PREDATOR
It's the governor of Minnesota vs. a vagina with tusks!
A knife flies through the air, impaling its target and sticking him to a support beam. Cigar-chomping Arnold Schwarzennegger smirks and quips, "Stick around!"
With that line, Arnold let us know just what kind of humor could be expected from him for the remainder of his career (to date). Sure, Commando gave us lines like that (and a lot more), but after a few humorless flicks between it and this, Arnie established that the Cheesy Arnold One-Liner was here to stay. And movie history has never been the same. I, for one, wouldn?t have it any other way.
Arnold stars as Dutch, a commando (again?) plunged deep into the Central American jungle with his team (including Carl Weathers, Bill Duke, and screenwriter Shane Black) to rescue a bunch of hostages from the clutches of, oh, I don't know. After blasting the badguys to pieces, they don't find hostages. But they do find trouble - in the form of a seven-foot reptilian alien with a personal cloaking device and an heat-sensitive eye on loading up his trophy cabinet back home with human skulls!
Working with the most hilariously macho dialogue I've ever heard (courtesy of Jim & John Thompson), Arnold is, well, Arnold. Carl Weathers is, well, Carl Weathers. Repeat this summation of the performances for each actor in the film. What I don't get is Elpidia Carrillo as a native girl that tags along for the action - she serves no purpose at all in the film, but hangs around anyway, jabbering in some language that nobody understands, until she starts speaking English.
Predator also features none other than that feather-boa-wearing governor of Minnesota, Jesse "The Body" Ventura. His best line: when people decline to partake in his chewing tobacco, he grumbles "You're all a bunch of slack-jawed faggots 'round here! This stuff'll turn you into a goddamned sexual tyrannosaurus. Just like me." I hope that the "sexual tyrannosaurus" angle was part of his election platform.
The Predator itself (played by the late Kevin Peter Hall), when we finally see him, is fairly simple (it is, after all, mostly just a tall guy in an animatronic mask) but nevertheless very cool. Its mouth is like a vagina with tusks! If that doesn't creep you out, well, maybe you're more hardened to this kind of thing than I am. Vagina with tusks! That doesn't creep you out? Are you feeling well?
Anyway, I also like the tentacle-like protrusions that hang off of its head like dreadlocks - they've even got things like Rasta beads in there! (the sequel, which pits a Predator against a Jamaican voodoo drug posse, has ample opportunities for joking around with this but I don't think it ever delivered) The Predator also has day-glo green blood (hey, I think I've figured out what's in Herbert West's reagent).
There isn't much plot here, and thus, not many plot holes. The only one that immediately comes to mind is that the heat-seeing Predator can't seem to detect heat from human eyeballs. Other "holes" - basically, the stupid behavior of some of the soldiers - can easily be explained by the fact that these macho assholes just macho themselves to death. Oh, and maybe it's of some curiosity that the Predator's notion of sportsmanship includes being INVISIBLE, when even visible it blends in pretty well with the jungle. Even to another species, you'd think that'd be cheating.
A lot of people (viewers and critics alike) seemed to miss the motivation of the Predator, and no wonder - it's spoken in two words by Arnold late in the film, almost inaudibly. The makers of Predator 2 seemed to understand that, and make it fairly obvious. But here, unless you're listening, you have to piece it together from little things like the fact that it takes trophies, and frequent comments along the lines of "He's hunting us!"
Directed by John "Die Hard" McTiernan, there's a nice mix of blood-n-guts, chest-thumping action, and suspenseful waits in between. Predator spawned one sequel (and another in longtime limbo, oft-rumored to be helmed by Robert Rodriguez and set on the Predator homeworld) and a big stack of comic book series from Dark Horse, at least one of which pitted the Predators against the Aliens. (and a few more pitted one against Batman!)
And yes, the closing credits start with one of those sequences I treasure where the cast mugs for the camera one at a time while they're given their due credit. I just love those.