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437. Predator: Badlands – All-ien 2025 (#—)

Posted on November 30, 2025 by Darren

Hosted by Andrew Quinn, Darren Mooney and Jess Dunne, this week with special guest Emma Keily, The 250 is a (mostly) weekly trip through some of the best (and worst) movies ever made, as voted for by Internet Movie Database Users. New episodes are released every second Saturday at 6pm GMT, with the occasional bonus episode between them.

This week, Dan Trachtenberg’s Predator: Badlands.

And alien hunter named Dek is given an opportunity to prove himself by travelling to the hostile world of Genna and hunting the deadly kalisk, a beast so fearsome that the legends say it cannot be killed. In the hostile jungle, Dek finds unlikely allies and unexpected enemies.

At time of recording, it was not ranked on the list of the best movies of all time on the Internet Movie Database.

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Filed under: The 250 | Tagged: action, all-ien, cgi, colonialism, dek, emma kiely, film, graphic, horror, imdb, james cameron, jess dunne, masculinity, Movie, podcast, predator, predator: badlands, vietnam, violence | Leave a comment »

The X-Files – Sanguinarium (Review)

Posted on February 12, 2015 by Darren

This February and March, we’re taking a trip back in time to review the fourth season of The X-Files and the first season of Millennium.

Appropriately enough, Sanguinarium is a bloody mess of an episode.

To be fair, it’s not a total write-off. There are some interesting ideas here, and the episode’s willingness to indulge in trashy horror is almost endearing… to a point. However, Sanguinarium often serves to illustrate just how much care and consideration is necessary to make an episode of The X-Files work. It is a very effective counter-example, an episode that demonstrates it takes more than just pulpy horror to make an episode work. Sanguinarium is almost as revolting and as graphic as Home, but it lack all the little elements that made the earlier episode work.

The doctor will see you now…

It’s cheesy instead of wry. It’s gratuitous instead of simply hyperactive. It’s blunt instead of subversive. Sanguinarium is not a misfire to the same extent as – say – Teso Dos Bichos or Excelsis Dei. It has a few ill-judged elements, but it’s more clumsy than offensive. It might be a bit much to suggest that there’s a classic episode buried just beneath the surface of Sanguinarium, but it seems fair to say that there is a much better episode somewhere in here. One suspects that pressure behind the scenes simply made it tougher to bring that episode to the fore.

Nevertheless, Sanguinarium is an interesting failure, if not quite a satisfying episode.