If It Bleeds, We Can Kill It: Predator at 35

In the summer of 1987, Predator was the ultimate rumble in the jungle. Hard hitting pulp sci-fi guided by the sure hand of director John McTiernan, Predator surrounded peak '80s Arnold Schwarzenegger with a crew of guys - Carl Weathers, Jesse Ventura, Bill Duke and Sonny Landham - who might not have been able to match him muscle for muscle but were still convincingly tough. Shane Black and Richard Chaves filling out the rest of the team, not so much, but you gotta have a couple of normal dudes in there.

Released on June 12th, 1987, the story of Predator, with its screenplay penned by brothers Jim and John Thomas, put a team of bad asses deep in a Central American jungle where they unexpectedly found themselves up against a star-spawned adversary so proficient it could take 'em out one by one as easily as Jason slaughtering his way through a bunch of camp counselors. If you think of Predator as essentially a sci-fi slasher, with its mounting body count (and shots from the killer's POV) and its series of gory, creative deaths (far bloodier than the late '80s Friday sequels were allowed to be), then Schwarzenegger's cigar chomping Dutch is its Final Girl. 

He's the last survivor who has to prove himself to be pluckier and more resourceful than all the characters that have fallen before him in one final, do or die battle. 

In true Final Girl fashion, Schwarzenegger's Dutch gears up for his third act showdown by elaborately booby trapping the jungle in a way that would make Nightmare on Elm Street's Nancy Thompson proud. In the end, both of them are operating from the same playbook. Nancy sets up Freddy to take a sledgehammer to the gut while Dutch tricks the Predator into getting a log dropped on his head. 

When it was released in 1988, McTiernan's Die Hard was praised for subverting the macho cliches of '80s action cinema, with Bruce Willis' John McClane painfully bleeding his way through his face offs with Hans Gruber and his band of terrorists rather than breezing through them but I say McTiernan had already been breaking down those cliches in Predator. The whole movie is about how empty and ineffectual macho bullshit is. One by one these tough guys get taken out as their advanced weapons prove to be completely useless and most of them don't go out stoically but instead die screaming. Predator is very clear about the fact that none of the stuff that usually wins the day in action movies counts for shit. 

After having Dutch's team in full swagger mode in the first act, having them spouting lines like "I ain't got time to bleed," McTiernan takes the wind out of all their smirking machismo by having the Predator make quick work of them. 

Predator is typically perceived as a celebration of male bravado but it is not that at all. McTiernan ruthlessly torpedoes the cartoonish bluster of these characters. Jesse Ventura's Mac gets his chest blown out before he even has a chance to give the Predator a taste of Old Painless. When Sonny Landham's Billy decides to stand alone in a mano a mano confrontation between himself and the Predator, McTiernan doesn't even honor this encounter by showing it. Instead all we get is Billy's off-camera scream. That jacked arm of Carl Weather's Dillon that greets Dutch's handshake? It ends up dismembered, lying on the floor of the jungle, firing off rounds into the dirt. And although Dutch ultimately does win, he isn't wrapped in glory at the end. Instead he's covered in ash. 

As designed by FX legend Stan Winston (and as worn by Kevin Peter Hall both here and in Predator 2), the Predator suit proved to be instantly iconic. I wouldn't have thought that dreadlocks would look right on an alien but as soon as you see the Predator you know that Winston's instincts were spot on, right down to him wisely incorporating his buddy James Cameron's casual mention that he always thought it'd be cool to see a creature with mandibles. When James Cameron says "Hey, you know what'd be cool?" it definitely pays to listen. 

Given how well McTiernan set this franchise up for success, I think it's crazy that he never returned to the series. I mean, if Ridley Scott could come back and do a couple more Aliens, why not McTiernan on Predator? Maybe the ultimate answer to that is, well, he went to jail but to that I say "yeah but he got out" and, you know, a lot of stuff can be overlooked for the sake of the Predator.

I think it's interesting, too, that Schwarzenegger never came back. This could have been his franchise, if he wanted it to be. It was definitely his name that sold the original but he just moved on and ultimately I think that was to the series' benefit. Even though it's easy to imagine all kinds of sequel scenarios in which Dutch returns and has to gather another group of guys to take out more Predators or he starts working with the government to advise them on combating this alien threat or even to have Dutch really go on the offensive and lead a Space Force back to the Predator's home world, Schwarzenegger was out after the first film and I think that only helped the Predator franchise to thrive. 

The biggest problem with the Alien series is that they kept Sigourney Weaver around way too long. Coming back for Aliens, fine, but after that they should have moved on. The studio and the producers got hung up on the idea that Sigourney was what was driving the franchise, not the concept of the Aliens themselves and that ultimately hurt the series. With Predator, the Predators have always been the star. Going back to the idea of the first movie being a sci-fi slasher, the Predator sequels have been like Friday the 13th's in which every movie presents a fresh slate of victims for the Predators to eliminate in gruesome fashion. With the Predator, it's all about the hunt and the sequels, despite taking place in different environments (or even different time periods), have all followed the formula of Predator vs. Prey that the original established so perfectly.  

So Happy 35th, Predator. You're one classic motherfucker! 

Eye of the Tiger: Rocky III at 40

As great a film as the original Rocky is, it's not the kind of film that at first glance seems ready made for a franchise. You know, it's a movie about an underdog boxer living in a crummy neighborhood who gets an unlikely chance to hit the big time and it all leads up to that final match and, well, that's kind of it. At the end of Rocky it feels like the story has been fully told. 1979's Rocky II was such a retread of the original that, well done as it was, it only seemed to confirm that the story potential of the series had already been exhausted. I mean, in II Balboa just goes up against Apollo Creed again. I don't know. Kind of seems like we're done here, right? But hold on, because the '80s are coming. Cue up Survivor's "Eye of the Tiger!"

As much as Rocky and its first sequel had been '70s hits, it took the '80s to really make a true franchise out of the series. The appeal of the original Rocky in '76 had been that its uplifting quality represented an antidote to the prevailing cynicism and defeatism of the decade.The '70s wasn't an especially triumphant period of time. America wasn't feeling a lot of big wins back then. In the original, Rocky loses his match, with simply going the full twelve rounds with Creed and winning the love of Adrian being his victories. He earned a more definitive win in Rocky II, officially becoming the champ, but Rocky's wins were only going to get bigger and better in the '80s.

People thought Rocky was a feel good saga before but, man, they hadn't seen anything yet. It's like the series, and writer/star Sylvester Stallone, had been waiting all along for the '80s to happen and when it did, it was the perfect fit of character and decade. 

The Bad News Bears had been another sports related '70s franchise (and, like Rocky, it started in '76) where the protagonists had actually lost at the climax of the original film with the sequels making them into winners but the Bad News Bears franchise sputtered out after two poorly received sequels (ending with '78's The Bad News Bears Go To Japan) and a failed TV series that, post-cancellation, limped its way over the finish line into 1980. The '70s was the time of the lovable loser and The Bad News Bears and Rocky had reflected that. The '80s, however, was reserved for winners only and Stallone's Rocky was more than ready to join that company. The original Rocky was an anticipation of where the mood of the country was headed as we slowly crawled out from under our post-Vietnam, post-Watergate malaise and once the Reagan era arrived and a new morning in America was here, Rocky was primed to meet the moment and become a poster child for the feel good '80s. As the trailer for Rocky III proclaimed, Rocky was "an American tradition."

Rocky III embraced the mood of the times to a (Mr) T. The storyline was no less predictable than that of the first two but III saw the Rocky saga transform from being simple boxing pictures to becoming the equivalent of superhero spectacles, with Rocky not just taking on other boxers but battling larger than life supervillains. Unlike Carl Weathers' slick, erudite Apollo Creed, Mr. T's Clubber Lang was a fucking beast. As Burgess Meredith's Mick says, he's a "wrecking machine." Clubber works out alone in a dank basement with poor lighting and, like, dangling chains and leaky pipes or whatever (I could just be imagining the chains and the pipes but it feels like they should be there) and he says things in interviews like "I'm gonna torture him. I'm gonna crucify him. Real bad." and, of course "I pity the fool." 

In the director's chair again after Rocky II, Stallone immediately establishes Rocky III a product of the MTV era as he sets up the entire movie via an opening montage before the titles even roll. We never get any dialogue or dramatic scenes to set up who Clubber is, where he came from, or to flesh out his conflict with Rocky. No, we get a music video, set to the entirety of "Eye of the Tiger," and that's all we need. As "Eye of the Tiger" plays out, we see Rocky being a big time celebrity, shilling for products like American Express and clowning with the Muppets while Clubber stalks Rocky's matches like a slasher villain, glowering at the champ's bogus wins and steadily annihilating his own opponents. 

 

In Stallone's most inspired move, he brings back Carl Weathers' Apollo Creed, installing him as Rocky's new trainer after Clubber turns Rocky into paste in their first match, an event so traumatic that it leaves Micky dead. Bringing Weathers back in this capacity was such a smart way to not just keep Weathers involved but to elevate Clubber as an adversary. The fact that Rocky has to team up with his former rival if he's going to have any chance of beating Clubber only makes the challenge of taking down Clubber feel that much more serious. The ensuing friendship that develops between Rocky and Apollo is one of the highlights of the entire series and one of the great bromances in cinema. There just aren't a lot of platonic male relationships on film that feature the two dudes frolicking in the waves together. None, in fact, besides this. There should be many more, I agree, but this is all we've got.

The most surprising aspect for me in revisiting Rocky III is being reminded that the story hinges on Rocky being past his prime. He might still be thriving as a celebrity but as a boxer, he's pretty much washed up. So much so that Mick keeps putting him up against has beens. Rocky is ready to retire and publicly does so at the unveiling of his statue before Clubber calls him out with a taunt of "Don't give this sucker at statue! Give 'im some guts!" Balboa is said to be 34 years old here, which does not seem all that old from today's perspective where Tom Brady is still a star athlete at 44 (and whose own retirement lasted a blink of an eye!) but this movie is built on the idea of Rocky facing down the end of his boxing career and Apollo being firmly over with his. Incredibly, these two are supposed to be a couple of old dudes fighting off their own impending obsolescence! I always remember that aspect as being key to Rocky IV but I had forgotten that the path to that was already laid down here. I just find it wild that as Stallone was just starting to ramp up into the prime of his own career that his signature character was supposed to be past his best days.

Some will say that this and 1986's Rocky IV were too cartoony, arguably even bordering on parody, and that they erred in taking the series away from its down to earth roots. Stallone himself might, to some extent, agree with that as beginning with 1990's Rocky V, he purposely kept driving the series back to the more realistic vibe of the first two films. Maybe that was the smart move, I don't know. Maybe it was the only viable choice Stallone had at that point because after Clubber and Drago, what non-cyborg adversary could believably top either one of them? If you didn't dial things back, you'd have to have aliens come to Earth to pit their greatest fighter against ours with the fate of the planet on the line. Personally, I do think that would have been the way to go but what do I know? I'm just someone who walked out of Rocky III in 1982 feeling on top of the world and I think the series could have kept chasing bigger and better highs. 

You know, I'll just say this: I remember what the mood of the audience was like in III and IV and, man, it was not the same for the opening night of V. Imagine if after 2011's Fast Five if the Fast and the Furious producers had thought their next move should be to take the series back to its street racing roots. Not an option, right? Of course not. By F9, ten years later, these characters are driving cars in outer space! When it comes to sequels, you gotta always keep leveling up, even if that means that, oh, now Rocky's boxing a werewolf.

A lot of great movies in the summer of '82 missed with audiences but Rocky III was not one of them. It was absolutely a movie of its moment. Released on May 28th, 1982, it landed every punch with precision and walked away a box office champ. You didn't have to train with Apollo that summer to get the eye of the tiger. You didn't even have to work up a sweat. You just had to watch Rocky III.