Yesterday. What did you see? You're wasting your time.
No more games.
I don't know what it was.
It's... Go on. It changed colors.
Like the chameleon. It uses the jungle.
You saying that Blaine and Hawkins were killed by a fucking lizard?
It's a bullshit psych job. There's two or three men out there at the most,
fucking lizard.
What's your name? Anna.
Anna, this thing is hunting us.
All of us. You know that.
What the hell do you think you're doing? You're gonna need everyone. I'm taking her
back. We're out of here in five minutes. We're not going yet. Look, the rendezvous
is 10 to 12 miles away from here. You think the chopper's gonna wait?
Dylan, we make a stand now. Well, there would be nobody left to go
to the chopper. There is something else.
When the big man was killed, you must have wounded it.
Its blood was on the leaves. If it bleeds,
we can kill it.
It's Two Dads, One Movie. It's the podcast where two middle-aged dads
sit around and shoot the shit about the movies of the 80s and 90s.
Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Two Dads, One Movie.
I'm Steve. And I'm Nick. And today we are kicking off the month of January,
the month of Janu Arnie, with our first Arnold
Schwarzenegger feature, 1987's Predator.
Yes. Oh, I love this movie. This was my pick for
us. And honestly, this is one of my favorite movies of all time.
I don't even remember the first time I saw it, probably high school, maybe like
14 years old. It would have been obviously several years after it came out.
But just the combination of basically one of the
coolest creature creations in like action sci-fi,
certainly of the era. Just a very unique take
on why an alien is coming to Earth to
do X, Y, and Z. Like is very cool. Obviously, Schwarzenegger's fantastic. And at the
time, you know, who wasn't loving watching Schwarzenegger in action movies in
the, late 80s and early 90s. And the whole cast is
like a lot of fun, but it's just, there are great one-liners and there's just
a ton of action and it's like brutally gruesome in parts. It's sci-fi,
it's this, that, it's got so much going on. Oh, yeah. Doesn't pass
the Bechdel test as only one woman actually appears in the movie, but hey,
nothing, no movie is perfect. So, Nick, what's your history with
Predator? So, yeah, I mean, probably the same as you. And I don't recall exactly
when I first saw it, but I think I first started getting into it around
high school, like when your friends would have VHS tapes or when people would record
things off movie chairs and you end up with a predator tape. But oh my
God, I mean, what a great like guys guys movie. And not that
I'm this like all time guys guy, but I certainly was never around a lot
of girls. So I think that makes me by default a guy's guy. And best
movie to be chugging beers and high fiving your buds with full of one liners,
full of cool looking guns. Yes. I mean, it's just it really has
everything. If you just need to like just live that
you know, vicariously through these like testosterone
come to life characters. It is a testosterone fest,
that's for sure. I mean, any movie with Jesse Ventura in it is going to
be pretty much a testosterone fest. But yeah, he and everybody else is great
in this. So let's jump into the facts on Predator and we'll get chatting about
the movie. The movie Predator came out on June 12,
1987 with an R rating and a running time of 107 minutes.
Directed by John McTiernan, who also did Die Hard, which we've
already seen, and written by the screenwriting duo brothers
Jim John Thomas, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Carl Weathers, and as
the Predator, Kevin Peter Hall. Scores on Rotten Tomatoes,
65%, a decently solid, not super high, but a solid fresh
score. On IMDb though, 7.8, actually much higher
than I kind of expected. Yeah, very strong score on IMDb, which is great.
We get a thumbs down from Gene Siskel and a thumbs up
from Roger Ebert. Yay, Raj. Yeah, I don't know. These guys, I can't read them.
Yeah, I want to read the underlying article and stuff. I just want
to see if at some point I feel like we do enough of these with
Siskel and Ebert that it's like, I should start seeing a pattern where it's like,
oh, I tend to agree with Roger Moore, I tend to agree with Gene Moore,
and I'm not seeing a pattern. It's like every once in a while I go,
Siskel, you idiot, Ebert, you idiot. Like, I just can't seem to agree with either
of them. Awards worth mentioning, it did get an Oscar nomination,
which I was a little surprised by, but not so much for the category when
you realize for best visual effects in 1988, and it did
not-- Did not win, it just got the nomination. At the 1988 Saturn
Awards, which is a sort of sci-fi fantasy focused film
awards, I did win Best Music for Alan Silvestri, the composer.
And I absolutely agree with that. Great music in this film. It's so good.
There's like a theme that sort of repeats throughout in different forms and it's just
very tension building and dark and it's really fantastic.
On a budget of $15 million, which kudos for doing
this for $15 million. Very impressive, frankly. It pulled in 98
million at the box office for six and a half times what it cost,
by all measures, a bona fide blockbuster. So fantastic success
at the box office for Arnie. Not surprising.
The dude had, you know, a couple of hits in the 80s. Yeah, he was
ascendant at this point. And John McTiernan, oh my God, was Die
Hard also '87? '88. So it was the next year, yeah.
So I mean, it was, yeah, he had a very nice run. He's back there.
Also, just like all of the terrorists in Die Hard,
Many of the characters in this movie carry MP5s, which were a choice of McTiernans
for both movies, but not super common in movies, not directed by John McTiernan
until a couple years later, where they were every terrorist in every movie in the
90s carried an MP5. Interesting. And that was one of the many different sort
of common guns you see in this movie as well. Yeah. So yeah, okay.
Let's jump into Predator, man. Yeah, we're starting off. How are we kicking off in
Predator Universe? We're up in space. So you start off with the stars and space
and a spaceship, actually reasonably good looking special effects spaceship
flies by. But we only see it momentarily because it sort of shoots
out a little like drop ship or some kind of like essentially like a landing
pod that leaves the ship. The ship flies off out of screen and that little
landing pod is clearly headed straight for Earth. So it gives us the indication that,
hey, there is an alien presence as part of this movie. That's obviously
an important piece. We cut then to the beach. Looks I
mean, we're in South America. I don't know how clear that is initially until you
start seeing the map that they're looking at with Spanish written all over it.
It becomes more clear that it's South America. But we have a few, a helicopter
flying up to a beach where they're already helicopter pads and different things,
lots going on, and they land and there are a few people in there.
So what we see is we see on the beach already, there's a building,
and we see a guy with-- it's clearly a general, he's got two stars on
his uniform, so he's a general. He's looking at them arrive and
sitting in the building, kind of reading a newspaper or something,
reading something is Carl Weathers. So that is our character, Dylan. We'll be introduced
to him in a second. Coming out of the helicopter after it lands are a
handful of army soldiers. We are introduced to these guys.
So there is Blaine, who is played by Jesse Ventura. There is
Poncho, who is the kind of skinny guy without the glasses.
Hawkins, the skinny guy with the glasses. Billy, who is a
Native American character. Mac, who is the one African American member
of the squad. And then Dutch, played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, who we later referred to
as Major. That's his rank. I don't think we get a rank for everybody,
but they're all, you know, this group that works together basically on special missions.
And when it shows, when we're first introduced to Schwarzenegger as
Dutch, because all the other guys kind of get out of the helicopter first and
he's left behind in there. And then of course he has to light up like
the cigar that Max Katy smokes in Problem Child and Cape
Fear. This enormous, like nine foot cigar. And oh my God,
it makes me laugh so much, like this tough guy stuff. Are you a cigar
guy? Have you ever been a cigar guy? I kind of briefly flirted with it
in my mid-20s. In fact, my bachelor party.
I got married at 27, and my bachelor party included a stop. It was an
A's game, lunch at Kell's out in the city, like an Irish place, and then
a cigar bar. That was kind of what we did for my bachelor party.
So we did that. And so there was a time when, yeah, I had an
affinity for Macanudos for a little while, but it lasted about two
or three years, and then I kind of just fell out of it. It's an
expense, plus you got to give the time to it. If you're actually going to
sit there and spend the time. Yeah. That's the thing about it. So I never
got into cigars, and whenever I I see them, I wonder, like when I was
watching this, I wonder, like, why am I so like averse to them? And I
think it's just that I fundamentally don't like having to carry something around.
Same thing with umbrellas. I never use umbrellas. I would rather get rained on
forever. I hate giving up a hand for no fucking reason. So when he has
the cigar, I'm like, what do you do with that? You just have to like,
he has nowhere to put it down. You can't tech it behind your ear.
Right. So yeah, I think he does eventually. Like put it out and shove it
into his like pocket 'cause he pulls out a half smoked cigar later in the
movie. Okay. I think he must just, so he's. Got a spot for it.
Push it out. Clip the end and you basically have the cigars like new again,
essentially. Yeah, that's true. But I do love that as just establishing
like, oh, these are some men's men, you know, these are some badasses. Cigars having
muscles. Big muscles, big cigars, the whole nine yards. Oh, and also real
quick, Schwarzenegger is Dutch. When he gets out of here, he is dressed like he
works at Target. He is wearing a red polo shirt and khaki pants. That's right.
He's cool as hell. Yeah. So they jump out and they get into a series
of jeeps, two or three jeeps to be driven 100 yards down the beach.
It's really not very far, but they just they can't walk. Because it would be
wet and sandy and that would get your boots dirty. They can't get their boots
dirty and also maybe it gets in the boots and it gets all irritated.
Like these guys don't like that. Yeah, so they get driven safely down the beach,
100 yards, to meet the general. Dutch walks in, the guy's
kind of away from him, he walks into this hut and starts talking to the
general and oh, it's good to see you, Dutch, and all this stuff. And that's
when Dutch notices Dylan, Carl Weathers' character, and he's like, Dylan! And he runs over.
And this is one of the things I realized, gonna we're need this as a
tag on the website. This movie contains a meme. Because we've seen it with the
Naked Gun, the Naked Gun and now this, because the Dylan and Dutch handshake,
the sort of arm wrestling pose handshake, has become an
animated GIF in every Slack workspace in my job that I've been at in
years. 100%. And it hits every time,
the Dylan. You son of a bitch, and you. Get the clap
of the hands. I mean, it's so funny. This movie is,
choc full of bicep porn. Yes. If you're a bicep
fetish person, I think this is probably where you want to be existing. Good point.
Choc full of it. But oh my God, such a funny way to kick it
off. And also the way that Dylan is explaining,
he's like, oh, why do you have us doing this here? And he's like,
some son of a bitch accused you of being the best.
The different ways that they approach telling somebody because you're the best, I think
is so good. It's the standard sort of, I mean, frankly, we've, I think,
rightly come to recognize this as a bit of a toxic sort of nature,
natural behavior, toxic masculinity thing. But back then it was just, it was bravado,
right? It was all just about machismo and bravado and like, well, I could tell
you you're awesome, but I'm not going to tell you. Yeah, yeah. That make me
a, like, or whatever, you know? So, yeah, so there's a little back and forth.
Basically what they find out is like a chopper went down. Chopper went into the
jungle, went down on the wrong side of the border. The general tells Dutch,
hey, you know, Dylan says that it's contained a cabinet minister from whatever
country they're in. I think the idea here is that they never say any of
these country names, so it's hard to be specific. But essentially they're in South America
inside the borders of a country that is friendly to the United States, and that
across the border is either a country totally run by cartels,
or there's some kind of a coup going on, and there's guerrilla
fighters, or there's something that's bad for the US and bad for the country that
they're in. So I don't know enough about mid-80s South American geopolitics
to guess, but that seems to be what it is. So the idea is like,
oh, this chopper got on the wrong side of the airspace of the wrong side
of the border. Must have got shot down. Now you need to go in and
rescue them. And that's what Dutch says. Like, Dylan asks him something, like, hey,
why didn't you do Libya? Why'd you pass on Libya? And he's like, it's not
the kind of work we do. We're a rescue team. We're not assassins. Yeah.
And so he's like, that's what they do. They do rescue. So he's like,
all right, that's what we're here for. That's why they have so many rescue guns
on their. Yes. Rescue M16s. They rescue so many people. I love
the Blaine's rescue minigun. It's like the jaws of life, except the opposite.
Yeah, so. So they agree to do the job that
they're here to do. And the next thing we see are choppers flying towards the
jungle. And what a scene this is, man, with the music playing.
So the thing in all the 80s movies is, you got the
50s music, the 60s music playing, and they're all getting down. And we got
Jesse the Mind Ventura handing, chewing tobacco, offering it to
everybody, a la John Candy, offering a clarinet in the
back of the U-Haul truck. And just a great scene of just dudes being
dudes, like trying to tell you as much about each individual's personality without
them having almost any lines in a lot of cases. And it's
just so effective. And this gets me fired up for. What'S about to happen.
And I will say Blaine has a couple of good lines and some really bad
ones. He uses a slur that I'm glad has kind of fallen out of favor,
so I won't repeat that line. Tyrannosaurus that fell out of favor 65 million years
ago. There you go. No, but he does say, you know, all these people aren't
taking his chew and he goes, this stuff will turn you into a sexual Tyrannosaurus
like me. I just love that shit, man. That's fucking classic.
Anyway, so yeah, they're flying notoriously. You want to have a really short arm,
sexually? That's the move. Sexual Tyrannosaurus. I'm not even sure.
Is it a mantis eating the head of your partner thing?
I'm not even sure what we're going with that, but that's okay. It's okay.
It's vaguely, vaguely, it sounds cool. It sounds vaguely powerful.
It sounds like a prompt someone would put into AI. Sexual Tyrannosaurus.
Don't do it. No, don't do it. Don't waste your time with that. But God,
so he's established himself though as like he's kind of the bust your balls out
of a crew that's already like that. He's the most like, you know,
masculine out of all of them. One of the other things that happens on the
chopper, form eventually, maybe. Right, exactly. Is Hawkins, who's the one
guy with big eyeglasses, he leans over to Billy, who's Native American, and clearly they
talk about him being sort of like the best tracker, you know, of their group,
whatever, and he leans up to Billy and tells him a joke and he says,
Billy, I told my girlfriend, I'd like a little pussy, and she says,
oh yeah, so would I. Mine's as big as a house. It's not a very
good joke, and Billy doesn't laugh, and Hawkins explains to him, no, no, no,
'cause big as a house, you know, he tries to get him to laugh,
and Billy is just like stone-faced about it. The reason I mention it though is
that it does come back, and there's a kind of a, there's a funny and
good thing later that happens because of Hawkins and his joke telling, but this one
does not land. He clearly does not get Billy to laugh. I like
Hawkins trying to get everyone a little chuckle that's good for him.
So, and so he, there's that. And then I think basically the only other thing
that may be really worth mentioning is Mac. He's the one black member of the
crew. Played by the great Bill Duke. That's who it is. We love Bill Duke.
Thank you. Yes. And he's got like a Bic razor with him almost at all
times. And it's just constantly shaving his face and his neck. And I just like,
that would just be irritating. And all the sweating and like, I don't know why
he would do that, but that's apparently his, either it's like a calming thing for
him or it's like, I don't know what it is, but he's always got this
Bic razor with him. And he's shaving on the chopper. Yeah,
it's an interesting little trait to have, but I guess they're probably thinking ahead.
They're like, Look, at some point, we're gonna be selling action figures. And in addition
to the minigun, he needs something else. He can have a little razor. Yeah,
he's got that sort of tripod-mounted M60. He's got a big gun.
Yeah, he's-- oh, man. But, yeah. So we land in the jungle,
and they're kind of told that their rescue
mission is for some type of politician or ambassador type.
Cabinet minister is what they term him. Of the country that they're friendly with.
Not a US cabinet minister. Yeah. So it's like the neighboring country that the US
is friendly with is being held in this hostile country over the border.
That's the idea. Yeah. So when they get there, they see this chopper that had
previously been sent and never got back to them. It's like crashed
in the tree and it's all messed up and stuff. And they're trying to investigate
the chopper and see what's happening up there. There's a handful of things that
seem weird right off the bat. They noticed that the two pilots who were still
in the chopper were clearly killed not by the crash, but by being shot in
the head, each of them. One shot in the head. So that's interesting. And then
when Billy is done sort of tracking around, he goes, you know, he talks to
Dutch. He goes, Major, this is strange. I see the gorillas and I see the,
the two people from the chopper, and then I see six, like, us issued pairs
of boots. And so it's basically, he's able to notice Billy voice. I like that.
That's very good. I tried. That's, again, one of my favorite movies. But, yeah,
but basically, Billy has noticed not only does he see extra tracks that maybe wouldn't
be explained by the story they've been told, those tracks are wearing us issued equipment.
Now, there are ways, obviously, for gorilla Fighters to get us issued
equipment by killing U.S. soldiers. So it's not like a done deal that there's something
squirrely going on, but it puts everybody on edge. And Dutch is already looking
sideways at Dylan at this point. Yeah, and Billy, one of
the things I love that Billy does, 'cause he's such a great character, and he's
going out and tracking, and he's walking through the jungle, and then he just grabs
this vine. Oh, yeah. And slashes it open with his-- it's not a machete.
It's a really long machete. I know, it's like halfway between
a machete and a combat knife. It is big, yeah. Wild. And then he chops
it open and then he drinks from the vine. There's so many scenes in this
movie where a little Photoshop could make certain actors look pretty bad.
And this is definitely one of them. Some kind of a milky water that
he's drinking from a vine, clutching right over his head with his mouth open.
But yeah, so they come across some gruesome shapes. Well, yeah, so Billy
hears something and he's not really sure what it is. And so he's kind of
looking, and what's really interesting, if you listen closely and you know what to listen
for, what you're hearing is flapping wings. And it's pretty clear you're hearing flapping wings.
Then if you listen at this moment while Billy is looking in the trees and
walking towards it, you can hear the little, there's a predator croaking sound. The little,
like, I can't do it, but whatever, it's like the clicking noise the predator makes.
It's in there momentarily. So we do get a sense
that something's nearby, and if you've seen the movie multiple times, you recognize that sound.
You can listen for it. But really, he's hearing these flapping wings and he's not
sure, so he kind of climbs a part of this tree and looks, and when
he spreads this sort of canopy apart to see, yeah, there are three bodies
that are hanging from their feet and have been skinned alive, and the flapping he
heard was vultures. They were all over the place and so they kind of go
crazy. It scares them half to death, it seems like. But that's, you know,
they find this gruesome, you know, sort of effigy with these bodies hanging
in the trees and skinned alive. Well, I mean, I guess we don't know they
were skinned alive, but they're skinned. Yeah. And it's bad and they're gutted and that's
a whole horrible scene. Yeah, it's super gnarly. And then there's like, under them,
is there just kind of piles of like guts and their clothes and everything,
right? 'Cause they've been all torn open too. Like you see they're missing their intestines
and there's just stuff everywhere, yeah. One thing I love that's gonna go in the
category of Dr. Dan throwing the Halloween mask onto and Halloween 3:
Season of the Witch is whoever was investigating the pile of guts
and shit at the bottom. Poncho. Poncho picks up a dog tag with his knife
to look at it, and then he just flings it off of his knife.
And then Dutch catches it so easily, like it's a small joke
book on Kill Tony. Just this
perfect catch, but I just love that kind of shit. Yeah, absolutely. Also,
by the way, I very much appreciate that every time you reference that, you mention
the entire name of the film, Halloween 3: Season of the Witch. I think it's
important because there's so many witches. There's so many Halloween 3s. No, anyway, so yeah,
so we get the dog tag-- oh, yeah, sorry, yeah. Yeah, so the
dog just Dutch checks the dog tag and he recognizes the names, Jay Hopper.
And he talks to Dylan, he's just like, I know this man, this green beret
is out of Fort Bragg. What are they doing here? And so Dylan's kind of
like, oh, I don't know, he's still playing dumb, but it's clear that Dutch is
suspicious of Dylan. He doesn't think that this is all in the up and up.
He doesn't think he can trust Dylan, but he doesn't know yet for sure what's
going on. But it's not looking good. There's pieces that aren't lining up here.
And in another way, Dutch is also pissed because this is apparently someone
that he served with. This is someone he's known for years. He knew, you know,
in his, throughout his time in the army. And so he's like, fuck this guy
that I knew, like, who's a great soldier. Like, he's dead. Yeah, these are his
dog tags. Like, shit, that sucks. And also he got sent on this mission where
they probably lied to him too. Like, they lied to us. Like, you know,
what the hell's going on here? They believe gorillas did this, right? Like, some soldiers
nearby, we'll get him. So Blaine pulls out who he calls old painless,
which is the minigun. It's a big freaking belt loaded, you know,
the rotary whatever the hell it's called. I don't know. It's crazy huge. Really cool
looking. Really cool looking gun. So he's running over payback time. He's really portable.
Not easy to carry, but he'll do it. And then this is also where we
get the very first Predator vision moments. We now see,
we're gonna see this a lot through the movie. It's clearly when we are seeing
the scene from the Predator's viewpoint, we see it in his thermo,
sort of IR infrared vision, right? It really is a scene heat.
So it's a lot of cold sort of jungle, right? It doesn't seem like it
would be that cold, but whatever, like things that are not themselves emanating. It's not
going to have like human body. Yeah, exactly. And then, and then the humans walking
around. So the predator is stalking them. This effect, I mean,
is so good. Like it's not visually impressive, but the
way that they layer the different sounds and they give it such atmosphere
that you're just like, this is completely believable. It doesn't look, it doesn't
look 40 years old. And that's the thing is, I feel like the way they
did it, it'll never look dated. Yeah, it's because it's meant to be it,
what we're seeing is that, and we get this a little bit. We'll talk when
we get to the point where the Predator does take its helmet off near the
end of the movie, where the vision shifts. It's kind of like this is a
species with just terrible vision. So they've invented this technology where it's like,
well, we can't make ourselves see better, but we can make ourselves
recognize these heat signatures and that helps us hunt. I mean, that seems like sort
of the technology, the purpose behind the technology in their world,
right? The species world. And so it's really interesting and
deliberately looks bad. And by having it deliberately,
quote, look bad, It never actually looks bad. It always just kind of
looks like the way it is. And it never dates itself. It's not like Last
Starfighter with the computer generated real space base or whatever
the fuck it was, right? So it's fantastic. So as they're walking through the jungle,
they're continuing towards, they know they need to head towards this like gorilla camp to
find this cabin administrator. They're still on the same path. As they're going, there's a
great little moment where Dylan slips. Yes. And like kind of slides
down this hill, makes a ton of noise, a lot of leaves crinkling, whatever.
And I love that Mac comes and gets him and he gets him to safety.
He goes, you give our position away again, I'll bleed
you real quiet, leave you here. God,
I love that guy. He's so good. Bill Duke is really,
really incredible. And yeah, I love the friction between him
and Dylan here. Yeah, absolutely. And they're doing really
some good sneaking here. I love the sneaking happening.
Dutch looks into the village with his binoculars and the second
thing he looks at is a guy getting executed. Clearly an American, so he's speaking
plain English, whatever, and just getting shot in the head. And he's just like,
all right. And he does a cool like crawl down
a hill, which looks really fun. Yeah. Little belly crawl.
And then so then this thing, so they're at
the edge of this encampment. Yeah. And it's very loud because
they have a generator running, which is just, you know, an 18 wheeler
with the back tires taken off. It's not a pickup truck. It's not even an
18 wheeler. It's just like a pickup truck, I think. Oh, I thought it was.
Okay. Yeah. It's not a pickup truck. Anyway, this truck with the back tires taken
off and it just has the rims there that are hooked to a belt and
like that's their generator is the engine of this vehicle or whatever. And what
Dutch does to create a distraction, which is so fucking cool, is he comes
in and slickly cuts the belt there. And then he lifts this truck
just to show how strong he is. Cause he's not a normal guy. He's a
strong guy. He's Arnold Schwarzenegger. And he places the truck down with front tires and
back rims and it just sets like perfectly off towards the most concentrated
group of the bad guys. Where he's also put like some like bag in the
back of the truck bed that's clearly a bomb. That he like sets on,
you know, with a little switch before he goes. And yeah, sure enough. So we
get just chaos here. Mad chaos, bomb explodes, killing a bunch of guys,
but that was also then the signal for everybody else in the crew to start
shooting and killing people, whatever. And we get an attack and we get like a
full, it's like a three or four minute, at least five minute attack
on this can. Oh my, it takes a long time, but it's, there's a lot
that goes on. There's a lot of, there's a lot of death. And I was
trying to keep track of the numbers. Of killed on screen during this, and I
lost track, but I looked it up. Somebody has done the homework, thankfully.
72 on-screen deaths during this sequence of Just here.
Yeah. Which is like... Does that include the hostage that gets. Shot at the beginning?
It might, it might count him. But man,
is this fun. And this is just classic Arnie. And again, you've got Blaine,
Jesse Ventura with the minigun just mowing shit down and all these different kinds of
weapons and it's just guys flying all over the place. And just like we talked
about when there was a minigun in Terminator 2, when Schwarzenegger uses it in the
office building itself, Cyberdyne, the sound it makes that whirring high pitch
is so good. And it does it here too. And it's just a very like
unique sound that only that kind of weapon makes. And yeah,
most of the guys are like Dutch has got like a M16 with a grenade
launcher. Poncho's actually got this like, it's like a drum magazine
grenade launcher where he can probably carry like 40 grenades at a time. He's just
launching them into people. Couple of fun things that happened during this is,
going inside one of the buildings, somebody tries to sneak up on Dutch instead of
just shooting him, like you do in a movie when you're an idiot henchman.
He turns around, throws his machete knife thing, which is huge,
right? And I swear to God, just like in the Rock, I'm pretty sure it
goes, phew, phew, phew, phew, phew. Like that little noise, that little Looney Tunes wiggle
noise. But he goes and he gets a guy in the chest and actually pins
him to a post he's behind, and Schwarzenegger turns and goes, Stick around.
He's so efficient with his language in this movie here.
Yeah. And so there's all this chaos and stuff, and they're finding out
during this that they're like, oh, this doesn't look like Central Americans.
This is some kind of, like, there's Russians, there's CIA people. Like,
this goes all the way to the White House, you know? Goes all the way
to the top kind of thing. Yeah. And at some point,
Blaine is there with one or the other, with Poncho, maybe. And Poncho
points out, he's like, hey, you're bleeding. Yeah. And then Blaine says, I ain't got
time to bleed, which is a really funny line. But the funniest thing is the
look that the other guy gives him. He's just He's just like, you fucking dipshit.
But he literally goes like, Oh, right? Yeah. Like, he literally-- so
it's so great because it is a great line, but it's a great line 'cause
it's a cheesy movie line. So in the universe of the movie, it's a stupid
thing to say, and Pancho looks at him like, and then he's so-- basically,
Blaine is like a guy up there stuck, dug in like an Alabama tech.
You know? And he's gotta like get this guy out of this, like, the hidey
hole he's in. And so Pancho, when he tells Pancho he doesn't have time to
bleed, Pancho goes, okay. And he goes, he fires three grenades
up into the guy's like, you know, like a hidey hole. And he goes,
you got time to duck? Cuz it starts exploding and dirts raining down on
them and stuff. Very funny. That adds so much to the movie, though, that these
guys, like, know that all the other guys are full of. Yeah.
Yeah. Let's see here. Yeah. So basically what happens after
they've killed everybody, there's a girl, a woman actually tries to attack Dutch and he
turns on just, like, you know, rifle butt to the head to knock her down.
Goes. And he goes, oh, like, if he He doesn't expect a woman to be
there at all. There's that. And then kind of as they clear up and all
the baddies are dead or whatever, Mack is the one that tells Dutch, sort of
like, yeah, if these are Central Americans, I think he says, I don't remember what
he says. I'm a Chinaman, I think he says. Yeah, yeah. Which we know is
not the preferred nomenclature. But basically it's like, yeah, there's Russians.
He's like, there's some CIA guys. Like, what is going on? This is crazy.
And Dutch is pissed at Dylan. Because Dylan now has found a bunch of papers
and he's like, oh, we got them. This is what we came for, all this
stuff. So Dutch realizes, yeah, they were sent in here to wipe this encampment clean.
Not about a rescue at all. It was about, like, a hit job, basically.
And it was just so the CIA could get, like, hands on these, like,
plans and stuff. And he's pissed. He's like, you set this up. You set us
in six of us into a meat grinder. Like, you know, he's, like, super pissed
about it, which, like, makes sense. I'd be pissed, too. Oh, yeah. And so now
they're kind of like, we got to get out because now they're on the wrong
side of the Border. This is the thing right now. They gotta. They gotta get
back. Our chopper can't pick us up. We gotta. Exactly. And it's
not like where they were dropped off. The chopper landed. They have to go to,
like, a clearing or something where they can actually land to get on the chopper.
They all repelled down when they originally and so
we get as the sort of team is moving through the
camp with all the damage, we get more predator vision because it's clear that the
predator is watching them. And a handful of really important things happen here. One,
it looks like Max spots something and he talks to Dylan. He's kind of like,
hey, over here, you know, and he's kind of like whatever. And he goes to
put a knife on his shoulder. We realize there was actually a scorpion on Dylan's
shoulder. Max just saved him. So that's interesting. But then the, the,
the Predator is, like, watching and listening. And you can hear this really cool effect
when we've got the Predator's point of view, where he's hearing their voices, and then
it's like he's refining his hearing of them. So it's repeating over and over again
and getting clearer and clearer. Then Hawkins tells another joke
or whatever, and he said, hey, it's a Billy. He goes, hey, Billy, I was
going down on my girlfriend the other day, and I said, boy, you've got a
big boy. You've got a big boy. And she said, why'd you say that twice?
And I said, I didn't. And there's a pause. And then Billy erupts in laughter.
He thinks it's the funniest thing. Not a bad joke, by the way.
That's a much better joke than the. Big as a House one. It's a much
better joke. But he laughs his ass off. It's a huge, and the Predator
hears this, and it's clear that he's refining his hearing.
He's internalizing Billy's laugh. Very important. That'll come back later. It's almost like
the Predator is doing the thing from Face Off where he was like, I can
eat a peach for hours. Exactly. Like just trying to repeat it so that he
could replicate it for hunting purposes or whatever.
Oh, man. Yeah. Really good.
At this point in the movie, my wife says,
Not a lot of dialogue, just a lot of big puss jokes.
And I think that's correct. That is accurate. Yeah, yeah. Certainly most of
Hawkins lines have literally been telling those jokes. We haven't heard much of anything else
from Hawkins. That's pretty much his existence there.
Anna, so the hostage that they have now, she starts
to take off like she is trying to escape. Escape a few times here.
And in the meantime, Billy is kind of like off away from the
group, like staring off into the woods. And the way that they deal with Billy,
I mean, this is very racially coded. I don't love it or
whatever. And 'cause Billy's the tracker and he's the Native American, and they're treating him
like he's their dog. Like a bloodhound. 'Cause Billy's out there looking,
they're like, what's got Billy so spooked? It's.
Not good. It's not great. But they obviously respect the guy.
But yeah, he's amazingly good at what he does, too. The sort of dog whistling
terminology is not great for sure. So Billy's gesturing,
he's just like, There's something in those trees. Something in those trees.
And that's when the girl tries to run and Hawkins
chases her down and is trying to chase her through things. And as he catches
her, she looks past him and we
get this crazy moment of this shimmering,
something's not actually there, but lunges at Hawkins,
splattering blood all over. And then,
you know, sort of Hawkins being dragged away into the jungle. And by the time,
I think the next person to catch up is either Dylan or Poncho. The two
of them show up similarly timed to find Anna, and she is just,
like, in shock. And she's literally shaking, and she's covered in blood. And when Dutch
sees her, he goes, this is not her blood.
Like, what happened? Yeah. He discovered that so quickly.
Yeah, I guess he's just looking at it going, like, there's no blood. There's no
blood. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's that here. Like, you have, like, blood all over
your face and, and and upper body, but there's no cut anywhere. So where'd this
come from? And that's like, so now they find--. And where they
send, they're like, they send somebody off to look for Hawkins.
They send Poncho off to look for Hawkins. And he comes back because all he
finds is-- the pile of guts. Oh, a pile of guts. Yeah. Throws up.
You find Hawkins? I can't tell. I can't tell. Yeah.
So, yeah, so Hawkins is gone. So of the original crew,
we've gone from seven to six now because Hawkins is down.
But yeah, so. Oh, so Poncho the translator, he's the only
one who can communicate with Anna. And they're like, ask her what she saw.
What did you do? And he's like, she said the jungle
just came alive and took him. And they're like, your translation sucks. There's no way
she said that. Or that doesn't make any sense. Dylan says something even more interesting.
He says, that's not what she said. What she said doesn't make any sense.
And so it's almost like he's He is maybe at least, I mean, he speaks
a lot of Spanish to Anna before we realize a little bit later that she
actually speaks English. Dylan obviously knows Spanish, and it's almost like, is he translating
her words differently than Poncho is? He doesn't actually tell us what he
heard her say, but he does make a comment about, like, that's not what she
said. What she said doesn't make sense. Kind of reminds me of
Tombstone, you know, when,
oh, what's the Michael Bean character? Johnny Ringo
has to correct some of the other, one of the other actual, like, Mexican Banditos
Spanish because it's like, you know, your Spanish is worse than your English, that kind
of thing. But, yeah, so, so he, we don't know exactly what's going on,
but that's, she does her best to explain and it doesn't work. So they are
both now they're all looking around for Hawkins body because Dutch is like, I want
Hawkins body found. We're not just gonna leave here without finding it. So he sends
her 50 meters, like, look around. And as Blaine is kind of
looking through the jungle looking for what, you know, somebody he
can shoot or whatever. He turns around and he hears a sound. He turns
around and a laser rocket thing that we later
learn is from the Predator's shoulder cannon. Yeah. Blows through his
chest and just absolutely explodes his chest. And that thing is crazy.
Crazy. Turns him into a donut. Absolutely wild.
Really brutal. And when they go and see Blaine's body, I mean,
his ribcage is like, yeah, it looks like, you know, and I,
there's a lot of things in this movie that are very similar
to John Carpenter's the Thing. Okay. Oh, yeah.
And, and I think the effect of his, like, ribs coming up
looks so much like some of the scenes in that where the thing burst up.
But I mean, like, the alien crash landing on the Earth and this crew of
guys who are in this isolated situation that they're kind of, even if this thing
wasn't there and all this, yeah. I mean, the effects in it,
I think, were pretty cool. Yeah. Jesse Ventura. I mean,
very, very entertaining in this movie.
And it sad to see him go, but I think he served his
purpose. He gave a sexual tyrannosaurus. There you go. Tyrannosaurus. So then Mac,
his best friend, comes and sees the Predator kind of moving
away from Blaine's body. He's cloaked still, but, like, there's movement. So he picks up
the minigun and just starts shooting after him. And we see that actually he does,
like, Nick the Predator somehow because he bleeds and he. This, like,
glowing green blood on a leaf, but none of the crew see it. Only Anna
sees it. And for whatever reason, she kind of, like, touches it with her fingers,
which, to me, it looks like acid. I don't know why anyone would touch it.
Yeah. And then, like, rubs it on her pants to, like, keep some of it
or something. I don't know. But she does sort of, like, see this and.
And see. But nobody else sees that he bleeds. And this is great that everyone
comes up and they see, like, this is what you do when you're in one
of those Crews. You see your buddy mini gunning down an entire. Jungle, just stand
next to him and fire whatever you have. And there's a great sequence of them
just unloading their shit. Yeah, absolutely doing massively in very
inefficient landscaping all through the jungle. It's a massive waste of ammo.
I'm really actually glad that ammo capacity doesn't come up
really at any point in the movie, because that would have been irritating. But it
is like, Jesus, because the minigun that Blaine had and the Mac is now using,
Blaine had to wear a backpack full of the belt-fed ammo
for that gun. And obviously it's shooting a lot of rounds per second. He goes
through the entire backpack. That gun is now useless. It is out of ammo,
and I don't think they've got another ammo backpack lying around. Nobody else was carrying
one, so there's that. He was just tired of holding it. He was like,
he doesn't like cigars or umbrellas or miniguns.
Yeah. So let's see. Yeah. So it seemed like after that,
you know, is there any. And I, and I love when the minigun finishes fire.
Yeah, you just have the barrel spinning. And that's the whole other trick.
Sound is that. Yes. Yep, exactly. And so Poncho runs off to
see like what they hit if anything and he finds no evidence of any blood,
any bodies, any anything which I don't know how he missed whatever the girl saw,
whatever Anna found. And how did Billy not find that? There's that too. He can
smell the air and know what kind of plane is flying overhead, you know.
But so he comes back, he goes nothing. We hit nothing. There's no bodies,
there's no blood, there's nothing. That was crazy. Crazy. We then cut to another scene
where we're up in the Treetops and the Predator turns off his little cloaking device
so that we actually get our first good look at the actual Predator costume,
which is unbelievably cool. I mean, just incredible look.
And he's got a bunch of, he's got a medic kit. He's got like a
first aid kit. And he is, he was clipped in the leg, it looks like,
I think, like in the thigh by one of the rounds of Mac's, you know,
mini gun Fest. And he's got us several different things that are like basically
sewing it up and shooting himself with probably some kind of antibiotic or something.
I don't know, whatever. It's a very complicated. It's a very like complete first aid.
It's like a Batman utility belt level of stuff that he have. It's really cool.
One thing that was cracking me up watching that scene because it's showing the predator's
hands kind of repairing itself and dealing with these tools and stuff in the actual
production. It wasn't the guy in the full suit. So I like the idea of
just an actor wearing like predator like sleeves doing that shot.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so there's a little bit later as
they're trying to figure out what the hell's going on, like, because nobody saw anything.
And it's like, well, now Blaine's dead. They then somebody, I think
Poncho says to Billy, like, what do you think, Billy? And Billy goes, I'm scared.
It's like, oh, bullshit, Billy, you're not scared of any man. And he goes,
there's something out there waiting for us. And it ain't no man.
We're all gonna die. And it's like, Billy's fucking right.
They're basically gonna all die. So when Blaine,
you know, Blaine and Max, Mac was Blaine's buddy, and Mac went to
kind of say goodbye to Blaine and cover his body up and stuff. And,
you know, it was this whole, like, emotional thing, but it just ends with.
Goodbye, bro. That's as.
That's as emotionally vulnerable as we're allowed to get, which is fine,
which is all right. That's where we need to be. We'll live with it.
But, yeah, but they basically set up sort of a defensive position, and they,
like, put a bunch of flares around and a bunch of, like, trip wires for
bombs, whatever the ideas. That they will either, you know, attack or be alerted
to anything getting near them. Yeah. And then, and then night falls. And so now
Mac is apparently on watch. We see a few people asleep, like Billy and Dutch
are both sleeping, and Mac is, like, sort of watching out. And there is a
bunch of rustling suddenly in the trees or whatever,
you know, in the bushes nearby. And, and Mac is attacked and makes a ton
of noise and is, like, firing his gun a couple times, whatever. And, like,
and everybody else wakes up and it's coming. They got flashlights, whatever, and it turns.
Out, Mack was attacked by the biggest goddamn wild boar I've ever seen in my
life. That thing was huge. Looked like a rodent of unusual size from
the fire swamp. Holy shit. That is exactly what it looked
like. Yeah. And when Mack was out, it appeared he was definitely
drunk. He was probably the wettest I've ever seen. And we just watched Rocky IV.
Yeah. Sweating in his face. At this point, he's not shaving his face.
He's squeegeeing his face with the disposable razors. Anyway. Gross.
So. So, you know, he does that. They all get a good chuckle
and. And then they find out, like, Blaine's body is gone. Yeah. And nothing else.
They had booby trapped this entire perimeter. And they know that some of the,
like, flares things went off because the boar set them off, and they can kind
of. I think Poncho mentions, like, hey, the boar came in here. But where else
did anything, like, how did anybody else get in here? Like, where'd the body go?
Yeah. To get in and then to get the body out, like, what's going on?
And then this is when Anna starts speaking English. And it
talks about how, you know, she found the blood of the thing
or whatever on a leaf the last time that you guys all shot at it.
And this is one of Arnold's then best lines in the movie. He goes,
if it bleeds, we can kill it. Yeah, that's true. And it
starts speaking English because somebody grabs her shoulders and shakes her and
says, what did you see? So this is a lesson for anybody out there.
If you speak, if you ask somebody a question, they don't seem to speak your
language. Just ask it louder in your own language. They'll get you at something.
That definitely helps, for sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But they decide,
yeah, hey, if it bleeds and we can kill it, then let's, again, figure out
how to- We're not gonna leave here without killing this thing. And this is also,
I think, when they realized because they didn't trip the wires that it's been getting
to them through the trees. Right. And so Dutch just like starts setting traps.
And we get a good montage here. Yeah, a lot of good trap setting.
Again, for the bicep fans out there. Again, they're just We're just like,
Look, we cast all these buff guys in the movies. We're gonna show off,
and they're pulling ropes. And there's certain scenes where he's just like,
made a Bowflex machine out of bamboo for some reason. I don't
understand. But it's really, really fun. I also love Dylan's not helping them very much
at one point, and Dutch is like, maybe you should get the whole crew to
help us, you know, kind of thing. In order to help them pull the rope,
he has to take his shirt off. Yeah. Right. So it's not good enough that
his arms are bare. He has to actually fully take his shirt off in order
to strain properly. Oh, for sure. To get the rope to pull. Yeah. Gotta get
that Carl Weathers torso out there. So,
so yeah, they have all these traps set and it's really good.
At this point, you know, Mac squeegeeing his face still and
he presses so hard with the razor that it breaks. Which is so unsettling.
And just thinking of that as a beard guy,
you know, it's like, I don't fuck with getting anything that close to my face
that's that sharp. I need a layer of hair, you know?
The Anna said, In her conversation, she's like,
yeah, we've kind of know about this thing. And what we call it is
the demon who makes trophies of men. Yes. Ooh, that is dark.
That's really... She says it in Spanish and it sounded better. I don't remember now
exactly, but obviously something about Diablo, something, something ombre. It sounds really good when
she says it, but she mentions it only happens the summers when it's
really hot. That happened when she was a little girl. All the ladies of the
old women of the village were trying to say prayers. And like whatever, but their
men would start disappearing and then when they would find them, they'd be skinned or
worse, she said. Right. And that this summer, you know, it's this year it gets
very hot. Right. So it's reiterating one of the reasons all these people are sweating
so damn bad is it is an unseasonably hot summer in the Amazon. Right.
So and that's what they have found in the past. Apparently this is not the
first time that this or another member of this predator species has come
here to do this hunting in the jungle. Apparently it is it's like
going on safari for them. It's like a vacation So they
are big game hunting out here. Really creepy. So they set up a pretty crazy
trap that is meant to be like one of those like
a net trap, like in Return of the Jedi that'll. Just capture you and
pull you up in a net. The whole sling thing. Where Arnie
says, like, he's gonna be the bait. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And Dylan's
like, what are you gonna try next? Cheese.
But sure enough, the predator comes cloaked and springs the trap and
gets caught up in it, but then is immediately shot. Shooting Wildey with its shoulder
rocket cannon thing and ends up breaking out of the net fairly easily and
escapes. But Dylan spots it and Dylan starts chasing it down.
Unfortunately, also part of the trap was this log,
sort of again, very, very Return of the Jedi, very Ewoks fighting the Empire,
but a log swinging down from the tree to hit the center of the trap.
And unfortunately, Poncho was standing there and catches it straight in the chest. Right in
the chest, dude. Like the world's thickest Home Alone paint can. Yeah, right to
the Sternum. Yeah. So no good for Poncho. Yeah.
And so Mac actually spots the Predator and he chases after it. Dylan follows after
Mac, and then Dylan is stopped by Mac.
He whispers. And it's really great moment because this is one of the things I
want to bring up. We, one of the things we know the Predator has heard
said is, hey, come here, that kind of thing, right, from Mac. So we hear
that. And I, I know. I even haven't seen this movie. I always think to
myself, wait a minute, is that the Predator saying that, or is that actually,
oh, this time it's Mac. Yeah. Yeah. Sure enough, it's Mac getting Dylan to come
over. Because he is like hidden underneath a branch log thing.
And he says, Look out there, just beyond those trees, you know,
and it's like, and sure enough, we can see the sort of cloaked, but that
that shimmering look, right, that the predator has when it's up in the trees.
And so they've spotted him. And so Mack and Dylan think, man, this is their
chance. They're going to they're going to get them. So Dylan says, like, you know,
you go this way, I'm going to go down there and we're going to come
at him, you know, two sides, we're going to get this guy, we're going to
kill him. And Mack, I love this whole thing where Mack is sneaking here
sneaking super, like real quietly is underneath the brush. He's underneath
logs. But at one point he like reaches his arm up to like pull himself
into a certain direction and three little red dots in a triangle formation show up
on his arm and he kind of looks at it and then he moves his
head to look at where it's coming from and there's the predator. Just blasts
through the top of his head I think because we see his face later.
But at that point it almost looks like his entire head explodes. It looks like
it kind of goes like through his forehead basically. Yeah. It's because we can't see
the exit. Wound came out the back and and stuff. Brutal. Brutal. Really gnarly
there. And RIP to Mac, another entertaining character there.
Yeah. Yeah. So Dylan sees this and he
starts shooting. He's firing his gun up. And the Predator
charges him and we get a great scene of
Dylan's flexed bicep detached from his body.
Two dads, one movie, hashtag, baby. We got another limb
missing limb here. The arms detached from his his body still firing
on the ground, which is such a good scene. And he still tries to fight
it. Well, he's got two MP5s when that happens. He's shooting them both. So,
yeah, his arm gets blown off by another shoulder rocket from the Predator. And that's
the one that, yeah, lands and it's still firing as the finger must have been,
like, you know, held. The muscle holds on to the trigger. Right. But he tries
to fight with the other one. Trigger mortise, folks. Boom. I like that trigger mortise.
But, yeah, the, it, it, it, yeah. Dylan gets
his shoulder, but he gets his arm blown. Off. And then the Predator finishes him
off close quarters with his, like, claw knife. Yeah. Crazy thing on his wrist.
In the meantime, though, Dutch, while. While. While, you know,
Mac and Dylan were off trying to hunt down the Predator, Dutch was with Poncho,
who's really wounded with this thing. And Billy and Anna, and they're
all trying to continue on to the chopper Rendezvous point because that's
kind of their only hope to get out of here, especially now that Poncho is
injured. Like, they just don't have that much. Choice. And so as they're,
as they're running off and as we hear Dylan screams off in
the distance as he is killed by the Predator, Billy, then they all cross a
big log, almost like that's across a Ravine, like as a bridge. And Billy stops
and he turns around and he takes off his vest and he drops his
weapons and he gets his big machete knife out and for whatever reason, kind of
cuts himself, obviously very lightly, but cuts himself across his chest and upper
stomach. And it's just like, come get me.
Yeah. And that doesn't take very long. No, not at all. We hear Billy's
scream off in the distance. I don't know if we talked about this yet,
but this is kind of an important point to introduce is I think at this
point or a little bit before Dutch has realized like it didn't
hurt you because you didn't have a weapon. That's right. There was a moment.
He said that to Anna. Let's keep a weapon out of
your hands. Like this thing is coming, you know, they're kind of starting to understand
a little bit what its motivation is. It's not about It won't kill you with
another weapon. It's not sporting. So then, you know,
very quickly after that, Billy, you know, we hear Billy die off screen.
Poncho gets capped as well. Another shoulder rocket. And it's
just, now it's just Arnie and Anna. Right. And then Arnold actually
takes a shot from the shoulder rocket, but it just grazes his arm and kind
of knocks him down. At which point he yells another great line from the movie
to Anna. It's like, Go, run. Get to the chopper.
Anyway, hopefully that'll come through. Nice get to the shot, but I like that
one. But yeah, apparently Dutch is partly made of steel, because even a grazing shot
doesn't seem to really phase him at all. Right.
And he gets shot, and then he does 500-foot
the Richard Kimball waterfall. Well, he kind of slips almost. He slides
down this embankment, and then it's so crazy when he crests the cliff,
the camera shows us what's beneath him, which is rocks,
the shoreline. But somehow he's able, his momentum, I guess,
carries him far enough. And he lands in the river. And then he goes over
another waterfall. I mean, it's really gnarly. He should
be dead several times during this river scene. Oh, for sure, for sure.
And so he's in this cold water and he comes
crawling out into the mud, and you see that the predator dips into
the water right behind him. Yeah, yeah. And it doesn't, you know,
it ends up going by him. It doesn't creep up on him. He doesn't
have a weapon on him, but he also is like, he's like tucked up into
like this like fallen tree or whatever, and he's covered in this mud from the
riverbank. And the predator, you know, spots like a little animal and shoots
at it because that's the thermal signature it can see. Yeah, but it can't see
Dutch at all. And he even says it out loud. He's like, he didn't see
me. Like he gets it right away that, you know, basically when he's covered in
this mud, the predator editor couldn't see him. And so, yeah,
so now we cut to Dutch. Now, basically, like, let's just take stock quickly of
what's going on. Yes, sir. Anna and Poncho's
dead. He's been shot. Billy's dead. Dylan's dead. Max's dead. Blaine's dead. Okay.
And Hawkins was the first to go. And then. So Anna has supposedly run off
towards the chopper. She couldn't possibly know where she's going. Yeah. Okay. So she's doing
that. And Dutch is now setting up. We cut to him, like, setting up.
Traps, basically. And he's, like, trying to create this, like, pinch point where
he could, like, attract the Predator to and kill it, because now he knows it
bleeds. Yeah. And he knows how to stay hidden from it, essentially. And so he's
got a plan. He's got a plan of attack. And we get a great little
Montage again of more trap setting and, you know, creating. Oh, this was actually where,
where he was doing his, making his own bow Flex machine bending Vines over
his shoulder. He was making a bow and arrow. Right. That's, that's literally like he
creates a bow and arrow for himself. He doesn't have Weapons anymore. I love it.
I love the ingenuity of it, but also just the gratuity of these
scenes where we're like, Hey, we gotta get the muscle guy looking muscley on the
screen. And then we do, while he's doing these traps that we do cut to
the predator who's got Billy's body and he reaches into Billy's back basically and
grabs L4 from his spine and rips the whole spine and
skull out. And then we see him spray it with this thing that clearly cleans
it because he adds Billy's skull to a set of other skulls
that he has, all human skulls. I do like how clean the skulls were.
That was pleasing to me. If it was like bloody, Gross skulls. I love that.
That he wants it. He wants it clean, you know? So, yeah, this guy's collecting
his trophies, but, yeah, so Dutch makes himself a set of bow and arrows,
covers himself in more mud. We get a lot of just very, like,
muddy, whatever. And then he lights a huge torch and gets up on a bridge,
you know, like the, like, another Fallen Tree log, and he just does a war
cry. He just yells like nothing intelligent. It's a great Roar.
Great Roar. The Predator does. Does get its attention. And then what he does is
he tosses that torch into what he's created, like a bonfire. So now there's this
huge fire that obviously the Predator's gonna be able to see. He's figured out the
whole mud thing is a heat thing. It's like he's cold when he's in the
mud. So, you know, it's like he can't be seen, but the fire will.
Will attract the Predator and probably make it fairly hard for it to see other
stuff. I think that's kind of part of it. And then we'll see it again,
like, what his exact plan is. He goes up into the trees to.
Hide. And it's like the predator walks right by
him. And it's hard to tell how close. Almost looks like the predator touches
him. It looks like he goes over him. Yeah, it's just because we're seeing through
it. It's like he's on the underside of a branch and the predator is right
there. But yeah, that's very tense there. And I do
really love his vine swinging between trees. Like, let me get your attention
over here. It starts to come over there and he swings on the vine.
And like, and then what a great setup. Hugs the tree. As soon as he
gets the other side, he hugs the tree and stays still. And he knows if
he's covered in mud and cold and up against the tree trunk, he's going to
look like part of the tree. Sure enough, the Predator, you know, reacts to the
sound, but then doesn't really do anything else, doesn't see anything. So continues
on down towards the bonfire to investigate that. And this is where we see what
the real plan of the fire was, is that he had taken Dutch had during
the Montage taken apart some of, like, the grenade shells or something,
right, from his RPG or his grenade launcher. Rifle and dumped out the gunpowder.
Yeah. And wrapped it up in like a big banana leaf or whatever, and then
turned that into a tip of an arrow. So he made this bone
arrow. So he's able to shoot that into the bonfire, which then makes it explode,
which clearly does fair amount of damage to the predator. It screws up his like
some of his equipment. Like it blows up his little wrist computer. Yeah. Cloaking thing
doesn't work anymore. So no more cloaked predator for the rest of the movie.
We get a good look at him from here on out. Out. The computer stuff
is funny because there's a few scenes where it'll show the Predator and it has
this kind of like blue lightning static looking effect
on the outside of its computer system and then it pushes the button to make
it stop doing that. Yeah, I think it turns it off. I think the idea
is it's like it's on but it's shorting out and so if he just turns
it off, it'll stop. Turn it off, turn it back on again. Yeah, you know,
it's a good idea. I'm a tech guy now. It's the three R's. Retry,
retry, retry. I reboot, reinstall. There you go. Yeah. This is
funny. So when the Predator is coming after him. Yeah. 'Cause it's moving
so like stealthily to this point. And then
when it starts coming after him, it's like stomping, lumbering.
Like the worst upstairs neighbors you've ever had in your life. You know,
it's like stomping hard at him, which gives us a great sense
too of how large this thing is. Yeah. And I think also too, it shows
that it adapts to its own situation. So when it has its cloaking device,
it moves in a stealthy way. Once that's gone, what's the point? Yeah. Who cares?
Just beat. Just be. Just Barrel through it. Like, go get the guy, you know?
So I think that's kind of on the topic of this particular species of alien
being a particularly Adept Soldier, Hunter, whatever, you know, it really adapts to
what it has. The Predator jumps in front of Dutch at one point. Now,
he's still covered in mud, but he knows that, like, I mean, the thing will
see me eventually if I'm too close to it kind of thing. But he is
able to kind of, like, get underneath the loggies on and hang on to the
Vines as the Predator walks by, which gives him a little more time.
He's able to retrieve a couple of other weapons he made
for himself, including a spear with another one of those exploding heads on it.
And let's see. And the Predator, in the meantime, has left
a trail of glowing blood. That's right. Because that first explosion from
the bonfire really did damage it. So he's now following these little green
glowing drops of blood, and he gets kind of under-- I don't know if it's
a cave or underneath the roots of a tree or something, but he's in this
little underground kind of kind of part. And that's when we hear the Predator
showing up behind him. And it's kind of hard to tell what the Predator sees
here because it does sort of follow him and shoot after him as he runs
away. But he jumps and I think goes to grab a branch that breaks.
It breaks immediately. It's the most pointless branch grab ever. But he lands in
the water, which we got to remember now, this is going to wipe all that,
this is going to wash all the mud off him. It's like his one sort
of defensive mechanism. Is this mud and the water is going to wash it all
off. And the Predator's got him now up out of the
water and you can see the Predator is absolutely enormous
next to this guy who's already enormous. His whole career is built on being enormous,
right? Yeah, he's like 6'3 or something. Yeah, yeah. And the Predator
is choking him, a la Ivan Drago, choking his manager, just holding
him up against the tree by his throat. Very intense. Intimidating. Very crazy.
And we see from the Predator vision through his helmet, he's really examining
the skull. He's really looking at Dutch's skull and comparing it, I guess, right,
to the other trophies he already has. And, and, you know, it's interesting. He could
kill him right now, but instead he drops him. But does Dutch
has, he doesn't have a weapon at that point. That's why he drops him.
Maybe that's right. Yeah, I guess, because there's a point where the, the Predator takes
off his helmet and takes off his shoulder cannon and is basically like, do this
hand to hand. And I guess you're right. It probably is because he sees Dutch
as a valuable trophy and a worthy opponent, and Dutch
currently does not have any kind of weapon on him. So we'll just fight then.
Yeah. And that's, that's, you know, I guess, like, respectable. I don't know how to
think if that's how I should think about it, but that it does seem to
be what happens. So when the Predator takes its mask off,
really creepy looking. I mean, they managed to just.
Model these after the absolute weirdest looking of real life
things and combine them in such a cool way. My wife did
say, she said, that's a dark crystal ass looking face.
That's good. That's good. So that's the only effect that
didn't. Quite, I mean, something out of labyrinth. It's still cool,
but that's where you see a little bit of limitation of practical effect
from looking super cool. But still, great. And we get Dutch saying,
you,'re one ugly motherfucker. Yeah, which it really is.
Yep. So the Predator and Dutch start fighting hand to hand, and the Predator is
just beating Dutch's ass. Oh my God. This is Ivandrago and Rocky
Balboa all over again. But Dutch is kind of able to continue leading the
Predator towards those traps that he set, right? He's got this spike
thing that's gonna collapse on him, and he's got this other log thing. And so
he is able to crawl under to where if the Predator follows him, he's gonna
be in his trap. But the Predator stops. Now we know he can't see very
well. That's what the helmet came off. Everything had been blue and
then the heat signatures would be red. But when the helmet comes off, it's like
that dude's vision is basically all red. There's very little difference. He's blinded by
whatever. And I think maybe it's the heat around or something. It's got
that. So it's a less specific ability to detect the differences
in heat signatures. And that's what the helmet gives him, is his ability to understand
and like, you know, sort of more mammalian,
you know, like kind of heat signatures versus vegetation. Oh, totally.
And I think now it's just the whole area is so hot, that's just his
unaided vision is just terrible. Right, 'cause if it's like 92 degrees,
you know, yeah, that's gonna be all messed up. So yeah, so the predator
is trying to follow him, but like feels the spikes. You can't even necessarily see
him. He feels him. And Dutch starts with like, you know, come get me,
I'm right here, you can kill me, come on, come on, get me, get me,
you can kill me. And it's like, Bro, it's clearly not that dumb.
If it sees you sitting there just asking it to come at you,
it's not gonna. It's just not like this isn't like an idiot
creature. And sure enough, the Predator does not follow under
the sort of spiked trap. It goes another way and it's got its
claw blades back out, little gauntlet blades ready to just finish it with
Dutch. So Dutch is kind of like Kevin McCallister in the treehouse,
hoping that the wet bandits will chase him in a certain way.
But there's two reasons for that. Luckily,
there was a backup trap. There was a backup trap. And it turns out to
be a good one, because he has a huge log that we saw him sort
of have to hoist into the tree. I want to know the estimate of how
much that weighs. What are we telling people that he's able to hoist? Yeah,
it was crazy. Without a pulley,
it's, I'm sure he put the vine over a branch, but it's not the same
as having a real pulley. And yeah, 300 pounds. It has
to be enough to kill from a height and kill an extra. Way more than
that. Right? So, yeah, so this giant log drops
down to crush the Predator. Alá, two things that we've seen
in our film so far. Number one, go ahead. Cyrus the
Virus. That's right, that was one I thought of. Con Air. His face getting crushed
by the face crushing machine. And number two, Rob Lowe's character in
Tommy Boy, where he gets put onto one of the chairs that they're testing for
durability. And the sandbag that they repeatedly drop on the chair just drops
right on his nut sack. So it's kind of like a halfway between both of
those. Send him a bottle of wine. Say sorry about your marbles.
Yeah, so yeah, in other words, I wrote down here, got him. So yeah,
we got the predator, but not necessarily. There's still movement and sound coming. So Dutch
goes and checks it out and he realizes the predator's not dead, so he lifts
this rock up. He's gonna crush the predator's head, which he really should have
done, because as it turns out, Predator, you know, is bleeding all over, is choking
out its last breaths. It's, it is dead. It is not a threat to anymore.
So he thinks it, like, opens the little wrist computer
and hits a bunch of buttons or whatever on it, and it starts
making little, I guess they kind of look like a countdown. They just don't look
like any numbers we would use. Yeah. But there is an increasing frequency
of a tone. Beep, beep, beep. Yeah. So you can figure it out. And it's
kind of like, well, that doesn't sound good. So Dutch hauls He just hauls off
in the other direction. And I'm pretty sure this is a nuclear
explosion that occurs. From the effect of it, right? Because there's a helicopter
that's on its. Way- With the general and Anna, yeah. Right, yeah. And that feels
the effect of it. I mean, that thing gets rocked and it doesn't get actually
touched by any of the debris. So,
and the Predator, as it's about to self-destruct,
is recreating the laugh that Billy did to the big pussy joke.
So it's like, like the predator finally got the joke.
Yes. It finally took him that long to
get the joke. It's like, oh, I get that. I have a feeling that's on
our planet. I have a feeling that's not a sexual act that a creature with
that kind of mouth teeth would do. But, you know, maybe I'm wrong. I don't
understand the sexual proclivities of the predator species. So the chopper,
the chopper feels this blast, but Dutch is able to, like, dive, you know,
get low at the last minute and he gets picked up by the chopper.
He hides behind a tree, which is what you're supposed to do in a nuclear
explosion. Yeah, hide behind a tree. You're fine. Trees gonna protect you. Exactly. But they
do when they get. But there's also. I love it, too. That explosion creates the
clearing needed for the helicopter to land to get him, because otherwise there would
be too many trees in the way. But it's, like, created this almost crater-like situation,
and it created a clearing. And so it lands and it gets him. And Dutch
is rescued by the chopper. The chopper. And that's
pretty much where the movie ends. That's. Yeah, there's no. He doesn't get married to
Anna. There's no epilogue here. He's also the only survivor.
I'm assuming he's retiring because his entire crew is dead. So it's
not like his team is rescuing anybody anymore. Yeah, or he just, you know,
that helicopter gets shot down because the implications of him getting the word out about
what's going on are too dark. I don't think it's that. I think he retires.
He goes back to that bar in Alabama where his wife works and they're gonna
expect their first child. That's probably what's gonna happen there.
Oh my God, Predator. Predator.
How fun was that? Oh boy. Yeah. Well, what a great
way to kick off January. Steve, this was your wonderful
selection. Do you want to you want to give it a rating for us first?
I this is so everyone will we'll do movies on this show and it'll be
something, you know, maybe that I haven't seen in a while or or have really
fond memories of. But then I watch it and it's like, God, it just didn't
quite hold up. It just didn't quite hit for me. There's been several examples of
that over the time. This is not one of those. This hit on every level
that it always has. For me. I reconfirmed itself as literally one of
my like, I mean, look, I put it, I guess I put it on Letterboxd
as like a top four, partly for the shock value. It is easily, though,
I think one of my top 10 favorite movies of all time. Easily. I am
a five out of five on Predator every single time I watch it. There is
no doubt in my mind that nothing I could ask for of this movie,
I could not ask for anything other than what it gives me. It is amazing.
The effects hold up for the most part. I know that the, the puppeteering on
the Predator face is, yeah, it's maybe a little dated, but it's, it really looks
great. And it's the only thing in it that's even a tiny bit that way.
The Predator Vision stuff is so, was so Innovative. Just the Predator character
creation or character design was incredibly cool and new
and unique at the time. And, you know, the fact that there have been 20
other Predator involved movies over the years kind of, you know, Bears that out.
It's a really fantastic as a Sci-Fi it's fantastic as
an action. Movie. It's got a bunch of great lines. Yeah. Five out of five.
No notes for Predator. I'm a huge fan. Excellent. Yeah. I mean,
again, I kind of thought the same. Like, what am I going to think of
this as a. As a professional film analyst? No, but,
like, it is just like it delivers everything that you would want from it.
It's perfect. Kind of, like, Mindless, Arnie action. You don't have to read too
much into any of it. The guns look cool. The guys are cool. They're saying
cool stuff. I think that,
yeah, I mean, oh, I did, this is an interesting fact,
is two interesting facts. Number one, if you went back
in time to 1987 to this movie in the theater,
the movie ends, you stand up and you say, this movie stars two future
governors of U.S. states and then just poofed back into the present. That would
be a weird ass experience for people, right?
I did know that the actor who was in
the Predator suit was actually also in the movie Harry and the Hendersons.
Oh, is he? Yeah, he was Harry. No, it was, it was Harry,
though. It was like the, you know, the Sasquatch and Harry and the Hendersons.
So Kevin Peter Hall, big, big guy. You definitely got to make a movie that
your kids are allowed to see. So I understand why he did that.
But, yeah, man, this movie is so much fun, and I think it's one one
that gets, like, any guy of our, like, cohort really fired up.
If you just start talking about it. The Predator vision is something that's carried forward.
You can just mention Predator Vision. Right. I don't even call it
night vision. No, no, it's. That's thermal vision. Whatever. No, no. Like the Predator.
That's what it is. It's super fun. And I really not allowed
to pick a part about this one. I'm gonna give this one a four and
a half out of five. This is so much fun. I recommend everyone see it
if they haven't. I know now we're getting to the that these movies are so
old, they're kind of falling out with new generations. For sure. Like I was talking
to a friend of mine who was like 30, and the action movies to them
are like Fast and Furious, Marvel, John Wick and stuff.
Which is a good-- I mean, in its right, its own generation of action
movies. But I really do recommend that people go back and check these out,
because there's something about them that makes them so endearing and just such
a blast to watch. There's something about the '80s and '90s action movies that just
isn't duplicated in the 2000s and 2010s. And as good as the Fast and Furious,
some of those movies, of the Fast and Furious movies are as good as all
the John Wick movies are, whatever. And I was always a huge fan of the
MCU. It's just very different. It really does feel like action movies have been taken
over by comic book movies. Right. In the more recent decades. And so, yeah,
it really is a special breed to go back and watch a movie like Predator.
And I think a nine and a half out of 10 is perfect. I love
that score from us. Like I said, I knew I was going to be a
five out of five on this. It's just the way I am with Predator.
It is just one of my favorite movies of all time. So, all right,
that was the first movie of Januwarrie. And Nick, you get to tell us what
the next little trip down memory lane we get to take with the former governor
of California. Yeah. Yeah. Gray Davis was in the 1982.
This is, I'm so glad that we're doing this. Like, this is the whole,
I'm so psyched about this. I love Arnie. I love talking Arnie. So,
yeah, and the, there's not a lot of variation in what I want to do
with Arnie and what I want from him. Sure. So we're gonna go a couple
years later and we're gonna go many years into the future. And we're
gonna go to 1990 and we're potentially gonna get our ass to Mars.
We're gonna see Arnie. We're gonna see Sharon Stone.
We're gonna see some Paul Verhoeven. We're gonna see some Michael Ironsides. We might
see a limb disappear in this one, folks. And we are gonna watch 1990s
classic Total Recall. Perfect. I love Total Recall.
We've talked about Paul Verhoeven before, and this is one of the many Verhoeven I
hope we do get to it at some point. I think next in priority
list for me might be Robocop, but Total Recall is fantastic. It really is
a lot of fun. I can't wait to watch it with you and talk about
it because yeah, it's great and we don't have to talk about this remake either.
We can pretend it doesn't exist. No, nothing exists past 1999. There you go.
They're redoing the Running Man now. Why? Anyway, all right,
so yeah, next week, next week, Total Recall, be there. Second week
of January. It's gonna be great. That's a wrap. So if you like what you
hear and we hope you do, please consider heading over to Apple or Spotify and
leaving us a five-star review. It really helps new folks find the show. Be sure
to check out our website@2dads1movie.com that's the number two and the number one.
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Once again, this has been Predator, another episode of Two Dads, One Movie.
I'm Steve. And I'm Nick. Thank you so much for listening and we'll catch you
next week. Thanks,