Predator

Details

Written by KTP

Predator:  The amount of testosterone produced on and off the set would have gotten you pregnant.

Drop whatever bullshit that is floating in your head and think really, really hard. I want you to think of a single movie in film history that is manlier than Predator. Road House and Gladiator come close, but ultimately fail by Predator's ensemble numbers. Rocky never stood a chance. Even though it’s about a guy getting his face punched in, Rocky gets his happy ending by losing the fight and getting the girl. The Expendables is forced, relying on the standards that the older films reinforced, like....uhhh....Predator. The only way you could even consider sitting at Zeus’s table would be to assemble a team Kelly’s Heroes style. Predator doesn’t just sit at the table, it sits at the head through pure force by creating a cast built from manliness, biceps, and firepower.

This scene that takes less than a minute is more manly that the entire running time of Over the Top.

If you had shitty parents or you spent your youth in a fucking coma, you may have missed out on the greatest action movie ever made. Schwarzenegger leads a team of commandos into the jungle to rescue a cabinet minister held by guerrillas. The team of absolute badasses takes out the guerillas easily. With the encampment in ruins, they find that the mission was a ruse by CIA operative Dillon to shut down the guerrillas operations in the area. The real threat is an alien predator that is systematically hunting down the team for sport with high-tech weaponry and stealth camouflage. It boils down to a final showdown between the Predator and Schwarzenegger using primitive tech (and dem flexes) to shut that motherfucker down.

Billy needs a bodyguard just so he won't fuck people up when he gets drunk at the bar.

Schwarzenegger is headlining the film, but the rest of the cast are in no way fucking slouches by comparison. Mac (Bill Duke) is best known for his role of fucking with that kid in Menace to Society and Action Jackson. Former SEAL and professional wrestler Jesse “The Body” Ventura plays Blain and doubles down by lugging around a Gatling gun designed to fire from helicopters as a fucking accessory. Billy (Sonny Landham) plays the massive tracker of the group with the physique of a Cherokee warrior. You know him as the villain from 48 Hours and the guy that should have destroyed Chuck Norris in Firewalker. Poncho (Richard Chaves) is the only one of the group that actually served in Vietnam. Hawkins (Shane Black) seems the weakest of the bunch until you realize he sold scripts for millions of dollars. Not bad for a guy with pussy jokes. The cherry on top is CIA agent Dillon (Carl Weathers). You know him as the guy that punched Rocky in the face repeatedly. Now, you send this team of ultimate badasses on a mission into the heart of the jungle pitted against one of the greatest designed movie monsters ever created.

Even the goddamn alien had muscles.

While the end result of the film increased gains in the gym on a global scale and was responsible for an increase in child birth nine months after release, behind the scenes was legendary in itself. Initially, the Predator was played by an up and coming Jean Claude Van Damme who had to wear a really shitty, bulky alien suit in the middle of a fucking jungle. For a guy that just wanted to show off his arts, he hated it and thought it was fucking stupid. He was also roughly 5'9 which was tiny compared to Schwarzenegger's team of pure muscle. Let's let that sink in. Jean Claude Van Damme was not fucking man enough to play the scary alien when stacked against the commando meat machine. He left after two days and went on to show off his sweet splits a couple years later in Bloodsport. The producers stop for a second to reevaluate the suit and came up with a reasonable conclusion. It was fucking stupid. They had to stop production for 8 months while Stan Winston came up with a new design so the super tall Kevin Michael Hall could set out to convincingly wreck the shit out of Schwarzenegger's crew as the now iconic Predator.

For three weeks, Schwarzenegger endured the cold half-naked and covered in clay for the final showdown. They tried to warm him up with booze but that just got him drunk.

The cast was seething testosterone during production. Arnold brings his gym where ever he films and gives everyone a key. He would show up every morning around 5 am. Ventura, not wanting to be upstaged, would show up around a quarter to 5 and splash water all over himself to give the allusion he had worked out. It all culminated when Ventura found out he had biceps an inch bigger than Schwarzenegger. Schwarzenegger later told wardrobe to "measure again" and lie that his were bigger than Ventura's. Carl Weathers tried to keep the appearance that his muscles were all natural and he didn't need to work out like the rest of the crew, but would sneak in a workout every morning at 3 am. The greatest story would have to go to Sonny Landham who would only agree to the film if he had a bodyguard around him. The bodyguard wasn't for his protection, but for everyone else since he would get drunk and try to fight everyone around him.

At the opening when the team is heading in to the jungle in Hueys, Ventura sets the tone laying down the machismo as thick as workshop grease. Little Richard is blaring from the boombox. That's right. Predator was so manly that they turned a song written by one of the most flamboyantly gay musicians ever into the song you want playing when you drop into the jungle to wreck some shit. Passing around snuff, disappointed with the non-partakers, Ventura booms, "Bunch of slack-jawed faggots around here." Predator kicks the door in of any other action movies that declares the same. If we are lucky in our lifetime we might get something that comes close to being as awesome, but as hard as Hollywood tries, nothing can reach the bar that Predator set on Olympus.