three stories: Predator vs. Vikings, Predator vs a ninja, Predator vs. WWII aerial ace, you know, the type of stories I was actually hoping would each get the full-feature, live-action treatment, not burned off in an animated tie-in. It's a movie that simultaneously offers a little more than what the typical anthology film does, but at the same time offers each conceit less than what it could have.

Set in 841 AD, "The Shield" finds a viking warrior, Ursa, leading her clan - and her son - on an assault against a foe she has been hunting for a long time.  The enemy was responsible for the death of her father a lifetime ago, but it seems revenge has been fuelling her the whole time. As she confronts the man she has hated her whole life, her son makes the killing blow, and makes him the target of the Yautja that has been observing them in action. The Predator here is a hulking beast, literally Hulk-sized, with a unique pulse emanating weapon on his right arm where his hand should be. Ursa, the Viking queen, meanwhile, fights using two shields with razor-sharp edges.  There is some wild violence and some impressive action beats in all this that allowed me to get over my disappointment of there not being more to it than there is. I feel like the emotional resonance that the story wants wasn't allowed enough time to build, both for the big confrontation the Ursa wants, and for the people she loses along the way.  I like that, like Prey, the Predator is still a more technologically advanced creature, but that technology is more primitive, clunkier than what we would see in the 20th century.

"The Sword" is set in Japan in 1609, but starts further back with two brothers, thick as thieves, who learn and train and grow up together, are forced to face each other by their disciplinarian father to see who is strongest and fiercest enough to be his heir. Kenji refuses to fight his brother, while Kiyoshi is reluctant but the disappointment of his father is too much to bear. He attacks Kenji and Kenji flees. Year later, Kiyoshi holds his father's title, and Kenji, now a ninja, sneaks into his city to get his revenge...except Kenji, for as stealthy as he is, cannot elude the Yautja observing him from behind his invisible cloak. This story, largely wordless, was everything I was wanting, except for not being live-action and feature length. It actually manages to hit the emotional resonance that "The Shield" could not, with the silence putting more emphasis of the visuals and direction, and the music providing so much of the emotional cues. As a short, it's absolutely lovely and poetic, but I still can't help want more out of it.

The end of each of "The Shield" and "The Sword" find our protagonists victorious against their alien opponent, and there's the briefest of glimpses of them in the same confined space that looks like the hold of a spacecraft. The film is teasing that there's more to Ursa and Kenji's stories than what we just saw. And then we're introduced to John Torres.

"The Bullet" is set in 1942, and finds Torres as a second-stringer aboard an aircraft carrier during World War II. Torres wants to fly, but hasn't been given the chance. When his squadron leaves to engage the enemy, Torres and his mechanic buddy discover something incredibly foreign, alien even, that's an even greater threat in the skies. He takes off in a junker plane to alert his crew to return to ship, only to have the Pred Baron start picking them off. Clearly we know Torres is successful in defeating this alien ace, but of the three stories, it's the most implausible. Torres is not, like Ursa or Kenji, so skilled, and his equipment is so outclassed it should barely be flying. Voiced by Rick Gonzalez (Arrow) Torres is a motormouth to the point of being too much, especially coming off of the quiet of "The Sword". Torres winds up verbalizing his inner monologue, which makes it feel much more cartoony than the previous for-adult-audiences entries felt.

It all culminates with a fourth act in a Yautja gladiatorial Colosseum, which I was not expecting at all. If anything I was anticipating that our three victors would wind up in the hunting forest planet from Predators. I very much enjoyed that it was something new, and there was no explaining it. We know what a gladiator arena looks like, and we know how they work, just not Predator-style, so it was full of discovery as new elements are introduced. 

All the fighting throughout the film is brutal and bloody and quite impressively choreographed. It's clean and clear what is happening in the action, although sometimes it's moving so quickly (Tractenberg using a lot of follow-from-behind or follow-in-front of the action oners) that taking in all the violent mayhem is sometimes a bit too much to process. I like how the Predator designs were all quite well thought through and how even though our protagonists were technologically outmatched, they still were smart enough to figure out how to use the Predators' technologies against themselves.

I had an absolute blast with this movie. In the end, the three opening acts come together with purpose for a rousing fourth act that, despite some pretty hand-waivy improbabilities, makes it all comes together, not just within but also outside of this film. The victories Dutch, Harrigan, and Naru all had...well, those probably weren't the end of their stories either.  Also, it should be said that at no point did Killer of Killers ever feel like it existed solely as an introduction to the forthcoming Badlands. It will be interesting to see if they do connect in any way, but even still, this feels as stand-alone as every other Predator story, which is amazing.

[Series Minded: Predator edition]

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When I was a young lad, I thought Pee-Wee Herman was real. Like, maybe he didn't always look like that, in that suit, with the hair slicked back, but to me I had no awareness there was anyone underneath. Pee-Wee was a character actor like, say Ernest or Hulk Hogan or Mr. T, who only seemed to star as himself in movies and TV shows about himself as the character.  I didn't know Paul Ruebens from a hole in the ground until he was arrested at a porn theatre in 1991, and suddenly the magic was dispelled.  I mean, I was 15 at the time, and I knew Santa wasn't real, but this was the first true realization that Pee-Wee was a character played by someone not named Pee-Wee Herman.

We lost Paul Ruebens to cancer in the summer of 2023. He was 70 years old. In the year prior to his death, he agreed to participate in a documentary about himself, shedding off the layers upon layers of privacy he'd long, long held and opening himself up to examination and scrutiny in a way that seemed to frighten him previously.

We learn about Ruebens' early days, his family, his dalliances with theatre and art school in his teens, and we learn about his coming out story, which led to his re-closeting story once he started achieving success. He had a true love-at-first-sight relationship post-College, and he had formed a true bond with this man, as they shacked up and got a cat, Ruebens found himself content.  But that contentedness presented a crossroads: either live the life of love, or live the life of ambition. He chose the latter, broke his lover's heart and his own, and set out for L.A. where he joined up with the Groundlings comedy troupe. From there characters, including Pee-Wee were built, but there was something about Pee-Wee that demanded more attention, both from Ruebens and the audience.

Ruebens was committed as a performer. He invested himself in whatever it was he was doing. He knew how to steal scenes with looks and physicality more than words (but as we see in the documentary, he does have a razor-sharp comedy mind to accompany the sly-little-devil twinkle in his eye). As Pee-Wee became a bigger and bigger thing from stage to screen to Saturday morning subversive idol to children and college kids, Ruebens sheltered himself to the point that he barely existed outside of the character he played. His ambitions got the better of him, relationships with friends and colleagues fractured, and then the arrest.

A children's show host being arrested for something indecent coming out of America's puritanical 80's (where sex was evil, but violence and greed were good for all) was the death knell for Pee-Wee and Ruebens spiralled. 

The first half of this two-part documentary (each part 100 minutes long) follows Rueben's life through all these elements, with friends and ex-colleagues all talking about how amazing it was to be part of it all but also speaking truth to who Ruebens was at the time, as Ruebens himself struggles on camera to fully lay it out and cede control of his narrative to his director.

The second half is all about the fall of Pee-Wee Herman, and then his revival, and his third act, and all the messiness in between. The first half is a real rise-to-fame story, but without revealing in the triumph, since there were sacrifices along the way that have manifested as, if not regrets, then at least remorse. The second half is very much a rollercoaster, as Ruebens tries to find his footing as Paul Ruebens and it's full of ebbs and flows that must have been really tumultuous and stressful to live through, particularly the very public reaction and hurtful things said about him. Rueben's relationship with his sexuality is an integral part to the story, and probably a lot of what Ruebens wanted to get off his chest about in the documentary. 

There's a lot of great things about this documentary, first and foremost is Ruebens himself. Even at 68/69 years old, secretly dealing with cancer, he looked fantastic and vital with a precociousness about him that was so alluring to watch. His combative nature with director Matt Wolf is the B-story to the documentary, where clearly Wolf was constantly having to fend off Rueben's stabs at taking control of the project.  Rueben's jabs at the director start out quite playful and take on a bit more menace the closer they get to the more troublesome years. 

The talking heads are all fascinating, most coming from such a place of love, but a few coming from a point of pain, of regret or remorse around their falling out with Reubens (and there were a few). The sheer volume of personal films and tapes that Ruebens had around his life makes this documentary sing with not just the narrative but visual proof of that narrative, and transporting the audience into the past.  

There have been a slew of documentaries about celebrities of the 70's, 80's and 90's of late, most of them produced by the celebrities (or their family/estate) leading to pretty whitewashed looks at their lives, celebrating more their glories than their humanity. This is very much the opposite, really getting in touch with the person who hid behind a character for so long that he had a hard time finding his way out again. It should be a compelling watch if you ever had any affinity for Ruebens at all. 

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I wrote a bit about Steven Soderbergh's prolific output in my Black Bag review (Toasty just published his, we agree!), so I won't rehash it here, except to say that the man put out two films in the first quarter of this year. That's insane. Even more insane is that Black Bag was a critical hit but fared poorly at the box office while Presence was pretty much ignored by everyone, but its low budget meant that it would up being a modest success.

Where Black Bag was a real adult sexy thriller starring big stars, Presence is an experiment in filmmaking with a story.  While the story's unfolding nature of discovery does lead the audience through the proceedings rather well, it's unable to escape the techniques Soderbergh employs that are simultaneously distracting and effective.

The whole film takes place inside a gorgeously refurbished 19th century home which had Lady Kent and I both salivating. It's a dream home, to be sure. The film opens with the Payne family looking at the property, and then moving in. Rebekah (Lucy Liu) is the driving force of the family, clearly successful, but there are hints that her success hasn't always been above board. She is obsessed with the wellbeing of her superstar swimmer son,  Tyler (Eddie Maday) while all but ignoring the well-being of her daughter, Chloe (Callina Lang), much to husband Chris's (Chris Sullivan) constant displeasure. Chloe has recently lost two friends two overdoses, and she's spinning out. Chris does what he can to engage, but it seems like Rebekah and Tyler just ride her and push her too hard. Tyler introduces her to his new friend Ryan, and soon Ryan and Chloe are hooking up. He seems like a good guy, and lets Chloe take the lead in their relationship, but there's also an air of menace about him. He's up to something, and it's not what you think, but the film wants you to think it.

The entire production is told from a sort of floating first-person perspective, which, it's slowly revealed, is the "Presence" of the title. Yes, it is a ghost story. It's not a horror movie, but just a drama in which a ghost is our eyes into the play. At times the spirit, who Chloe believes is her dead friend, seems to be  trying to interfere in what's happening, mostly unsuccessfully, but events that elicit a particularly strong emotion from the spirit allow it to interact with its environment.

It's a bit of a trifle of a film. It exists solely for Soderbergh to play with this first-person perspective storytelling, which doesn't have a lot of true success stories in the film world outside of Nickel Boys which earned an Oscar nomination at this year's Academy Award.  But presence is more in the "just trying something here" vein of Hardcore Henry or Gaspar Noe's Enter The Void and is about as successful as either of them. When the whole story is in service of a stylistic experiment, there's a layer that gets in the way of the audience engaging with the story fully.  

As well, the third act climax felt...very Hollywood. This took a family drama with a hint of supernatural intensity and turned it into a studio movie with a legit villain. I didn't really expect too much from Presence and it doesn't ask much either. It's fine for what it is.