This week, The Hunger Games has audiences everywhere all in a tizzy. The movie is already a gigantic hit, and if you’re reading this article right now, chances are you’re either desperate to see it or already have. If you find yourself walking out of the movie desperate for more Hunger Games or you can’t stomach the thought of sharing the theater with a packed house of excited teens, then fear not! We’ve got some alternative options for you. While Suzanne Collins’ book and Gary Ross’ film are certainly strong pieces of work worthy of the attention, the central drama of the movie is a classic conceit that filmmakers have gone back to time and time again. “Humans being hunted” is any easy source of suspense, action, and drama that’s yielded many classic movies before it even popped in Collins’ mind. There’s many examples, but we’ve come up with the three best worth checking out if you feel like your week will be incomplete without a little more action following the games. So take a look at these prime examples of the genre and may the odds of you enjoying them be ever in your favor.

Battle Royale (2000, Kinji Fukasaku)

This is the big one, and chances are there’s already a few folks out there who dismiss The Hunger Games outright because the concept is so similar to this ultraviolent Japanese romp. In the not-so-distant future, the Japanese government decides to combat overpopulation by annually randomly selecting one class of high school students and transporting them to a deserted island where they must bump each other off one by one until only one survives. The public loves watching it, there are some star-crossed lovers in the new class, and a few of the “students” are volunteers who signed up to slaughter the other youngsters just for fun. Sound familiar? It should, because it’s pretty well the first book in The Hunger Games saga.

Well, perhaps that’s unfair. The two movies are quite different in many ways. Legendary Japanese director Kinji Fukasaku (who turned 70 while shooting the movie) takes a different approach. His story is far more streamlined and action focused. While almost every teen admits love for one of their classmates before kicking the bucket (at times hilariously so), there isn’t that much in the way of drama. Sure, there’s some subtle social satire in play and the characters are developed beyond merely being bullet fodder, but fore the most part the film is presented action first. Blood flows liberally, spurting out of students from hoses in the classic Japanese manner that Tatantino lovingly ripped off in the Kill Bill movies.

Battle Royale plays much differently and certainly far less seriously than The Hunger Games, but it could be argued those differences simply come down more to accepted levels of taste for the Japanese and North American teen markets. If you’re hungry for more…er…games following Ross’ film, this is the first place to go. The films are very similar, yet different enough to prevent accusations of plagiarism being thrown around. It’s also a damn good time to see this movie as well. Battle Royale first made the film festival rounds shortly after the Columbine incident and unsurprisingly no was willing to release it in North America. It’s only been available via bootlegs for years until this week when Anchor Bay put out the first ever official North American DVDs and Blu-rays to capitalize on the Hunger Games hoopla. Battle Royale is definitely a viciously violent watch and not for the week stomached, but it’s also a cult classic for a reason and should be seen by anyone who likes to push their cinematic limits.

The Most Dangerous Game (1932, Ernest B. Schoedsack)

If you want to watch humans being hunted in an exotic setting, then you may as well head back to the original source. Richard Connell’s short story The Most Dangerous Game is about a man and his special ladyfriend who are shipwrecked on a deserted island and end up being hunted by the insane owner of that island who considers humans to be the most exciting prey on earth. That story is where the whole genre began and Hollywood was quick to adapt it into a film in 1932.

The movie comes from the team of Ernest B. Schoedsack and Merian C. Cooper, two adventurous filmmakers who made wild nature documentaries before settling into the talkies. The pair cranked out The Most Dangerous Game as a B-movie at the same time they made their masterpiece King Kong to curb the spiraling production costs of what could be described as the first blockbuster. The same jungle sets from Skull Island were used along with many of the actors included the leading lady Fay Wray. This is not hastily cranked out B-movie filler though. It’s wildly entertaining little action/thriller filled with nail biting suspense and a surprisingly dark approach to the subject matter and onscreen violence for such an old movie.

Of course, this is a 1930s movie, so you have to curb your expectations in terms of the pacing, acting, and dialogue. They don’t make em’ like this anymore, but that’s part of the fun and plenty of campy laughs can be expected. Plus this sucker is only an hour long since it was produced to run in the bottom half of a double feature, so it flies by at a brisk pace. The Most Dangerous Game is an underrated classic and a human hunting flick that still holds up against current entries in the genre. If you enjoy old movies, this one is a no-brainer. But, if black and white scares you off, you can always go for 1994’s Surviving the Game which sticks Ice-T into a similar concept, hunted by the likes of Rutger Hauer and Gary Busey.  It’s not as good, but as you can probably guess based on that cast, it has its own undeliberately hilarious charms.

Predator (1987, John McTiernan)

Finally it comes down to this. Sure, Predator is quite a bit different from The Hunger Games, but if you want to watch a movie about humans being hunted in the jungle, it ain’t going to get much better than this. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Governor Jesse ‘The Body’ Ventura and (hopefully future Governor) Carl Weathers lead a team of Commandos into the jungle to take out some terrorists and end up being picked off by one of the greatest movie monsters of them all, Stan Winston’s Predator. At first the alien is invisible, which gives him an unfair advantage. But once Arnie can actually see his foe, it’s game time and the Austrian wonder ain’t going to let no ugly motherf*cker stand in his way, now is he?

This movie really needs no introduction. If you’ve never seen it before, then I guess you’ve never had access to a TV or spoken to any male between the ages of 6 and 100 over the last 20 years. It’s an absolute classic, pitting a team of testosterone-fueled actors up to their eyeballs in steroids against the pinnacle of rubber monster effects. If any human has to survive against the ultimate hunter, then it may as well be Arnold Schwarzenegger. The man kicks ass for all of humanity in this one and we should only be so lucky as to have him on our side if an actual alien invasion ever occurred.

Conan the Barbarian is an unnecessary, but often entertaining adaptation of Robert E. Howard’s series of stories about the Cimmerian warrior who was “born of battle.” And to the film’s credit, it doesn’t feel like a full remake of the Arnold Schwarzenegger take on the character. This Conan is actually smarter and even more action packed than the beloved films from the 80s, but under the direction of Marcus Nispel (who was also responsible for the reboots of Friday the 13th and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) sometimes the film can be excessive even by the standards of the character.

The film opens with a young Conan learning the ways of the warrior from his father (Ron Perlman) before watching him be tortured and eventually killed by a bloodthirsty warlord named Zym (Stephen Lang) and his mystical daughter Marique (a nearly unrecognizable Rose McGowan). Zym seeks to resurrect his dead wife through the power of a mask created by the necromancers to harness the powers of pure evil (or something like that since the actual powers of the mask are pretty vague), and together he hopes for them to enslave the world. In order for the mask to work, Zym must have the blood of the last remaining descendent of the necromancers (played by Rachel Nichols). A now grown Conan (Game of Thrones‘ Jason Momoa) is out for a Robin Hood like quest to protect the young woman and exact revenge in his own barbaric way.

The performances suit the material well, but Momoa is almost too good as Conan. Fans of the Schwarzenegger films might be disappointed that Momoa’s Conan is far smarter and much more tactically-minded. Fans of Howard’s stories, however, will probably be excited that the character is much more battle savvy. Either way, his performance is very good. Perlman almost runs away with the film despite only being in the first twenty minutes. He gets the film off on the right foot all on his own. Lang is suitably slimy and Nichols is very good at standing around and looking pretty, but it is McGowan who will probably get the biggest career boost from the film. She seems to be having an absolute blast walking around with Freddy Krueger nails and smirking with evil glee at her destruction.

Visually, Conan is also quite nice to look at. Made with a lot of practical sets against CGI backdrops, it has a decidedly well thought out production design, and it is filmed in a brightly lit manner. The fact that the film is more bright and colourful means it lends itself well to the 3-D conversion process, but that isn’t necessarily a good thing or a bad thing. It might be the first time I could ever say that a film is neither helped, nor hindered by being in 3-D. The action sequences are numerous, with one occurring almost like clockwork every five minutes, and they are quite possibly the most flamboyantly gory battle sequences on screen this year.

The main problem with the film sadly also lies with these action sequences. At 116 minutes the film is far too long and Nispel really doesn’t have anything new to add to these sequences after the first hour. Just as the film should be ramping up in intensity, it actually slows down because the fights begin to all look the same. It all gets a bit tiresome seeing the same thing every five minutes without adding any depth to the story or at least staging something a little differently. The film does pick up again at the conclusion with a pretty great final showdown between Conan and Zym, and it does send the audience home on a high note. With some trimming or more imagination Conan could have been a minor classic. There is fun to be had in this incarnation of Conan, but it isn’t very consistent. Thankfully, there is more to like here than there is to pan.

Thanks to Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis, the action film reached its height in the late 80′s and early 90′s. It was a world where a man could battle an army of terrorists single-handedly and not only survive, but slaughter them all; where a man could fire forty rounds from his hand gun—while flying through the air—and still have bullets to spare; where it was possible for a man to fight a helicopter with his nothing more than his bare hands—and win! Yes, Stallone, Schwarzenegger and Willis—and to a lesser extent Van Damme, Seagal and Lundgren—exemplified the action movie at it’s zenith. In more recent years, the action torch has been taken up by actors like Jason Statham and Jet Li, who  have done the genre proud. So when Stallone announced that he was making The Expendables, and that it would feature most of the guys I just mentioned, action film fans, myself included, were elated. But things were just too good to be true. I’m sad to report that as awesome as The Expendables sounded on paper, the film simply does not live up to expectations. I left the theatre seriously let down.

Spoilers to follow.

A team of mostly over-the-hill mercenaries, known as The Expendables, take on a job at the behest of the CIA. The team, led by Barney Ross (Sylvester Stallone), is tasked with taking down a brutal South American dictator (David Zayas) and his rogue CIA advisor (Eric Roberts). Add a damsel in distress, a betrayal by a member of the team and you have a pretty standard blueprint for an action movie. Stallone could have elevated this B-movie fare to the next level, especially given the fantastic cast he assembled, but the plot is hackneyed at first and is nearly incomprehensible by the end.

To his credit, one thing Stallone does get right is the action. There is some really great gun play and hand-to-hand fighting in the film. The action itself is pretty solid, but is almost universally ruined by the obscenely fast paced editing. Some sequences are rendered nearly unwatchable by the quick cutting. Editing notwithstanding, this doesn’t even begin to address the last quarter of the film, which contains more explosions than I’ve seen in a movie in a long while; explosion after explosion after explosion, it was the first time I was ever bored by things blowing up.

Aside from the action, the best part of “men on a mission” movies is usually the back-and-forth dialogue between the members of the team. Unfortunately, The Expendables barely has any of that, and what banter there is falls utterly flat. It’s a mix of slurred speech and bad acting, punctuated by even worse editing. In many cases the script feels like it was written mere minutes before the cameras rolled.

The scenes between Ross and Tool (Mickey Rourke) are a horrifying, steroid fueled, plastic surgery nightmare—it’s the one time in the film you’ll be thankful for the quick cutting. Rourke’s grotesque appearance aside, he turns in the most interesting and convincing performance in the entire film, which is sad when you consider how few scenes he’s actually in.

Jason Statham and Jet Li, perhaps the most relevant action stars in the film, are barely used. Li feels particularly wasted. His character Yin Yang (Yes… Yin Yang) doesn’t really do much at all; like every other bit of action in the film, what Li does do is obscured by a flurry of cuts. Also, I’m sure Eric Roberts is probably a nice guy, but the actor continues to be type cast as slimy, manipulative creep. Give the guy a break! And what about that much hyped Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger cameo? The best bits from that scene are what you’ve seen in the trailers, the rest is a hastily filmed, poorly planned little scene that feels very tacked on.

The Expendables is a violent mess of a movie. At times it can feel like a sweet throwback to the 80′s action hey-day, but it’s barely a step above the straight-to-DVD fare its stars have been languishing in for the past decade. The Expendables had so much potential, it’s a real shame that the film doesn’t work better. Stallone continues to rest on the laurels of his past glory, this is yet another wasted opportunity. If this film has proven anything it’s that he clearly has no interest in innovating, at this rate we can expect a sequel to Demolition Man by the time Wesley Snipes gets out of jail.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Jon and Al also created an excellent musical sendup to another Schwarzenegger classic: “The Mountains of Mars” from Total Recall: The Musical, though it loses points for not having a single mention of villains Vilos Cohaagen and Richter.

With the recent announcement of the Robert Rodriguez produced sequel/reboot of the Predator franchise, Premiere Magazine went back and took a look at the film that started it all.  They learned that the original Predator isn’t just a movie featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger in top form, or even an above average 1980′s action film.  No, Premiere believes that the film is something much more; a motivational piece that we can all benefit from seeing, they believe that Predator is a guide to living life well.

8 Life Lessons We Can All Learn From Predator @ PremiereMagazine.com

Personally, I learned that if you push to many pencils you won’t be able to match Arnold in a “push it to the limit” arm wrestle, even if you are Carl Weathers.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Thank you to Alana for the link.

MTV Movies Blog has confirmed that Arnold Schwarzenegger will be appearing in the upcoming Terminator Salvation in some capacity.  Whether the Governator will appear in the flesh, or only lend his likeness and voice to the T-800 cyborg he has portrayed in the three previous Terminator films, the nature of his cameo appearance is still a mystery.  It just wouldn’t be a Terminator movie without ol’ Arnie.  Even if Terminator 3 left many disappointed, I for one am happy to see Schwarzenegger return.

Additionally, Ain’t It Cool News is reporting that Terminator Salvation will be rated PG-13 in the United States.  Their source? A Pizza Hut promotional tie-in site promoting the upcoming Terminator film—the PG-13 rating being prominently featured in the website’s fine print.

This is disappointing news for fans, since director Joseph McGinty Nichol; also known by his ridiculous moniker McG, had been fighting the studio for an R-rated cut.  The reason for the Restricted rating?  Horrific machine-on-human violence?  Explicit coarse language?  The apocalyptic end of the entire human race?!  No,  no, Terminator Salvation was to be rated R because of a pair of breasts.  Actress Moon Bloodgood‘s nude scene took the movie from a PG-13 to an R rating.  I love the hypocrisy of the MPAA.  Show a person being brutally gunned down: PG-13—Topless woman? RATED R!  BOOBS!?  RUN FOR THE HILLS! Hell, even Terminator 3 was rated R…  the Terminator movies are meant for adults.

Terminator Salvation Trailer @ Yahoo Movies

Terminator Salvation comes out May 21st 2009.