There
is but one film in the entirety of our history that can resonate in a
man's very soul in such a way that the meekest among us can be made
mighty or that the proud can be made to shrivel in crippling fear.
This film is Predator, the most epic fucking tale ever
spun.
As a boy, it was the characters of Predator that I gazed up to with hopeful, young eyes for it was these men that defined the absolute essence of what it meant to be a man. These were the men that other nations looked upon and with icy fear in the quivering pits of their stomachs said to each other "lets not fuck with America for a while." And as their peers looked upon this film they rushed to agree.
I was a normal six year old boy when I first watched this movie, pathetic and weak as any other. Halfway through Predator I looked down and Holy Shit I had grown hair all over my chest. I stuck a plug of Redman roughly the size of a baseball in my cheek and continued to watch the best fucking movie of all time unfold before me. The credits started to roll, I kicked my front door into a thousand splintery bits of wood all over the porch with a single blow, went out in the yard and installed some punji sticks. I haven't been the same since.
Schwarzenegger's name is so long that once they awkwardly squeezed it onto the promo posters and the box cover for this movie there just wasn't any room left to list the men who star alongside him but these characters make up the most badass secret military rescue team that the eighties had ever seen. There's actually seven guys on this super secret mission into the harsh jungles of wherever the hell they like to send these guys. Five of them are some of the scariest sons of bitches you've ever seen...aaaand they brought two guys along that are kind of nerds but still kind of scary.
Apollo Creed is apparently Schwarzenegger's buddy from Nam. He's been working for the CIA (which leaves some interesting questions about the days that he was fighting and training Rocky all the time). He gets them all roped into what was supposed to be a simple in and out rescue mission to retrieve some U.S. bureaucrat that stupidly wandered into the clutches of some heavily armed guerrilla fighters, as bureaucrats seemed to do pretty regularly back then.
They bring Bill Duke along because he's like seven feet tall, real stoic looking and so hard that he shaves with a single blade, disposable razor in the helicopter over without any shaving cream or water or anything. You would think a guy like that could handle anything but he pretty much loses his shit and goes bonkers as soon as things get weird so don't even worry about him.
There's also this huge Indian guy that was in a bunch of porn before the 80s but now he's all business, especially when it comes to blowing things up and wielding a big huge knife. I don't even know why he agreed to go along considering that Carl Weathers threw him out of a window in Action Jackson. It turns out though that he's a bit of a nut bag and a huge racist anyways, so he was probably just so mixed up he didn't know what else to do for the summer.
Then there's the two kind of nerdy white guys, one slightly more badass than the other. I don't even remember if Predator ends up killing these guys or if they just move in together and constantly redecorate their apartment.
Perhaps most importantly among this crack team of highly trained military operatives is Blain, played by Jesse The Body Ventura. He's pretty much the embodiment of masculinity. Every line out of his tobacco stuffed mouth is a profound one liner that can be applied to any situation if you're badass enough to wield such words. In the movie he's got this gun that looks like it should have to be mounted on a tank but he just carries it around like its his lunchbox. I think he could just kill all the guerillas and the predator but he just doesn't want to.
Anyways, these guys go in and play
around in the jungle a while. They find some bones and gooey dead
bodies and they're all like "Oh gross. Now we're really gonna
eff those guerillas up."...and they do; it takes them maybe
three minutes even though the guerillas have Genghis Kahn from Bill
and Ted's Excellent Adventure on their side (they should have
returned him to his own time). Then the predator shows up and he's a
big scary alien that is mostly invisible half the time. He's got
lazer beams and shit and he can record your voice and see you in the
dark. He looks like a bug and kind of like Ricky Williams. He shoots a missile at a beaver or something and Arnold Schwarzenegger
kills his ass. Booyah! Don't even act like I spoiled that movie for
you. We both know that you've seen Predator before.
EPIC DIALOGUE:
Blain:
This stuff will make you a goddamned sexual tyrannosaurus...just like
me.
(true)
MORE EPIC DIALOGUE:
Blain:
Son of a bitch is dug in like an Alabama tick.
Nerdy
guy: You're bleeding man.
Blain:
I aint got time to bleed.
Nerd:
Huh.....okay. (hahahaha what a nerd)
SIDE NOTE: I
haven't bled since I watched this movie when I was six.
