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You got tired of pushing pencils? It's a terrible Arnold. I'll do better as this podcast alone. Predator is coming up next.
Whatever this out here, it killed Hopper. Nothing like it has ever been on earth before. She says the jungle. It just came alive and took it.
It kills for pleasure. He wants to keep alive. It hunts for sport. It's killing us by the time we put this time.
If it leads, we can kill it. It's making a wrong man to hunt. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Predator rated on the hunt begins Friday June 12th at theaters everywhere.
Much like we assembled the dream team in Predator and all those dudes around the helicopter, they're on a zoom here. My dream team, a lot of testosterone in this room. Kyle Brain is here. Shay Sarano is here.
Chris Ryan is here. We're going to talk about Predator, a movie that is just loaded with masculinity. Shay Sarano, let's talk. Why do you love this movie so much?
This is my favorite action movie of all time. I just love every single part of this thing. I was trying to figure out how do I measure what all I like in an action movie. I was making this whole John Hollinger gigantic formula to calculate it.
Ultimately, I ended up settling on this one thing. How much of a movie can I watch before I need to watch basically all of it? You don't understand? There's not more than any 10-second stretch in this movie that you could show me if I've never seen it before that it doesn't look interesting to me.
That's as short as it gets. John Wick is another one of my favorites, but you can probably find a 90-second stretch where I could see it and be like, I mean, maybe I'll watch it, but I don't know. But in Predator, I couldn't find more than 10 or 15 seconds here that just didn't give me so fucking pumped. What do you got, Kyle?
It's just glorious. When you were a kid in the 80s, you didn't get a superhero movie every 20 minutes. It just didn't happen. And this thing watching it back now, it feels like an Avengers movie in a way.
You got the Terminator and Apollo and the body and the green beret from Commando. And they're all just juiced out of their heads. I mean, they're in great shape naturally. And there's this villain who's like Thanos, and they can't kill him, and he's too good.
It's just like, we did Commando as like kind of like a little apertive to this. And that's like, you know, poison finishing their set and then Metallica comes on. You're like, holy shit, this is different. I think to quote Shay Serrano on the Ray Watchables text chain, like, Predator fucking rules.
It's so good. It's so metal. Chris. To play off of what Kyle's saying, the best part about this movie is how simple it is.
It's just let's put these fucking roided out bash brothers in the jungle and have them fight the ultimate killing machine and it's part slash movie and part action movie. And it is completely free speaking of superhero movies, completely free of mythology, of backstory, of like, wait, was this guy in the third movie, but he was going to do this and like, why do I want it? No, no, no, no, no, it's just Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bill Duke and Jesse Ventura machine gunning the jungle is so simple. But the simplest movies wind up being the most rewatchable because you don't have to like reset your brain to understand everything about it.
It's so primal. I can't believe he left that Sunnylandum as you. Unbelievable. To me, this is a Sunnylandum movie that Arnold's also in.
I thought this is Sunnylandum production. So I made my testosterone movie Mount Rushmore because it's like, Balgo Mount Rushmore kind of. Whatever you want it to be, but just the movies that just ooze the most testosterone where it's just reeking off the screen. It's reeking off the screen.
People are being sprayed with testosterone. Predator, I think, is the Michael Jordan of the category they go to. Fast Five, I would have in there as well. And I have nobody, those two movies have so much testosterone.
That's it. I don't need more on the Mount Rushmore. I just have those two. And I think the common theme of both of them is sleeveless, arms, muscles, and body butter.
Jay, does this movie get enough credit for introducing body butter and greasy arms to the American pop culture scene? Because I don't think it does. Whatever you were going to say after, does this movie get enough credit for whatever? Everybody talks about how Die Hard is the most influential action movie of all time or the most important or whatever.
Predator is right there with it. Nose for nose, step for step. It is up there. Goddamn, I love this.
You know what else? I just, there's this whole stretch before he became a little self-aware when Arnold's ripping off one-liners in these movies. And I don't know, when is that Anne Chris? Where it's definitely in the 80s.
Is it kindergarten cop? T2 is what I feel like the movies themselves are being sold off of those one-liners, right? And then it's kindergarten cop and last action hero kind of play with the meta-ness of it though. This movie is not meta.
I think he, I think he, I think he had loved a couple of these, which we'll get to. I think he's really excited to like rib Carl Weathers. I bet he like rehearsed that scene when he sees it. What's the matter?
Does that, all that stuff? But to me, this is the total Arnold package. We've not done a few Arnold movies here. Kyle, if you were going to do the Arnold checklist of things you need in Arnold action movies, anything missing, I guess like there's no girl, there's no love interest piece.
But everything else is here. Well, what I like about it is, you know, Bill, the unintentional comedy thing like, it's not there a lot. Like it's, it's a very serious movie. And you know, he gets in the one-liner about stick around, which I think he ad-libs.
And then the other thing is like, it's just the Shane Black making the sex jokes, but like Arnold is dead serious. There's nothing going on with the woman. And like, you just didn't have that back then. There was always has to be a joke or some shit like that.
I think I was taken away just how serious it takes itself. And I love it because he incidences hell. So like all that whole, like he shoots an alligator in the movie eraser and says, you're luggage, like that's farce. Like that's years from now.
This is dead serious, Arnold, like I'm going to be an action star and I'm killing it. This and Total Recall are my two favorite Arnold ensemble movies. Like they're the movies where he actually gets to hang out with people because a lot of the times he is, it's him against the world. But in these two movies, I really do feel like he gets to play with either guys who are probably legit think they are as tough as him at that time.
You know, like Ventura probably is like, I can go toe to toe with this guy. Carl Rogers looks like he can go toe to toe with him. And also like Bill Duke is a good actor. You know what I mean?
Like the dude playing Pancho is a good actor. Like those guys are like delivering the lines and really convincing ways you actually feel a real sense of, I mean, altered, but still realism there. Right. There's a lot of things I'm excited about for this podcast, but Shay starts on Pancho or way, way up there.
We're going to get to them later. Shay. I'm just going to read to you this Wikipedia sentence. Go for it.
And you tell me if Wikipedia peaks right here. It's Apex Wikipedia. This is its description of predator. It stars Arnold Schwarzenegger as the leader of an elite paramilitary rescue team on a mission to save hostages and guerrilla held territory in a Central American rainforest who encountered the deadly predator.
A technologically advanced alien who stalks and hunts them down. Do you think this was pitched this way in the room? And when did they buy the pitch like halfway through that sentence? Or did the person have to take the studio executive?
Like, you've been a couple of those meetings, Shay. Did the guy had to like take a break, like let a cigarette and just be like, I can't believe what just happened. You've blown my mind. What what transpire is in the pitch of that?
It's got to be perfect. Yeah, they walked in and they're like, listen, it's Arnold and an alien in a jungle and they fight. And then the guy just fucking has a pass out and they woke him up 25 minutes later. The producer looks at his pile of cocaine and he's like, this is pretty good stuff.
One thing I didn't understand about this, and this is one of the many reasons I think Fast and Furious that has, they're making the ninth one. We'll litigate the trailer some other time. But Kyle, the concept of basically a gang, the groups of dudes, a bunch of muscle guys, people filled different roles. Predator nails this.
Why didn't we have more of these? Why weren't there more movies where you just put six guys together and they have to do something? It's I mean, if you think about it, you have like the cool guy and then you have the smart guy and then you have the nerd. It's kind of like Breakfast Club with machine guns.
There's each little and it's just filled. And it's like when Billy finally dies, you're like, oh, now they're really fucked because this was this was the smart guy. Like they needed him. And I don't know why it's a perfect formula.
Glasses guy, Ray guy, a huge machine gun guy. And it's almost like a video game a little bit, but that's why I love it. Like you feel like you're playing it as you watch it. They basically became expendables, right?
This was the formula where probably somebody had the conversation like when he said men are not expendable in the movie. And eventually they are. It's a throwback to the dirty dozen. It's a throwback to the professionals.
I mean, you can tell McTyrin grew up watching those movies, watching them on a mission movies. And then he just applies it to like a totally like widescreen blockbuster format. Well, what's fascinating about this is we'll get to it in the research, but like they're ad-libbing so much of this stuff on the fly. They have to reshoot the last third of this movie.
I'll just spoil it now. They basically sent Arnold back into the jungle. And the last 30 minutes of this movie was basically their second try at trying to make it work with the predator outfit, all that stuff. Shay, when you see this movie now is the predator outfit and the special effects?
Are they endearing to you? Do you wish they could? Are they perfect? Are they time sensitive perfect?
What would you have changed about the costume and any of that stuff? I think that this is I think it holds up really, really well. We were talking about a movie that's 30 something years old at 35. 34 and a half.
Like just watching it now, you don't realize it at the time you don't because you're still pulled in. But if you're paying attention, we don't actually get like a good look at the predator until almost an hour in. It's just like the like ghost of this thing out there somewhere that they play off of. We get all these really great shots from like the ground up of them sort of listening and sensing something as dangerous as around them.
But then when he shows up, this is this is honestly my favorite movie alien of any of the ones we've gotten. Like obviously you can make a case for the Xenomorph from the alien franchises being like the best alien ever. But just from a practical standpoint, when he takes that mask off, even now watching I watch it last night again this morning, when he takes that mask off for the first time and you see his face and you're like, like I had no idea what was going to be under there, but it wasn't that. I knew that wasn't that.
This fucking teeth open up and he's just, he's perfect. And it's this, I think a really like neat trick they did is they just made them super tall, which is always intimidating. You got, you got, was it in Kevin Peter Hall is like in the suit? Wasn't an intentional trick though.
I remember you wrote how many years ago you wrote a whole Greenland piece about if Jean-Claude Van Damme had played the, had played Predator, which he was cast and fired. You have five, five, nine and a half Van Damme as the, as the Predator. Like Kyle's smiling happily. I think he kind of likes this scenario.
You seem happy right now. Well, you know what? I heard that there was a scene where Van Damme's playing the Predator and Dylan and Dutch are going to kill it. And then the Predator does the splits on two trees.
And there's another scene where the Predator shows his perfectly tanned ass to the platoon. And then there's another one where the Predator kills everybody and gets really drunk and then there's like bad clap dancing with the spenders on it was on the cutting room floor. I think it would have a very different film bill. I would have liked all that stuff.
Chris, does that break your brain Van Damme as the, as the Predator? It's an amazing what if, but Shae's right, man. It's like this, the way they handle the Predator in this movie is basically the Jaws format where you don't show it. You don't show it.
You let people's imagination fill in what it could be. And in the meantime, I think even the thing that, I mean, I don't want to step on what's age the best, but the kills in this movie are you're like, I'm terrified of this. And you can see why the soldiers who have like all they talk about is Afghanistan and we did Libya, we did this, Berlin, whatever. And then like they'd show up in this jungle.
And as soon as they see their voice, they're getting torn apart, they're, they're scared as the viewer. Yeah. When Billy says it. Yeah.
When he says he's afraid and you're like, oh, if he's afraid, we should all be afraid right now. This, you know what I'm saying? That was some of the best act. You went back to know, man, some other waiting force.
Sunny Lando pretending to be afraid was probably the biggest stretch in this whole movie because I guarantee that dude was never scared at any moment in his life by anything ever. There's some great Sunny Lando stories. One of my favorites, Arnold said he wanted to do a film like the Magnificent Seven, where quote, a team of guys worked together, mission accomplished. This movie was directed by John McTiernan.
Chris, what did he do two years later? He did die hard. Yeah. At that point, you just retire.
Yeah. But then you go off and you make hunt for October and then like, I mean, like with this guy couldn't be stopped for a resume. Yeah, what a resume. If you rip off predator and die hard, that could be a walk off.
Like that could be MJ going to play baseball at that point. We're just like, I'm just going to make, I don't know, and why people who raised action movies ever. Not even like 20 years apart. Produced by Joel Silver, who has popped up on this podcast a lot as we keep doing the action stuff over and over again, written by these two brothers, Jim and John Thomas.
This is apparently true. Rocky Four comes out. He fights a Russian. I don't know if you guys have seen Rocky Four.
It's a familiar with that movie. So there was a joke in Hollywood about Rocky Five. He's going to have to fight an alien because there's nobody left for him to fight. He's now going to Russia.
What's next? Fight an alien. These guys hear that joke and they write a whole script, and then it becomes developed. They decide to make Arnold's in.
They have to wait for Arnold. Everyone's waiting for Arnold in the 80s. It was like, if it was Zimmer Stallone, you signed him up and then you had to wait like 10 months until he was actually able to hear that joke because in Rocky Five, he doesn't fight an alien if it's Tommy Morrison. Tommy Gunn!
Tommy Gunn! That's not an alien. It's unfortunate the Rocky guys hear the joke. So they ended up doing it, and we'll get to all the stuff with the shoot.
But $50 million budget made $98 million. It spawned three sequels. It spawned two alien predator movies. I hesitate to ask this, but Shay, the sequels and the alien predator movies, I'm assuming you like those.
I don't like Predator 2, but I do like Predator. I do like Predator's with Adrian Brody. That's really good. That's the one that Robert Rodriguez produced, right?
Yes. Sign me up for that one. That one's really good. Did you like the Predator or the Shane Black one?
It was like it was better than Predator's. It could be third place on the list. That's fine. I know they did a lot of stuff with this, but it does feel like they squandered sequel stuff with this.
Yeah. I mean, Danny Glover in the second one. I love Danny, but that's a tough act to follow. It just didn't work, and Conchino Lanzo was cool and Paxton's cool, but it was a Jamaican gang in the city, and I lost it very quickly.
It's a cool premise to be like, let's put the Predator in a city, but it just has a completely different dynamic. My theory on the late 80s, early 90s action movies is that people had stopped doing cocaine at that point, but there were so many cocaine after effects that sometimes they were led to positives, other times they led to a lot of rehab movies. Yeah. This movie also spawned two governors, which I think what the Fandall ads would have been on that for the first 20 years of this movie, or 15 years, when did Vintore become Minnesota?
That must have been in the 90s, actually. So I guess it would have been the first five years of this movie. The sneaky thing, Bill, is that your guy Sonny was also running for governor. There's a third almost is that Billy, the character, was in politics and attempted to be on the whole ticket for governor.
There was going to be three. What was in that Oklahoma, right? Was that where Sonny was running for? I don't remember the state, but he was the dead series.
I'm like almost there. They would have had three. Sonny's platform was like, I'm going to kill you. If you don't vote for me, like literally, I will kill you.
And it almost went. It almost happened. This movie was nominated for an Oscar for Best Special Effects. And it got three stars from Roger Ebert.
I was very excited about it. I was wincing as I clicked on the Roger Ebert. He said, quote, predator moves at a breakneck pace, strong and simple characterizations, good location of photography, terrific special effects, and it supplies what it claims to supply, an effective action movie. I mean, we covered this in Commando.
Commando kicks off Arnold as an A-list action star. This movie kicks off the famous Arnold run. You're out of here. You're out of here.
All-time ridiculous where you got running man, a total recall and kindergarten cop and twins and T2, and it just doesn't stop. Yeah. Well, the beginning of Commando, the first shot of Arnold, he's carrying the tree, and you're like, all right, this dude's huge. He's cutting the wood.
The first shot of him here, he's just a full fucking rock star, just lighting this cigar, waiting for his roadies to get out of the chopper so he can take the state. It's a star Arnold. And then he just completely punks Dylan when he meets him out of the gates. Chris, do you remember?
Because I guess, well, Kyle and you were on the same age, but do you remember the Apollo Creed piece of this? Because I just didn't really know Carl Weathers has anything other than Apollo Creed. And I feel like this opens the door to actually Jackson. Yeah, actually Jackson comes after that, which is actually like a very like underrated, I think 80s.
You talk about rehab. I like it. It's got vanity and Sharon stuff. I don't think I knew, I don't think I knew of Carl Weathers outside of Apollo Creed.
No. I honestly didn't know he was in other things. I just assumed he was a boxer that, I didn't know any better. I was in high school.
I just assumed he was some boxer that he was a Rocky 4. I didn't realize he had this whole acting piece. But yeah, so the Apollo Creed piece of this, and it's right after Rocky 4 where he does. So it's kind of like he comes back to life a little bit.
FYI, he's really playing Apollo Creed. Like there's no difference between Dylan and like, if you're like, hey, what are the three ways of Apollo Creed and Dylan are different? You're like, I don't know. Is there a way?
All right. The cool thing is though, is that his character in this movie is basically Paul Riser and Aliens. Like he's the rat character. Like he's the one who's kind of sold these guys out a little bit without telling them the truth.
But then he's also like jacked up and still able to shoot a machine gun once he gets his arm shot on him. Is this your favorite rat character in an action movie? Because they don't sleep on the guy in Rambo for a split part two. Who doesn't tell him Murdoch coming for you?
Why this one is my favorite is because even after you find out that he basically sent them all to the jungle to die, you're still like, I love this guy. I'm not that mad about it. He's very effective. Very effective.
How do you get mad at Carl Weathers? You can't. We're going to go to the category. It's because there's so much to cover here, but we'll take a quick break.
All right. Most rewatchable scene. I'm going to rip through these if I left anything out, tell me. God, Arnold saying Carl Weathers is just awesome.
Dylan, watch it. Dylan, you son of a bitch. Dylan, you son of a bitch. What's the matter?
The CIA got to pushing too many pencils. It's so many things I like, including basically, Dylan has to do the whole, we need the best, which I think is a staple of an action group. It's like, look, man, you don't really do that anymore. They're like, Kyle, you a piece of shit.
We teach other that way anymore. Remember in the last dance when Jordan saw a bird and he was like, fuck you bitch. And that's all right. That's what the Dutch just did.
Dylan's perfect. It was pandemic when we're back in an office, Chris. I'm just going to greet you that way for the first three months. Chris, you fucking asshole.
What's the matter, Ryan? You got to push into many pencils? It's in the running for most 80s movie scene. That entire thing.
And how does it come like a huge meme? Is the shake is becoming this huge? Yeah. So you got that one.
This isn't necessarily watchable, but I just got to flag it. The skin body's revelation is pretty harrowing. The movie is a 180 fast. Where it's like, yeah, we're going to go find the ceiling.
Wait, are those skin bodies hanging up? What the fuck is going on here? The fact that they're up in the tree makes it so much more terrifying, because if you just see them laying on the ground, you're like, all right, a person could have done that, but that they're hanging from 30 feet in the air. This is something serious is out here.
Yeah. It suddenly becomes not as fun of a movie, even though it's an incredibly fun movie. I just wrote down hostage rescue scene. The countdown, right?
Yes. Yes. I mean, you have, I don't know if this is in the script or Arnold ad lives it, but he lifts the truck to send the truck. Where do you go?
It's still on with this too, right? Or you would have these moments where they would just like, let me just do something completely incongruous for human behavior. I'm going to try to lift this truck from behind. He does it, sends it in.
They're just shooting all around. He rips off the stick around line, the knock-lock line. Jesse rips off his iconic, I ain't got time to bleed. We got that whole thing.
Some of the pictures go getting like an Alabama trick. You're hit. You're bleeding, man. I ain't got time to bleed.
Okay. You got time to duck? It's a pretty unassailable, great seven minutes. He does the same thing and twins.
There was like a stretch where he was just picking up the backs of cars. He's like, it's just going to be a thing I do in movies. All right, go for it. Chris, anything we miss with the hostage rescue scene there's a lot of bullets being shot.
Yeah, I was going to say that this is got one of the iconic 80s kills to me is when they machine gun the dudes in the helicopter and they are really dead. And then they shoot a grenade into the helicopter. And this is just like 80s overkill. It would never just be like bang and walk away.
It would be like two guys shoot people with M60s and then another guy comes up with a grenade launcher and the helicopter explodes. Yeah, I love it that they tell them it's like before they went into the jungle. They're like, Hey guys, these guns that you'll have, they only work from you have to be 10 feet or closer and you got to shoot them 60 times in the chest to work. And they're like, there's a part where Ventura uses the Gatling gun and he shoots a guy so many times that the guy catches on fire.
80s stunt with like the like the they basically have like a vault that they jump on as soon as they shot flying across the screen. I think about relationship with how I how I understood things like this where he went into locations. And you know, you know, the internet back then, but you knew stuff was happening in Central America, but you didn't really understand any of it. So just be like, yeah, they're gorillas and there's camps and be like, okay, I have no idea how realistic it was that they're in the middle of nowhere.
There's dozens of people. There's all this machinery and there's bullets and they're like, but why? What was the purpose? What was the purpose of the want to get into slow burn Iran country right now?
It's got some echoes of the Iran country situation. Yeah, because there's Russians and there's the the the army, but then there's also like a rebel patrol and the CIA is there. It was a great era because Cobra has this too, where it's basically like, we just need an excuse to put a bunch of bad guys in one place. We don't need to have them to have a purpose.
It doesn't matter where this is commando, another one. This huge giant complex. It's like, what's happening there? Why are all these people there?
Are they going to work? Are they punching in? It's just some island off the coast of Santa Barbara. We're just going to go blow the shit out.
But this is an entire decade of movies like this, right? Over and over again, it's like, oh, man, well, we got to go to this spot. These people will be there and we'll shoot them and they're all going to have terrible aim as they shoot at us. They're going to miss be 10 feet away.
Anyway, I love that scene. Next one I wrote down was what's got Billy so spooked. Oh my god, this is what Billy Landham gets scared. Billy, I would watch a mini film that's just a compilation of Billy tracking.
Billy being like, I don't know, major. Can't quite figure it out. Staring at the trees. It's funny because it's not much different than his 48 hours character, Billy Bear.
Same kind of thing where he's just kind of looking around, surveying the scene, never seemed scared, super intimidating. Hawkins has some trouble here. And then we get the what in God's name, which I was enjoying. Next one I wrote down was Jesse dies, which leads to Bill Duke's what the fuck face.
I don't know what's going to be scared or Bill Duke being scared. What is more disarming? Neither person should be scared ever. What I really like about this Bill Duke performance, there's 100 things, but one of them is that Billy is very open.
I'm afraid right now. I'm a little bit scared. When when Bill Duke gets nervous or intimidated, he just fucking sprints at the predator. He's like, I don't know what to do.
I'm just where here we go and just takes takes off running after him. He never he never looks visibly afraid, but you can tell he's afraid on the inside and he's like, there's only reaction that I know how to do because this is my life is I guess I'm going to fight this alien in a jungle right now. I think Mac is the heart of the movie. I really do like I know that Dutch is the lead, but I think Mac has the full character arc and there's that great part where he's just lost and Dutch is going, Mac, Mac, Sergeant.
And then I'm like, dude, I'm freaked out. I want to go home because Mac is terrified and he's trying to cut his face off with a razor like he's completely lost his mind. He's beautiful. I know.
Why wasn't Bill Duke in every Arnold movie? I would have thought after the first two Arnold was just like, this guy's in my movies. We're just we're working him in. It's like Eric Stoltz and Noah Bombak squeezing him in.
Don't talk back. This also includes the 90 seconds of gun firing, which is intentional. Probably the smartest moment of this movie, right? McTernan's basically making fun of American action movies and he's doing it.
And meanwhile, they're shooting at nothing. Nothing happens. They just destroyed jungle, but it serves the story because then Duke's character is like, I shot 200 rounds at that thing, straight like point blank and I didn't hit anything. Arnold tries to lure the predator out when they catch him and then all of a sudden he's gone is a really good scene.
I wrote down this for the next one. Apollo dies, sunny dies, get to the choppa. Arnold jumps in water, mud disguise. You said that all in a row.
Perfect. Perfect. Get to the choppa. Get to the choppa now.
That's exactly what the script said and they went to shoot it. I won't ask a question about when Arnold is when they do the next thing. Kyle, do you think that when Pancho gets hit with the log, they would have played the injury jazz music, like they do over NFL? Like when a guy, when a guy blows up his knee and it's just like, we'll be right back.
It's like done, done, done, done, done. And then come back to commercial engine and says, well folks, we have a very tough piece of footage to show here. If you're sensitive, please look away. It's a 7,000 pound log going into the pancho and talk like, I can make it.
I know you can't find it. Yeah, they're taping him up. They're taping him up. He's gonna try and give it a go.
You knew in the mid 80s, you knew when you saw Pancho, he was not making it to the end. Pancho was going, he was done. Arnold making the weapons is really enjoyable. It's a little reminiscent of John Wick going to buy all of his stuff when we just get to see John Wick loading guns and getting bullets ready and stuff like that.
And same thing with Ram, in first blood, when Rambo is making like his makeshift, I can watch people make weapons in the jungle all day. Castile made $400 billion just doing that. It's always gonna win. Predator catches Arnold, takes his mask off.
Arnold says, you're one ugly motherfucker. The mask was great. It was a big deal in the 1980s. Great.
This, the thriller makeup, there weren't a lot of, you know, great special effects, Mass stuff, America, Werewolf in London. But this was like, this holds up. I think it's really good. Then the ending would be the last one.
Any rewatchable scenes, did I miss? Yes, Chris. So I don't want to introduce a whole new category here. But as we've been doing this podcast for a while, I've noticed that there's something that almost goes beyond a rewatchable scene.
And I would put it into the category of this is a Pruder scene. It's the scene that you basically rewind frame by frame to watch again and again and again. And for me, this is a Pruder scene of Predator is the guys getting off the chopper and getting to see what these guys wear in their like casual life before they get all out. So let's just go through really clearly.
I just want to break this down. So Jesse Ventress, first off the chopper, he's wearing a black MTV t-shirt, tucked in the jeans. Thumbs up already in the plane. Second, he's evidently his best friend in the unit, Bill Duke, full business suit.
No explanation where he's coming from, why he's wearing a business suit, best friend of the t-shirt. No idea. Second, so third, go ahead. It's not funny to watch, but when you're saying it right now.
Yeah, third is Pancho. He's wearing a butt, a short sleeve button up, but it's unbuttoned to his navel with a gold chain. I won't bring him that back soon as soon as we're back after vaccines, I'm dressing like Pancho all summer. Then Hawkins just tanked up.
That's cool. And Billy sick, tri-colored windbreaker. And then Donch is just wearing a bright red polo. Like he's just gotten a bunch of the golf club, but he had to come down to Central America.
It's just unreal how good that is. So you think there's a wardrobe designer for all that? Yeah, and you were all talking to these guys like, oh, well, Blaine was probably at like Monsters of Rock. But when he got the ball.
Headbangers ball. Yeah, exactly. He was saying I was Ricky Rachton. Shane, what do you have for most of us?
We'll see. You know what I think it is? I think that this is a dumb pick, but I'm shooting into the jungle guy. I love everything about it because there's so many times when you watch any sort of movie, an action movie, especially where they're like, okay, what's this like a metaphor or whatever.
And this one is just like some guy shooting into the jungle. I love that. I love that it's Bill Duke first, just unloading everything he has and then picking up the gallant gun too. I love everybody running in behind him.
Nobody asks any questions. They're just like, he's shooting. I'm shooting too. They have this great shot of like what the jungle looks like before they start.
And then you see it afterward and it's all it's just destruction. And it's like they just ruined this whole patch of it's going to take 400 years for this to go back right now for no reason at all. And it's terrifying the part afterward that Chris mentioned. And they do all of that and realize it didn't help.
Nothing happened. They nicked the thing. There's a little blood on a piece of leaf or something. And that's it.
That's to me is the one that I just get the most excited about seeing. Nobody's saying anything. It's just guys being dudes being guys. And I'm like, all right, I want to watch that for I would watch 45 minutes of that one scene.
What do you got? I think it's the main event. I think it's Dutch versus the predator at the end. We had never seen Arnold go up against someone bigger and stronger than him at that point.
I mean, this was like when Batman fought Wayne and he's like, holy shit, this guy can kick my ass. And I just think we had just seen him in commando where he's fighting Bennett who's built like Bartolo Colón in like a chain mail. And now we go against the seven footer who's just beating his ass. And we had never seen that before.
That's me is everything. That's a good call. He looks scared. We have Chris other than the wardrobe scene.
I think for me, it's like it's that slasher film sequence of when it starts to pick off all those guys and like the when Blaine gets killed and the way Blaine gets killed because like Jesse just even turns like chess just turns into red powder. Like when I think it was the room and you're just like, is anyone who live in this movie? This is crazy. I think it's like the slasher movie part.
I would say that seems particularly. That's a good call. Is this the same thing as when I had where it's Apollo dies, get to the Chaba Arnold joke of the water. But just guys, yeah.
All right. I'm going with that as well. What's age the best? The first sight of Arnold in the copter smoking a cigar is just age.
Fantastic. It looks like he's filming a cigar aficionado magazine shoot, but that magazine hasn't existed yet. We didn't talk about Arnold's battle cry. We'll talk about it.
What's age the best? Unbelievable job by him at last. What's playing Craig? We'll play it right now.
It lasts like 12 seconds. Great acting by him. Oh, excellent. The pipes and like really it's it's the it's the last one of a trio because you get one from the predator when he's fixing himself.
And then when Dylan dies with the blade, he has like a guttural roar too. So there's a lot of muscles and screaming, but Arnold's brings the house down. You know what else it was. Another fuck you to slice alone.
Slack climbs the mountain, does a trucker. It's saying it's like, yeah, that wasn't good enough. But when we do this, I'm gonna have a fucking Lord of the Flies horn. And I'm going to screen for 12 seconds with my shirt off.
Jesse Ventura's gun, I think is a what's age the best, just as like an incredible movie prop. Old painless. The one liners, which a lot of these have as soon as YouTube was created and rounded in a form, I feel like the Arnold one liner movie YouTube clip was like one of the first five things somebody put together. Get to the chopper stick around.
I also like the if it bleeds, we can kill it. Amazing one, which I think would be an amazing high school yearbook quote for the kids out there. Don't you think we'll see what that also has another rocky fourth thing where if it bleeds, we can kill it is just drago and he's cut. He's not a machine.
He's a man. It's the same thing. The mythology of this movie has aged incredibly well. This is a great internet movie.
We'll cover some of it in here, but just a cliff notes, 100 degrees, humid bugs everywhere, lots of bugs and ant stories and people just getting into life. All crew whole crew has diarrhea. Full crew die with the entire time. It's a diarrhea festival.
They made this huge mistake filming in the summer and the jungle was brown, so they had to have this makeshift greenery. They had to move around from scene to scene, so it seemed more green and lush. Von Dom getting fired as the predator. Look, this could have been its own podcast.
There's an oral history that has six different versions of what might have happened. Nobody can agree. When I say nobody can agree, the stories are so different. At one point, he's not in the film at all.
Another thing is the mask was too hot. He was too short. He snapped back at the thing. I still don't know what happened.
There's five AM waitlifting session stories about Carl Weathers getting through it. They were getting up in the middle of the night to start pumping. That's all out there, and then the reshoot of the final and third of the film, which is pretty unorthodox. What else did you notice, Chris?
Anything else? What's the best? No, just for the mythology of this movie. Oh, I mean, my favorite stuff is honestly, I mean, this is half a internet research stuff, but the fact that they've got the most notorious famous screenwriter in the 80s on the set, but he's an actor, and they're like, you'll do rewrites, right?
He's like, fuck, you do rewrites. I'm here to just play a part, and they basically, the rumors, they paid him back by killing him off first. He wouldn't do free rewrites, but that being said, McTyranin's like, Shane Black would just be sitting around at the cafeteria or the lunch table and would say the biggest house joke or something, and that would just wind up in the movie. Yeah.
More would say it's the best Sunnylandum. Yeah. Talk about it. What a character.
Chris, tell me when you want to have the Sunnylandum talk. Well, it's just right now. Later? What are you going to do now?
Look, there's a run from 70, I would say from New York and Alien and those movies through this period of time, where the people who were in these action movies felt very authentic. Not necessarily dudes that you knew, but if you told me Sunnylandum, if I just saw him at a bar, I'd be like, you want to get the beer first? That's cool. Yeah, take my chair.
Yeah. They feel authentically rugged dudes. You know what I mean? It's like Yafet Kodo in Alien is like an authentically.
Yeah, right. But I think when you see Sunnylandum, you're just like, I need to know everything about this dude. You're drawn to him. He's such a great character actor in these movies.
Yeah, it's 48 hours. I don't know if he really says anything in that movie. I don't know if he has more than one line of dialogue, and he's so indelible. It's such a hard thing to pull off.
And you know, when he cuts across his chest in this movie, like, I remember seeing that first time, I was like, I am freaking out. What is happening? I also think it just seems, it does seem very method. Like when he's doing the tracker stuff, and he's doing that stuff about, there were 12 gorillas that came in from the north, six men were at US issued army boots, and they were shooting in all the way, Jesus, Billy, holy shit, you know, all that stuff, just looking around.
And like, he's like some sort of Dr. Strange thing, and it's incredible. Talk as he owns that, man. You could tell he was out in the woods for a while.
You know, I was thinking of trying to decide whether he was a unicorn or not. And I think he was, even though he wasn't a major star, but Shay, tell me if Sonny Landham would have made them better. Roadhouse. Yes.
He's the big bad. Get rid of the guy that Patrick Swayze fights. Die hard. Yes.
Get rid of the big sweet, the guy who that Carl, get rid of Carl. Point break. Yes. Get rid of Anthony Kedis.
Bring up Sonny Landham. That's a whole different fight. That's a whole different fight right there. My point is Sonny Landham put him in anything.
English patient. The English patient. Yeah. Put him in there.
It's better. It's better. More would say it's best. Jesse Ventura, who they catch at an incredible point in his career, where he's basically what Charles Barkley became for basketball, he was for wrestling.
He was the first great wrestling commentary. It stopped wrestling at this point, but wrestling had really ascended. He was one of the reasons why, because of his announcing, didn't know he could act. It was pretty novel.
Kyle smiling again. This is the, Ventura makes you happy as an actor. He does. And the way that Chris talked about him getting off the helicopter and MTV shirts, that's the tone.
He and the Gorilla Monsoon doing play-by-play were unbelievable. And all he did, listen, that line up, I ain't got time to bleed. You can mess that line up. You can make it lame.
You could try to sell it too much. He says very no nonsense. He just spits it out like I got a job to do. That became the title of Jesse Ventura's autobiography.
I ain't got no time to bleed. And it's absolutely perfect. A little bit of screen time. It was his first movie, but every second he's on screen, you can't look away.
It was also, I'm putting this on what's aged the best, just a brilliant move to grab somebody from the WWE Universe, which is something now that has become a staple of, let's grab this UFC fighter, like Fast Five grabs Ronda Rousey. It's finally gone off, gone off the rails as John Cena is playing Dom Toretto's brother with Shay and I. We've never talked about it. I don't know if I'm ready to talk about it yet.
I know you're not, and I don't think we should talk about it now, but we will at some point on my podcast. We should. And Rousey is in Furious 7. Right.
And then they did Gina Carano was the other one, right? Yes. They pulled her in there, but this whole concept of pulling people from these little universes. The number one example of this, right?
Yeah, but he's like, overqualified. But he's doing the Jesse Ventura playbook, especially if he gets elected president next. I feel like the Rock watch this, watch Predator a bunch of times, and it's just pissed off that he hasn't had his own version of it yet. It's kind of the hole in his resume, right?
Unless you say Fast Five is his version. Or, no, that, because didn't he'd make that movie the rundown, the Peapurg movie? Yes, just for Walker. Yeah.
That's a fun movie. That's a fun movie. And that kind of has a little bit of like running through the jungle vibes. Yeah.
All right. Let's do it. No, there would say it's the best. Richard Chavez is Pancho.
Shay, 80s Latino actors, moments. Where is he ranked for you? That are worse than me. We're going to be able to go through them quickly over the next 40 seconds.
We could do every single one of them when I wouldn't have to take a breath. But this guy showing up, what was like really jumped out at me is they don't really say anybody's name for the most part. They barely mentioned Pancho at all, but they call him Ramirez at one point. And you're like, Oh, shit, wait a second.
It snaps together in your head when you hear him say the name. I think this is like the first time I was watching a movie that I heard the last name, Ramirez and something. I probably haven't heard it since, honestly. I'm hearing it in there.