I am an Arnold fan, or is it a fan of Arnold. At any rate Schwarzenegger is my favorite action star of all time. I know he will never get an Academy Award but that's ok, there are a lot of people who have gotten the award and didn't deserve it, James Cameron comes to mind. Anyway, Predator is an outstanding action movie that doesn't try to push any message, because it's an 80's movie and that means high body count and cool sayings. This also may be the first movie ever to have two future Governors acting in the same movie, Schwarzenegger, current governor of California, and Jesse Ventura, former Governor of Minnesota.

The outline is pretty simple Maj. Schaffer (Schwarzenegger) and his band of Special Forces are asked by the government to go after a group of diplomats whose helecopter was shot down in the jungle of some enemy territory in Central America, the countries are never named. So Schaffer's group goes in with a CIA weasel Dillon (played by Mr. Apollo Creed himself, Carl Weathers) and tries to find the missing diplomats. While they are looking for the diplomats, they come across a bunch of dead men who have been skinned alive. They turned out to be Green Berets from Fort Bragg. So the group works extra hard to find the men who did this. Little do they know that they themselves are being hunted by an alien, what has come to be called Predator, in the jungle. It has a nearly invisible defense mechanisms and a handful of cool killing devices. Eventually the Special Forces and the predator run into each other and the guys start losing, one by one, until its Arnold vs. the Predator.

The movie was directed by John McTiernan who has done other such action movies as Die Hard, The 13th Warrior, and The Hunt for Red October. He is a master at cinematography and always finds way to allow the setting to set the mood. In Predator, he uses the jungle to give the story a dark unnerving feeling even though the majority of the scenes are shot in broad daylight.

The action hero's in the movie are of course headlined by Schwarzenegger and Weathers. Jesse Ventura was a couple of years removed from wrestling and this is the movie where he coined the phrase, "I don't got time to Bleed". Other prominent stars are Bill Duke (Commando and Red Dragon) and Sonny Landham who always seems to play guys named Billy in movies (48 hours, Firestarter.) Kevin Peter Hall is the guy in the Predator suit and returns in the second Predator movie but passed away in 1991. I mention him only because he also was the Bigfoot Harry in the movie Harry and the Henderson's.

This movie is one of the many that made Arnie an action star in the mid 1980's. This movie won't tell you about saving the rain forest or the plight of third world countries and their people, but it sure will make you enjoy watching them get blown away as they burn down the forest. It's fun and would never have been made in the 1990's. If you haven't seen it, get the new DVD it's loaded with tons of new material and it coincides with the release of the god-awful Aliens vs. Predator movie. See where the origins of the predator begin by watching this movie. It rocks!

Brian - the Naked Gun