“You’re hit. You’re bleeding man.” “I ain’t got time to bleed.”
Alan ‘Dutch’ Schaefer (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is the leader of a small team of elite men. Considered the best they are the last resort when rescue is needed behind enemy lines. Dutch is Special Ops. His team consists of Mac (Bill Duke), Blain (Jesse Ventura), Billy (Sonny Landham), Poncho (Richard Chaves) and Hawkins (Shane Black). They are called in by Dutch’s former commander General Philips (R. G. Armstrong) for a rescue mission. The helicopter of a foreign official went off course and ended up in enemy territory in a South American jungle. He and his aide are being held hostage by insurgents.
It was a simple set up. One day in, grab the hostages and get out. The only condition, CIA agent Dillon (Carl Weathers) has to go with them. Even though Dillon is ex-commando and a friend of Dutch from Vietnam, Dutch prefers to go in with his seasoned team alone. Dutch’s objections are overridden and Dillon joins the team.
Dutch and his team parachute in to the jungle where the helicopter went down. What they find are three Green Berets. They are dead and they’ve been skinned. They make their way to the enemy camp. The team, now working on adrenaline and muscle memory wipes out the insurgents in a hail of bullets and bombs. This is when Dutch finds out that the entire operation was really a setup to retrieve intelligence. There was no rescue. Dutch and his team were used as weapons.
The only survivor of the raid is a woman, Anna (Elpidia Carrillo). Dillon insists that they take her with them. The team must now make it back across to a safe zone in order to be extracted. They head out. Billy is the first to sense that something isn’t right. He stops. Concentrating. There’s something in the trees. Something he can’t see, but he knows it is there.
Anna takes the opportunity to try to escape. She is chased by Hawkins. Hands tied in front of her, she runs. Hawkins tackles her. She hears a noise to her right. She looks. Something comes out of the jungle. It hits Hawkins and drags his dead body away. When Poncho reaches her she is in shock, trying to crawl away and covered in blood. Poncho follows a trail of blood. He finds Hawkins, or at least he thinks it’s Hawkins but it’s just guts. The rest of the team reach Anna and see her condition. Poncho asks Anna what happened. She says the jungle came alive and took him. Then it takes Blain. Mac sees it and starts shooting. The others arrive and instinctively start shooting as well. They shoot the shit out the jungle. They know now they are being hunted. They wound something that bleeds, bleeds green. Something alien that hunts men.
“Predator” was released in 1987 and was directed by John McTiernan. The movie spawned three sequels, three crossover films with the “Alien” franchise, novels, comic books, toys, and video games. It is a science fiction film and a classic action movie from the 80’s. A Testosterone filled ride with solid performances from the entire cast. The dialogue and the acting are wonderful but immaterial to the movie. The film is totally plot driven. A game of survival. The last half hour or so of the movie is the cat and mouse game between Dutch and the Predator. Primitive man facing the technology of an alien race. Let the game begin.
The blood of the Predator is green and is made from a mixture of glow sticks and KY jelly. The infrared vision the Predator uses is the same snakes use to find their prey.
The Predator’s shoulder gun was referred to as the Parrot Gun because it could move independently and it reminded the sound editors of the inflatable rubber parrot on Peter Sellers shoulder in the film “Revenge of the Pink Panther” 1978.
Peter Cullen was charged with giving the predator a voice. Not knowing what an alien is supposed to sound like he wanted to see it. When the producers finally showed him the design it looked, to Cullen, similar to a horseshoe crab. He remembered as a kid the sound they made when they were flipped over. The gurgling sound they produced became the sound of the Predator.
The Predator is played by Kevin Peter Hall. He also plays one of the helicopter rescue crew.