CraBlogged

So where was I?

Ah yes, Predator.

Predator, predator, predator. Last I seen yon predator I was a wee tyke of a laddie boy. Such a young yarn. Arnold was the first actor I ever recognized, as is probably the case with most of my generation. It really really confused me when I saw him both in this AND in Terminator.. and hey! it's that guy from Conan! And Running Man? Total Recall? My god, he's every where! It was thanks to him that I understood that the same people sometimes play different roles in different movies. So odd!

Ah, Predator. My memory of you is a million trillion times better than the reliving of you, and I wish I could have kept it that way forever. But alas, I did see you a few days ago, I did. And Arnold, I know you did your best here, you practically carried the movie on your broad, enormous, muscle-pumped-you-upped bosoms. Throwing a knife into someone and pinning them on the wall was wonderfully inexplicable given you were holding a machine gun at the time, but you smile so charmingly and say, "Why don't you hang around?"

How can you not love this mug?

I think the movie did pretty well at the time, but I base that completely off the fact that I, as an eight year old, enjoyed this movie. But do yourself a favor and skip this one if you're feeling nostalgic, it will just ruin whatever precious memories you held, if any. There's nothing worth keeping, nothing worth translating into the new century. It's not terribly fun to try to revive the old campy spirit of the original, because it's pretty boring and lame. Some movies, like Alien, are ageless. Sure the computers look phony and the monster effects are laughable at times, but it lives on and on and will forever as a priceless work of art. Predator, however, is like an apple that was hiding in the back of your fridge for a couple months. It once was shiny and crisp, delicious and entertaining, but now is stinky and rotten and should be thrown away before your significant other notices it and blames you for it.

GET TO THE CHOPPA is about the only thing you can take away from this movie at this point, and even that itself isn't that funny or worthwhile. You can (and by that I mean I can) only say it so many times before it feels a bit salty and dry in your mouth.

I always enjoy the phenomenon of watching old movies that you thought had excruciatingly exciting special effects, and realizing that by whatever day's standards you're looking at it again with have completely blown the old stuff away to make it look comical. As such, I distinctly remember the predator-cam being freaky and awesome. Woah! Infrared! And the red right lights - so cool! And OMIGOSH he's invisible but you can barely make him out! Seeing it again, I just shook my head. One and a half crab claws, though, just to see a sexy, young young young Arnold doing his thing.

Don't worry Harry, I'll be back! In Predator TWO!!!

Predator Two: Did not star Arnold. Take a moment, sit back, and think about this. Can you think of any way you could make a sequel to Predator... WITHOUT Arnold? How is it possible? I don't really know if it is, but I can assure you, they failed miserably trying. Absolutely, depressingly miserably.

You know who they got instead?

This guy.

Recognize him? Sure you do! He's famous character actor Danny Glover! Star of such famed films as... Lethal Weapon! And Lethal Weapon II! And Lethal Weapon III! And Lethal Weapon IIIIIIII! Ha, maybe that should be our next marathon. Anyway, Danny, my dear boy, I was so sad to see you in this. You did a terrible job; a darn reckless career choice. But why? The plot was perfect for you! And that was the problem.

I can hereby say with full authority, that of all the films I have ever seen, Predator II is the worst of them all. The absolute most draining, depressing worst of them all. We literally fell asleep four nights in a row trying to watch this film, I swear to you. We couldn't stay away at all - at one point we put it on around 10 just so we wouldn't fall asleep, and that night we got 9 hours of sleep. We finally finished it by watching it during the day, but it took a lot of our soul and lifeforce to do so. We had to, to complete the marathon. By why was it so terrible? Back to Danny Glover.

He makes a good cop. This movie was about cops. This movie was about cops and drug lords and cops fighting drug lords. If you took out everything to do with a predator in this film, then you'd have a normal film about Danny taking on the bad boys of drugs. The freaking "Jamaican Voodoo Posse". I'm not kidding. Honest to god, he fought the "Jamaican Voodoo Posse". And guess who was with him? Hudson, from Aliens, was one of his partners. And you know what? He played the exact same character as he did from Aliens. The loud-mouthed, dim-witted, beef-up soldier boy. I know Bill Paxybaby can do a fine acting job when he needs to, so I assume this was the writer's creative choice in the manner.

The thing was terribly acted, terribly written, and terribly directed. I've never acted, written, or directed a movie, but my $3 renting this movie entitles me to my opinion darn tootin! I don't get it, I really don't. It was a cop flick that just seemed to be sitting on someone's desk, and they looked at it and said, this is a damn fine film. Hire Danny boy, get him over here, and get me my damn cup of coffee. The guy then drank his coffee when all of a sudden it hit him. He spit out his coffee and slammed his fist to the table and let out a grunt. Then he took the word "Predator", printed it out 50 times, cut it up and put it in his empty cup. He laid out the script, shook up his cup, and blew out that word all over the script.

I'm a freaking genius, he said to himself. I'm sure he smiled.

And really, that's what the movie was like. A cop film with all-of-a-sudden Predator-cams looking at the action. It made no sense. So like, wow, this predator is scoping out Danny doing his cop stuff. Wow, look at the Predator-cam. And now it's gone and it's back to the original story. And then, randomly, inexplicably, it comes back here and there. Why? What is the point? The whole thing unravels so slowly yet so precariously. You can only shake your head in bewilderment.

I almost spit out my drink at some point - from surprise or disgust I can't remember, maybe both. Danny is creeping along, it's a suspense scene, it's building. He hears a noise and then he does the most baffling thing. He raises his shoulders up and crouches his head and points his hands out as far as they can go, both of them cupping a gun, and with frozen-limbs, he jumps in a full circle pointing his gun in all directions. It simply looked too goofy for words - I almost died, I almost screamed. Only in my worst dreams would I cook up something so terrible to see.

Only in my worst dreams would I cook up something so terrible to see.

And the ending... god, I can't.. I simply can't. If you want to torture yourself, please do, please rent this. It will end your evening so poorly though. It's not a good kind of terrible. There are good terrible movies, and there are terrible terrible movies, and then there's Predator 2. That's how my scale goes.

That's how my scale goes, for now on.

Wait.. what.. what am I doing here now?