After watching PREDATOR for the first time since the ’80s and realizing that it’s actually a good movie, I decided to watch PREDATOR 2. I never seen this one before and I knew the reputation wasn’t too good. More ominous, instead of John McDIEHARDTiernan the director is Stephen LOST IN SPACE Hopkins. Not lookin good.

But damn if the opening isn’t a scorcher. It starts out with the familiar Predator POV heat vision in the jungle… but as it pans across you realize it’s not the jungle – it’s the outskirts of Los Angeles. THE URBAN JUNGLE! In the futuristic year of 1997. (Think about it: a Predator is loose in Los Angeles at the same time Snake Plissken is looking for the president in New York. Meanwhile, the Spice Girls are topping the charts and TITANIC is breaking box office records.)

Anyway the scorchin part is when the Predatorcam flies across the city and finds some TFM (total fuckin mayhem) goin down on a city block. It’s a shootout between cops and a gang of maniac Colombian drug dealers, but it’s a bigger war zone than the one that Dutch and his special ops team went into early in PREDATOR. You got flaming cop cars, wounded cops and motorcycles laying all over the street, cars blowin up and flippin through the air, machine guns firing every which way, cops running around with metal shields, and reporters (including Morton Downey Jr., remember him?) frantically trying to broadcast the play-by-play. When our hero Danny Glover shows up his colleagues tell him that they don’t have all their guys there because some of them are in the other shootout going on somewhere else in town. This is not a great movie, but it’s a truly great opening, picking you up by the hair and dropping you right into the thick of things.

So you quickly get the idea that maybe 1997 L.A. is not the best place to be a non-Predator. One might even consider it to be a total fuckin hellhole. And there’s alot of details to show that throughout the movie, like the way everybody always has sweatstains on their armpits and their chests. (I guess there’s a heatwave, which fits with what was said in the first movie about Predator tourists choosing to vacation in hot places.) (more…)

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