Whatever it is out there, it killed Harper!” because I thought to myself, “Yeah, and nothing’s killed Harper before!” On a more positive note, I had completely forgotten where the quote that almost everyone includes in their Arnold Schwarzenegger impressions – “Get to tha choppa!” – came from, and it’s this movie.

I also laughed when one of the soldiers was going off because of Harper’s death, saying, “You don’t understand how bad this thing is. When Arnold stuck a guy to a pole with his knife and he said, “Stick around,” I couldn’t help but think he was getting started really early for his pun-tacular role as Mr. Why the hell didn’t everyone just throw their guns down? They would’ve all survived apparently! There were some parts to the dialogue that I could take issue with because of their corniness, but it’s an Arnold movie from the 80s! If I didn’t go in expecting some bad dialogue, then I was fooling myself. Arnold figures out pretty early on that the Predator wants a challenge, and even kicks the gun out of the girl’s hand because he won’t attack her if she’s unarmed and not a challenge. I did take a pretty big issue with one big logic loophole in the movie. I laughed at the part where the black dude was unloading into the forest because he saw the Predator and the other guys on the team ran up and just started shooting at random, knowing nothing more than they were clearing out some foliage. Yeah, I know the Mythbusters proved that the mud wouldn’t actually mask his heat signature, but I’m still perfectly comfortable suspending my disbelief to enjoy it. All of that Arnold stuff, caked in mud and fighting the alien with whatever he could assemble from the jungle. I like the way the movie unfolds, and I like how it concludes.

Not until almost the midway point do you actually find out that an alien is in the mix.

If you think about it, not knowing anything about the movie you would be caught completely off guard by the fact that it starts off as a pretty typical army type of movie that strangely keeps cutting back to something that’s watching them in infrared. One thing I got to thinking about is how much more interesting I probably would’ve found this movie on my first viewing, at least if I had no prior knowledge of what I was watching. It borders on cheesy in more than one occasion, but overall it still holds up as entirely kick ass. They take out a nearby rebel encampment, but soon start to realize that there’s something else in the jungle, hunting them with thermal vision, a laser gun, cloaking device, and dreadlocks. When they get there, they find a downed helicopter and the skinned bodies of an Army Special Forces unit. Armstrong.Ī group of mercenaries lead by Major Alan “Doesn’t my accent sound ‘Dutch’” Schaefer (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is hired by his old military buddy, George Dillon (Carl Weathers), to rescue a captured presidential cabinet member from guerrilla forces in Val Verde. Without the nostalgia making it seem better than it actually is, was this movie able to hold up in the present? We’ll find out in my review of Predator, written by Jim and John Thomas, directed by John McTiernan, and starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Kevin Peter Hall, Carl Weathers, Elpidia Carrillo, Sonny Landham, Jesse Ventura, Bill Duke, Richard Chaves, Shane Black, and R.G. The first movie in this series is a classic sci-fi action movie but, as with many movies, I didn’t see it when it came out and I was a kid. But I couldn’t just jump right into that movie either, because there’s another name in that title that I haven’t reviewed yet. Unlike even the worst Alien movies, AvP will probably give me a lot more to make fun of, being much lower in quality. In my mind, my review of the Alien series would not be complete if I didn’t first review Alien vs. This Stuff Will Make You a God Damned Sexual Tyrannosaurus.

Predator line slack jawed