Some guys in front of me weren’t talking about this movie at all. Predator isn’t a botch, but it’s not as if I heard anyone enthusing on the way down the escalator. Sanaa and Predator, sittin’ in a tree …Īlien vs. And, ugly as they are, those mandibles are sort of … cute. They have no bedside manner, but they’re brave warriors, and they recognize a kindred spirit in the toughie Lathan. And pretty soon those predators-whom I’d always thought of (mistakenly, I guess) as aliens with dreadlocks-start making like Klingons on Star Trek. In this case, that means siding with the disgusting storm-trooper predators against the rapidly multiplying aliens. “De enemy of my enemee ees-a my friend,” explains the pretty-boy Italian (Raoul Bova) keeping company with Lathan. Although that pyramid is an imaginative setting (it reconfigures itself every 10 minutes, creating new chambers and passageways while perilously eliminating others), Anderson is terrible at giving us our bearings and he’s the only franchise director who fails to generate even a drop of empathy for screaming people who have aliens erupting from their chests.īut once the predators and aliens start mixing it up-and they do mix it up, by gum, with lots of casualties on both sides and an adequate amount of splatter given the dismaying PG-13 rating-the movie gets some goofy momentum going. Predator, standards have fallen since the days when we worshipped predators and built great pyramids in their name. We want the World Series of baddest cats. It’s the same as Celebrity Death Match: We want the baddest cats to be humbled.

(No one really won-no one ever really does.) The appeal of the “versus” genre is no mystery. Jason, which set a world record for arterial spray and still couldn’t manage to avoid a cheat ending.

And, of course, I savored every stupid minute of last summer’s Freddy vs. Frankenstein, an unbelievably tawdry Al Adamson film cobbled together from spare Z-picture pieces, in which Dracula (or the curly haired, goateed dork who passed for him) pulled the giant Play-Doh Frankenstein monster apart limb from limb. I risked a barrage of peashooters to line up to watch King Kong square off against Godzilla and Godzilla square off against, well, anything. Thirty-odd years ago, along with many prepubescent horror fans of the ‘60s, I also stayed up past midnight to see Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman, in which Frankenstein (or, to be a geek about it, his monster) did not actually meet the Wolfman until the last five minutes, whereupon both were promptly swept away by a pathetic miniature exploding dam.

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