Arnold Fest 2009! Predator (1987) |

Man! I love Predator. I love everything about it. It has a lot of action and it’s well paced, brutal and pulse poundingly suspenseful! You just know at the very beginning that everyone is going to get their balls chopped off, metaphorically speaking.

The plot should be easy to figure out. A super powerful awesome looking predator dude is stalking hard core special ops dudes and killing them off one dude at a time… You never know who will be the next victim. It kept me on the edge of my seat the whole time even though I basically knew everyone was screwed except Arnold, I just didn’t know the extent of how screwed they were until they died. Let’s just say, you would need some special instructions on how to put most of those people back together again.

Part of why Predator works so well is because there wasn’t anything hunting us humans, until it came along and tossed a great big ugly curve ball our way. Humans have always been at the top of the food chain, and this movie makes people stop and think about what it’s like to be the prey for once. It makes you think about how horrible it would be to be the hunted one. Did you know that, in the wild, predatory animals don’t always kill their prey prior to feeding on them? So that’s a pleasant thought for ya. Anybody want to go camping?

One thing I couldn’t help but notice is that Predator was a huge sausage fest. I mean seriously, I haven’t seen that much sausage in one place since Oktoberfest. There was only one girl in the whole flick, and she got away because, apparently, she didn’t appear to be a worthy prey to the almighty Predator since she wasn’t carrying a weapon. Women! Always using their brain as a weapon.

There’s one member of the special ops team who I simply referred to as Vagina Jokes Guy because pretty much everything he said was a joke about big vaginas, and I have to say that I loved, loved, loved the big vagina jokes! I was so sad that guy died first. I was looking forward to hearing how big the Predator’s vagina was but the Predator got overly worried about looking uncool and killed him before the VJG could come up with one. Now I guess we’ll never know about the Predator’s vagina.

On a separate note, holy crap Kevin “Predator” Peter Hall is a giant! This titanic terror of a man is 7’2”. He was really towering over Schwarzenegger. It wasn’t some lame camera trick.

Overall, Predator is classic Arnold work. He delivers the one liners, he kicks ass, fights a ludicrously powerful foe, and he’s one of the few people to walk out alive. What more could you possibly want!?!

Time until action: ~ 20 minutes.

Baddies: The Predator

Best Line: “This stuff will make you a GD sexual tyrannosaurus. Just like me!”

Best Kill: Mac (Bill Duke) is crawling on the ground thinking he is going to sneak up on the Predator and kill him when he suddenly sees three little red laser sights on his arm. He has just enough time to wonder “What is this?” when he looks up and the Predator is standing over him with his laser pointed at him. The Predator blows Mac’s head off before he can even poop his pants. Awww, the Predator was nice enough to save Mac the embarrassment of having his family see Mac with poopy pants. What a softy.

Best Explosion: At the very end of the movie, Arnold and the Predator are facing each other. Arnold has pinned the Predator in place so he decides it’s safe to strike up a conversation with him. “Hey man, good job. You completely destroyed my whole team. Where did you learn to do that? You know, I would be totally mad at you right now for killing all my great pals if it weren’t that you did it in such an impressive way. Kudos. Oh by the way, what are you?” Okay, so that was my version of what he said; so he didn’t really quite say all that but he did talk to the Predator for a bit. Anyway, to answer Arnold the Predator just does this sinister, horribly scary laugh as he sets a timed nuclear freakin’ bomb to go off and to destroy himself. It explodes and takes out almost the whole jungle. AWESOME.

Action Rating: 4 1/2 Predators making kissy faces at Arnold, out of 5

Illustration by Alex Langley. Rocket Llama World Headquarters