Predator vs. Predator 2

they are all about...fuck, what are theya bout....the evil within?

Why? Rasta gangbangers. You don't see enough rasta gangbangers in moving pictures these days.

Buckaroo Banzai's drummer wielded a mean-looking Uzi.

Only er good instead of not.

OK the order in which they die in P1 surely breaks the rules of order-in-which- scoobies-die, since two black guys die ONE AFTER THE OTHER. However I don't know if this is top or crap.

How i feel abt "Pussyface" as epiphet of grudging admiration = ditto.

So therefore Danny Glover could have the Govenor of California any day of the week and we should make him our Global President accordingly.

Predator 2: fully recycled score (from Predator)
Wolfen: partially pre-cycled score (from Aliens)

Predator 2: invisible creatures from outer space w/ infra-red vision kill drug dealers
Wolfen: ghostly creatures from the Bronx w/ infra-red vision kill drug addicts

Predator 2: a black renegade cop chases the monsters around; he runs and runs
Wolfen: a British renegade cop strolls behind the monsters; he's jogging in his free time

Predator 2: the monsters mimick people's voices
Wolfen: the monsters mimick infants' voices

Predator 2: funny sidekick gets cut to pieces in the subway; revenge ensues
Wolfen: funny sidekick gets bit in the larynx in a church; understanding ensues

Predator 2: shady government officials operate openly; they have infra-red vision and a stylish aluminium helicopter
Wolfen: shady government officials remain shady; they have infra-red vision and a charmingly lo-fi big brother apparatus

Predator 2: voodoo? definitely
Wolfen: voodooo? yes; could be mistaken for freemasonry

Predator 2: the hero earns the creatures' respect by smacking up one of them
Wolfen: the hero earns the creatures' respect by smashing a scale model

Predator 2: offers insight on the state of society (like, it sucks)
Wolfen: offers insight on man's attitude towards nature (like, it sucks)

i am hoping Aliens will not be fooled by bendy light camouflage technology...and that Predators don't have an EM filter to detect them
(Aliens didn't show up on infra-red for a start, if i remember the Cameron film correctly....which was interesting as it suggested they could match temperature & emissivity of surroundings...then again that was only said in amongst the hive-resin material, which was maybe made of the same stuff/texture as their outer shells...)

Jordan - fair point - but i guess that part of the 'fun' of hunting is supposed to be the care they have to take to avoid being detected by some sharper-than-human senses ? If hunters could just walk right up to animals undetected and shoot/skewer them, i don't know what kind of 'dignity' of craft/skill they would think was due them...then again I'm sure there are some crazy sadists who would love that...
hah maybe Predators are more psychopathic weirdos who have been banished/exiled from home planet than fearless Big Game Hunters...(would explain why they are more Monty Python bazooka vs mosquito than intrepid tigah-shootah in style)

and that movie was actually not bad iirc

it was terrible imo.

v. disappointed that it's a Shane Black joint and appears to take place at Halloween rather than Christmas.

Rodriguez & Avellan produced but he did not direct or write

a Hungarian dude named Nimród Antal was the director

admittedly it’s been a while since i saw it but it was gory dumb fun iirc

clearly my memory is fucked though since i thought rr directed it

was just listening to "lord of the null lines" this morning

yeah Predators was a perfectly okay action movie

Nobody's gone to see this apparent pile of shit, then?

Is that a trick question?

It's unaccountably weird and lacking in self-awareness, but not as much as it needs to be, and has the same plot as that drunk pastor Ethan Hawke movie. They should have just combined movies.

has the same plot as that drunk pastor Ethan Hawke movie

wait what

the predator levitates when he gets a boner, is what I'm taking from that

Hahaha

I saw it. It’s very silly and a mess but I appreciated its gonzo spirit.

Predator straps on a suicide vest and drinks drano at the end

Spoilers, sorry

Also there are pred dogs and they have little dreadlocks it’s cute

predator 2 >>>>>>

easily, for a start Danny Glover is a real actor.

I can't remember if it depicted quite a bang-on dystopia of the near future with rampant gun crime and ultra militarised trigger happy cops or it was more of an accurate depiction of 1990. But it still pisses all over the first movie.

i love both films but predator 2's overblown comic book energy is just right for me

I just remembered I watched part (all?) of the most recent reboot in a hotel room, and ... what the fuck was that?

I watched the Adrien Brody one about a week ago. It was bad. And he was one of the worst things about it.

I haven't seen Predator 2 since it was in theaters. I remember it being OK, but I was 19 or 20 at the time, so... I wonder how the Jamaican voodoo gangsters come across in 2021.

I remember loving P2, watched in the cinema, rewatched shortly after on dvd still loved it. but watched more recently and oh lawd I couldn't take it.

The first film otoh is still brilliant.

Am I wrong in thinking that in 2 they fucked up the Pred thermal vision thing, and showed one still using it even without their helmet on (which provides the tech in the first place). cannot be arsed googling.com

uh as far as i can remember, no that didn't happen

I wonder how the Jamaican voodoo gangsters come across in 2021.

― but also fuck you (unperson), Tuesday, June 22, 2021 7:42 AM (twenty-six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

broadly-drawn and therefore very poorly but it's also just, idk, an outrageous fictional universe where danny glover supercop becomes worthy of the title intergalactic warrior so i can cut it a lot of slack while i'm watching it

every setpiece is just an awesome visual cornucopia, cf. the strobing subway scene where bill paxton's comic relief character finally blessedly dies, or the long drifting lights of gary busey's alien-capture SWAT team trying to catch the predator in an empty slaughterhouse

(actually i grew to love paxton's extremely goofy performance over the course of the movie even though he has the worst lines on earth)

the decision to have the predator actually say "motherfucker" is not one i would've made but i appreciate the tastelessness of it, again, total comic book energy

and the whole movie is just very visually inventive, all these luminous masses of blue and orange, the camera often either hanging omnisciently over the scene or locked in extreme-close-up so you see the mists of sweat coming off of everyone's face

I think there was a Steven Segal movie that came out the same year as P2 with ridiculously ott/bordering on the racially offensive Jamaican caricature gangsters in it, but can't recall which movie - can only remember some writer in The Face magazine commenting on it quite possibly looking like a new bad trend in Hollywood movies.

uh as far as i can remember, no that didn't happen

Aahh but it did..

(quote from internet):
At 1 hour, 22 minutes, and 14 seconds into the film, the Predator is following Det. Harrigan up a ladder leading out of the meat warehouse. Harrigan just removed City Hunter's bio helmet, so there is no way the pred can see in his infra red (or whatever it's called) vision mode, and yet in this specific shot we get a first person view from pussy face in pred vision though he does not have on his mask. Is this an error or can preds see like this without their bio helmets on?

ohhh i think i misunderstood you

I think there was a Steven Segal movie that came out the same year as P2 with ridiculously ott/bordering on the racially offensive Jamaican caricature gangsters in it, but can't recall which movie - can only remember some writer in The Face magazine commenting on it quite possibly looking like a new bad trend in Hollywood movies.

― calzino, Tuesday, June 22, 2021 8:44 AM (fifty-seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

marked for death.

has a steven seagal and jimmy cliff collaboration on the soundtrack

i remember thinking predator 2 was total horseshit but maybe i'll have to "rescreen" it

from pussy face?

I just remembered I watched part (all?) of the most recent reboot in a hotel room, and ... what the fuck was that?

spent about a year in reshoots forced on Black and multiple re-edits by the studio

The first scene in Predator 2 with the big drug shoot out was intense in the cinema.

I like the first Predator movie and have no interest in any of the other predator movies.

Saw the first one again, for the 50th time or whatever, but this time I listened to the commentary track. It was a blast, learned so much. Like that Arnold had food poisoning for some of the shoot, and had an IV in to stay hydrated; if you watch carefully his weight fluctuates throughout the movie, not because he is sick but because he was being really cautious with food. Learned that the big gun that Jesse shoots had like a 100 pound battery alone, and even he could barely move around with it. I guess it took hours to prep, and could only be shown shooting for six seconds at a time. Also learned that the ending credits were inspired by Altman's "Brewster McCloud." McTiernan is pretty dry/wry throughout, pointing out which sets are real jungle, what's fake, what's second unit, etc. He also takes a brief detour into discussing Columbine and studio depictions of murder.

Love

…how the new Trachtenberg one is a flip of so many themes and elements from his first one.

Wanna watch Prey. A friend tried to get me to watch the cartoon and it looks so shitty I couldn’t get through it.

"commentary track"

Arnold Schwarzenegger is a surprisingly entertaining commentator. Not because he's funny, or informative, but because he sounds gormless. Conan the Barbarian has John Milius going on about the mythic power of the ubermensch while Arnie is like "this is where I punch a horse" and "now I am running" and "this is a sword".

I've always thought of the second Predator as the high point - or at least "that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back" - of the ultraviolent 18-certificate 1980s action film. It came out at roughly the same time as Die Hard 2, Robocop 2, and Total Recall, which all had enormous body counts and masses of bullet wounds going SPLUTCH. It's as if Hollywood was trying to be as nasty as possible. Robocop 2 has a man's chest sawn open (off-screen, but it's still creepy), a spinal column in a big tank, a little kid as a ruthless murderer, a woman's head being crushed by a robot etc.

Predator 2 has people being bisected and skinned, and from what I remember Die Hard 2 held the record for the highest body count in an action film for several years on account of having a plane crash, in addition to people being shot, strangled, and stabbed in the eye with an icicle.

Is that really how you spell icicle? It doesn't have a Y? You learn something every day. There's no Y in icicle. But the top-grossing film of 1990 was Ghost, which had a body count of two, from what I remember, although one of the deaths was surprisingly nasty. From that point onwards everything was 15-cert and even Paul Verhoeven restrained himself.

Which is a shame, because isn't that what cinema is all about? People being stabbed in the eye socket with an icicle, and people having their heads crushed by robots? Barbie had its moments, but I don't recall a sequence where Ken had someone tied to a table and cut open with a circular saw in order to demonstrate the difference between humans and dolls to his henchmen. At no point in Barbie did Margot Robbie impale anyone in the face with a high heel. That would have been a much better film.

Do plastic dolls have spinal columns. They don't. They're monocoque, with a load-bearing skin. Empty on the inside for lightness. Just a hollow plastic skin on the outside that keeps the nothingness inside. I can relate to that.

McTiernan does mention a couple of things he fought to exclude from "Predator" that ended up in the sequel.

Mainstream violent action, at least the guy-with-gun-shooting-everything sort of action, probably peaked in the '80s, whether in arch/satirical Verhoeven mode or one-man-military mode. As far as body counts go, I presume the John Wick movies are somewhere on the level of, say, "Commando" (when I was a kid I once counted the deaths in "Commando," and iirc came close to 200?), but the Wick movies have absorbed some key lessons from their predecessors. The precision of Asian action films, say, or the vulnerability of "Die Hard," where our hero can't die but still bleeds and feels pain and has to figure out things, vs. just standing there with a machine gun firing for five minutes.

McTiernan, in his commentary - and I might be misremembering the nuance - made a case that he wanted to avoid mowing down dozens of people with guns, in this and later in "Die Hard." He notes the most sustained machine gun shooting scenes in the latter come when the baddies take out the windows, and McTiernan comments how much that level of destruction has been aped by others, except now they *also* station people in front of the glass as well for maximum death and destruction. Which is a bit rich, since "Predator" and "Die Hard" are both really violent films about violent people, but he iirc also argued they work less as army recruitment films than, say, "Rambo II."

Another thing he brings up is the casting of Carl Weathers as an actor strong enough (in both senses) to plausibly get in Arnold's face.

doesn't predator start with arnie's team mowing down an entire camp of bad guys?

Do plastic dolls have spinal columns.

spoilers for badlands

xpost I'm not sure of the distinction he was making, but I think he said that was all second unit stuff and implied he didn't like how it was done.

He dismissed it all as A Team stuff, but took credit for the later scene where they all fire their big guns for a couple minutes into the jungle and hit nothing. I think he considered that a statement.