Father Malone's Weekly Roundup - Predator: Killer of Killers (2025)

snoring about? My left foot is immobilized for the next couple of weeks, which is incredibly painful, but also a wonderful excuse to sit around and watch movies. I know you're not pleased with the current state of walks, baby, but it will improve. I promise. Is Superman going to

save the world? It looks that way. Definitely gonna save Warner Brothers. First time. I've been excited for a Superman movie since Part three, and I can be forgiven for getting hyped about that one because the previous one had Terrence Stamp as General Zod. Surely the Excellence train would continue checking down that track.

what have we had since then? Rapists and creeps as Lex Luthor allegedly, Kevin Spacey and Jesse Eisenberg, these are our Lex Luthor's Now Clancy Brown has been voicing him for a while. I believe Gean Carlos Bosito is doing his voice on Harley Quinn. There are actually way too many fucking good voice actors to single out any more of them. Plus I'm lazy, and those are the only ones I remember now. I was one hundred percent in favor of the continuing with Rosenbaum as Lex Luthor. He's older, now,

he's wiser. He'll bring a certain gravitas to Lex. There isn't no one who could replace him. Nicholas Holt, hold on, now, this fanboy needs to fan hisself. Every fucking image we've seen has looked great. He's had only a few lines so far are in the dozen or so trailers we've received. But the latest trailer is the one I've been waiting for. It's the Lex versus Superman trailer where mister Luthor is front and center. I was interested before, I am totally

stoked now. The joke of Lex has always been the same as the one with the Joker in Batman. If it came down a hand to hand combat, the fight is over instantaneously, so it's widely important who they cast as their nemeses. And for the first time since Rosenbaum, I think Lex can actually go toe to toe with the Man of Steel. You know how everyone's always droning on about how Batman is the smartest superhero I ever noticed.

The Joker is always a step ahead of him. Anyway, I've encouraged everyone to go see the new Superman movie to save the studio. Now I'm saying, this movie just looks fucking great and you should go see it. Anyway. One last thing, that bubble looking Mega Man suit that they featured in every trailer. You know, it's flying around and it's heat visioning and punching and shit, it is not Henry cavill I will eat my shoe, my immobilizing boot. If it is anyone but the new Supergirl. They're going

to task master her here. She'll be a villain for the entire movie and then whoops, look it's a fellow Kryptonian. Hopefully they won't blithely kill her in the opening movements of her own movie. Was that a spoiler for Thunderbolts? You're fucking right it was.

familiar with the television series Darkroom. For those of you who don't know, Darkroom was an anthology horror series hosted by James Coburn that ran on ABC in nineteen eighty one for one season. Actually watched every episode of it when it ran there's one with Billy Crystal as this low rent criminal who finds a makeup case from an old Hollywood star, and every makeup that he puts on,

he actually becomes that thing. I loved it. Anyway. There are a couple of amusing things about being asked about this show, Shane. First of all, a writer by the name of Rockney O'Bannon wrote a spec script for Darkroom, but the show had already been canceled when he submitted it, so he held on to it, submitting it later to a new Twilight Zone series that was being put together in nineteen eighty five. That episode was Wordplay. It is one of the greatest half hours of television of all time.

Never mind that one series, and Rockney O'Bannon would later go on to create SeaQuest in Farscape, and he's a friend of the show anyway. Another amusing thing is that before we began looking at Tales from the Dark Side of this season, we almost did Darkroom, but we deemed it too inaccessible to the general public. The only reason I have it now is that I bought it from a dealer at a convention world. Baby, Thank you, Shane, and thank you for your kind words about miss Foxy Brown. Okay,

what's with this fucking tie business? Let's get it on. Eric Idyl remains the samee Python these days mag In nineteen eighty three he appeared in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, and in that their final cinematic endeavor, he appeared as a piano man entertaining a crowd at a restaurant with this song.

been around for almost two hundred years prior. They think it was the name of a servant, initially a servant being an appendage of the master, plus time, plus the general dirty mindedness of people everywhere, and now if you name your kid John Thomas, it's like saying my kid is named Schlong, a fact that delighted me to no end when a rival for my late wife's hand ended up naming one of his kids John Thomas first and

middle name. Oh boy, such good times. I still love it, as amused as I was to learn that it does not compare to the fucking peals of laughter from fourteen year old me sitting in a theater in Revere, Massachusetts, as the trumpets are braying and the credits are rolling in what has been promised to be an all male action extravaganza with sweat and blood and bullets and jungles, and a writing credit comes up written by Jim and

John Thomas. Oh boy, I so wanted it to just be Jim Thomas and his impressive dick and not a couple of sibling writers as it turned out to be. Can you imagine the audacity of registering your cock as your co writer at the writers Guild? Which one is doing the typing? People will wonder? You know it's Jim's doing the typing and John Thomas is just pacing around and being a dick. Anyway, the movie is Predator. You've

read the episode description. I think it's funny. Every podcast likes to play dumb in their introductory segments these days. What could it be, audience, He didn't click on the fucking episode name anyway? Predator by the Thomas Boys and directed by John McTiernan in his sophomore effort as a filmmaker, Diehards, John McTiernan Hunt for Red October's John McTiernan. If you've not seen his debut feature Nomads, I think you ought

to go watch it immediately. Helen Shaver's a doctor who treats this patient, who's a photojournalist that's been following a group of well nomads as they travel through the unseen twilight world of early morning Los Angeles. It is atmospheric and creepy and cool, and it's got adam Ant and Mary Warnoff as two of the nomads, and Pierce Brosnan's so young and virile, and hear suit doing either the best or worst French accent you'll ever hear. Here's some of it now.

the time. It is a dumb design considering what they landed with. But don't let that footage fool you they were making the same movie. Also, don't let that footage of Nick Cage and that ultra shiny Ledlitz Superman outfit fool you either. That was a fucking costume test. There's no guarantee any one thing you see in that video would have ended up on screen, but that cocksucker Brian Singer used to carry around a still frame of that costume to silence anyone who is criticizing his take on

Superman with that fucking horrendous Superman returns. Oh anyway, A couple of other bits of Predator weirdness. Did you know that Optimus Prime is the voice of the Predator. All those weird clicks those are Peter Cullen, who is a giant in the voice industry. Apparently he based the vocalization on the sound he heard of a dying horseshoe crab. I have never once in my life wondered what a dying horseshoe crab would sound like, But now that I know it sounds like a Predator, it actually kind of

makes sense, doesn't it. Super screenwriter Shane Black is one of Dutch's team in Predator. Before spending his entire screen time telling pussy jokes, Black wrote Lethal Weapon and The Last Boy Scout. And I think he was writing The Long Kiss Good Night around the time of filming. Apparently he was a spy on, said producer Joel Silver, installed him to keep an eye on still fledgling filmmaker John McTiernan. And I said, gee, that's kind of underhanded. That's kind

of underhanded. Schwarzenegger's ballooning salary quote would keep him out of the planned sequel, so naturally they scrapped it and artistic integrity blossomed. Nah, they said, fuck it, the giant rubber suit is the star. After all, that first film wasn't called Dutch. Remember Dutch with Ed O'Neil in Perpetual Adorable Machine Ethan embry. Guy's like fifty years old and he's still cute as a button. Anyway, I know Predator two is an inferior film. Maria Kunchiita Alonzo's presence alone

drags it down at least a whole letter grade. She cannot act in Spanish or English, and I'm glad she's gone. Wait is she dead? I'm gonna feel really bad. If

she's she's not good, Good riddance. Who needs you. But the idea of taking the first film scenario and dropping in into downtown Los Angeles during a gang war during a heat wave and set a decade after the previous film, making Predator two a futuristic sci fi movie, they needed some innovations in Los Angeles that weren't yet innovated, so their solution was to set the movie in the far

flung future of nineteen ninety seven. Let me tell you when I saw this movie on opening weekend in Danvers, Massachusetts in nineteen ninety During the opening a title card let you know that this is seven years into the future, and then you hear that Rico suave guy singing. That was chilling. If that guy was still relevant seven years now, then we are headed for a dystopian outcome worse than

Blade Runner, worse than The Terminator Gerardo without Schwarzenegger. Producer Joel Silver threw some lethal weapon actors at the sequel, Danny Glover and Gary Busey, and as the film's quasi villain, the leader of the Jamaican Posse oh No, the Jamaicans are coming run. I know there were actual gangs in New York at the time, but it's still funny. The leader of the posse, King Willie, was played by the

magnificent Calvin Lockhart. He was the villain in one of my favorite films of the nineteen seventies, Cotton Comes to Harlem. But also in the seventies, he was the lead in a film that was all but lost until recently. That movie is The Baron. Here is a shameless self plug. Go over to the Projection Booth podcast check out their episode on The Baron. It features some devastatingly incisive analysis

by me. Predator two opened up the Predator's world in tons of ways, including how long they've been visiting Earth. Danny Glover's Harrigan is given a flintlock pill still engraved to Raphael and Doolini from seventeen fifteen. It also let us know that there were other Fox franchises that served as hunting grounds when we got a look inside the Predator's trophy case, which included a xenomorph skull from the

Alien films. Apparently, director Stephen Hopkins saw one in Stan Winston's creature shop and thought Hey, this would be cool, and thus he inadvertently kept both franchises alive in the public consciousness the majority of the public. I mean, if you were a fan of Predator, you could still get your fix with the dark Horse comic books. Hilariously, the first run came out before Predator two, but the story took place in New York during a heat wave, featuring

Dutch's brother. Because you can't have a direct sequel unless the new lead is related, so stupid. Predator actually had a really cool run in dark Horse. All throughout the nineties, though, the theme of desperate, perhaps antagonistic people have to put aside their differences and fight the Predator were pretty prevalent. There were tons of cool crossovers as well, Predator versus Batman,

Predator versus Transformers. The best was Archie versus Predator, where the Predator comes to Riverdale and kills every fucking one of them and is eventually subdued by Veronica. Great stuff, but cinematically, we wouldn't get a standalone Predator flick for almost twenty years with Predators WHOA Okay, I was not going to forget you this time. Hit it HP.

the past, but they haven't been. An honest to God paid for the entire ticket book at the Carnival Thrill Ride, combining a fifteen year old dropouts understanding of science and a seemingly boundless knowledge of the old Chariots of the Gods nineteen sixties seventies idea of how alien life exists and how it's been interacting with Earth since time immemorial.

Aliens Versus Predator is a bottle film. Our heroes and villains are all trapped in a puzzle box, this one, for all intents and purposes, being a Mayan pyramid found in Antarctica. The fact that this movie exists at all is a minor miracle. Can you think of two completely disparate cinematic worlds that dovetailed so nicely into one another and were held by the same copyright owner. I can't. And it assembled a fucking killer cast Sanah Lathan. I'm

not sure why she wasn't huge. She's Blade's mom, for fuck's sake. It also had Bishop himself Lance Hendrickson as the Whyland from Wayland Utani. It had Spud from Trainspotting and Tommy Flanakan from every fucking badass roll of the past twenty years. And you know what else it had. It had heart Kid. That might not mean anything in this slick day and age, but it once had a

hallmark of quality. Jesus, what am I talking about? It also had three predators on the loose in an untold number of Zeno morphs, all skulking and scurrying around with a few humans trying to stand out of their way, and eventually teaming up with a predator to face the greatest cinematic villain of all time, the Alien. I know we're here to talk about the predator, but I am fucking stoked that we're getting a new alien television series and you are going to hear all about it. Consider

yourself threatened. That film made one hundred and eighty million off of a seventy million dollar budget, which is just enough of a profit to get the film that that sort of success deserves. Alien Versus Predator Requiem. What a fucking piece of garbage that movie was. When it was announced that there was going to be an Alien Versus Predator movie, Jim Cameron bemoaned the fact that it was just like a Universal's Frankenstein meets wolf Man. There's no

more relevancy. They're just milking it. Well, he was wrong about AVP, and he even admitted it such, But those criticisms are dead on here. Written by Shane Salerno, the scribe who gave us Armageddon and ghost Rider and the stories for most of those Avatar movies. It stars a bunch of nobodies, It's made by a bunch of nobodies, and is in fact a direct sequel to AVP. That movie ended with a stinger, an alien bursting out of

a predator's chest. It was a cheap jump at the end of the movie, just to rattle your cage and maybe hinted a possible sequel. Well, here's what happened. That predatorship crashed in a small American town and the entire series turned to shit. Do not watch it if you haven't, And even if you have watched it, I bet you haven't seen it because it is the murkiest fucking film I have ever seen or not seen. Fred Olin Ray had better lighting packages in his disposable movies. Now. I

don't know about you, but when I heard Robert Rodriguez had a Predator movie coming out, I got pretty stoked. The movies are mainly nonverbal, so he can't really louse up the dialogue too bad. No matter how bad the script was going to be, overall, the action was going to be fucking incredible because that's what he does best. And apparently it's based on a script that he had been asked to write back in nineteen ninety four. K NB Effects took over for the creature effects, and the

psychotically good cast was assembled. Adrian Brody, Alice Braga, Toefer, Grace Young, Walton Goggins, Lawrence Fishburne, Danny Trejoemherschela Ali. We've got a team of badasses as usual, fighting for their lives in a jungle against the predators. But here that crack squad of heroes were actually assembled by the predators themselves, their soldiers and criminals and hunters and fucking psychopaths, all plucked from Earth and dropped onto a safari planet. People

really like Predators. I saw it A Man's Chinese on opening day, which had great presentation, obviously, and I agree with most of those people. Kinda, it's great. Kinda, and Adrian Brody is good. Kind of the movie is fine. Just like AVP, it's good enough, but somehow not good enough. Both films just leave you feeling a little bit hollow. It's kind of hard to put my finger on now about the Predators their weapons specifically. Since the first film,

they've all been able to cloak themselves. They've all had a shoulder cannon with that three dot laser target. They've all had medkits and arm blades and arm bombs. Predator two gave us the spear and a net gun and those disc blade thingies. In Predators, the newest innovation is that they use pack animals to hunt nasty little quadrupeds called hell hounds or predator hounds. I don't know why

they need them. These creatures, whose entire personality is based on hunting, use a bunch of near feral beasts to hunt down and potentially mul their prey. It was the addition of these hell hounds that finally made me realize the sad truth about our predatory friends. They're like those cocksuckers who hunt foxes or did is it outlawed? It fucking should be outlawed using hounds to chase down a defenseless animal and then fucking ride up on your horse

and blast it, you fucking cocksucker. Putting aside the hell hounds, think about these predators for a minute. All those weapons I mentioned a bunch of them invisibility alone gives them the equivalent of some asshole shooting lions from a Safaris jeep. Real fucking sporting. Remember in part two when it wouldn't kill Maria Canchido Alonso because she was pregnant, because they're so fucking noble all of a sudden, But they will

go after of you if you're armed. Sure, our projectile weapons are the equivalent of a fucking slingshot to a creature who travels across galaxies to hunt for Fun. But hey, you know what am I equippling about? What I mean is I love these movies. I just have a hard time reconciling that these guys just hunt for sport. I mean, if they remain villains, then that's not a problem. But after two AVPs, I'm starting to think of them as heroes. How am I not supposed to side with them? Oh?

Just make the Predator that will break the fucking spell. Shane Black, Shane Black. I cannot believe I'm saying Shane Black wrote and directed the movie that is worse than Requiem? Is it worse? Somebody tell me? Obviously, I think it's a better film just in general. But the fact that it's Shane Black and I can't decide if it's as bad a movie as the one I just dismissed as a piece of shit, somehow makes it worse. Shane come back, Shane.

Was it the casting thing? They're all really good performers. I just don't know if they work in this configuration. I don't think anyone was served well in the movie, certainly not the audience. Say what you want about any of the other films. There's always someone to hang on to. And take the ride with I didn't get that character here, so I didn't really give a shit. When the big old twist shows up, there's a predator that hunts predators,

the predator, if you will, spoiler alert. And it's huge, and it's a good idea, and it should have been a new species altogether, some planetary species that hunts the predators. Sign me up for that movie, baby, but that movie, this movie the Predator, Sign me down, sign me off. I will not even rewatch it to see if my opinion will change. It will not. And I thought at the time, that's it. We will not see his kind again,

not in this lifetime, that noble predator. And then wait a minute, what the fuck is this out of nowhere slice of predator? Pie pray? Holy fuck, I don't gotta tell you. Prey was a sleeper hit, and it was a deserving hit. You have to love when a true fan gets a hold of a property. Prior to Prey, Tracktenburg had directed only one other feature film, but it's a hell of a debut ten Cloverfield Lane. That was the John Goodman, Mary Elizabeth Winstead paranoid. Have we or

haven't we been invaded? Flick excellent stuff. Well, with Prey, he shakes the whole fucking series to its foundation, quite literally, taking the action back to the great planes of seventeen nineteen and focused on a commanche healer who dreams of being a hunter, but she's constantly being laughed off by the rest of her tribe and to the motherfucking Predator, which they cleverly wrap up in Comanche folklore. The action

is visceral, The characters are fucking sparkling. This is the first film to really dispense with the firearms and get these characters hunting each other with their wits and their surroundings. Speaking of firearms, it's seventeen nineteen. Our lead to Naeru, played by the fucking incredible Amber mid Thunder, is given a flint lock by a trapper named Raphael and Olini. I know Tracktenburg initially wanted to set this film during

the Civil War. I wonder if he said it one hundred and fifty years earlier, just to tie it into the Predator two. If so, fucking bravo. I think in any other scenario I would have been rolling my eyes with the mighty fan service mambo going on. But for some reason here it worked. Also, it managed to keep all the white people to a minimum. We've seen them tangle with the Predators enough, which is kind of why

the call back to Predator two is important. Think about it now, I think even a blind man could see that there was going to be another Predator film coming down the pike after the success of Prey. Luckily for us, it's Tracktenburg again at the Helm, and again it's taking us two unfamiliar locations in time periods Predator bad Lambs.

It seems to be set on an alien world. I'm told it's the Predator's alien world and it's in the future, and it has androids and it has potential Wayland Utani connections. That movie, Predator Badlands is coming out in November, and I am not sure there's a film I'm more interested in seeing this year, so we are going to have to wait. Actually, no, there's a new Predator film right fucking now, and it's on Hulu and it's from Dan Trachtenberg and it's animated. It's Predator, Killer of Killers.

warrior against warrior. First up is The Shield, a Viking tale about Ursa, a Viking leader on a mission of revenge kill the head of a rival clan who was responsible for her own father's murder. The animation and battle stuff is so fucking cool in this one, plus it subtly links the entire affair to Beowulf, with the Predator coming in at the end as a stand in for Grendel.

I'm not going to spoil any of these. To that end, I can't really give you all that much more except to say that the action here is so fucking brutal in ways that some films could barely fathom, and it manages to avoid the problem of most animated action, where

everything seems too perfect, too choreographed. Somehow the style of animation it's a computer generated fake of hand drawn styles, but the fluidity of the movement and that combined manages to leave room for what appeared to be accidents or flaws, which end up reinforcing how realistic it all is. I know that's a confusing assessment. The flaws make it perfect, but I don't know how any other way to describe it.

That same feeling carries over to The Sword. The second tale, set in sixteen oh nine in Feudal Japan, a tale of two brothers who paths diverge, with one becoming a warlord and another in ninja. On the day the brothers are to reunite to continue a battle from decades before, they are joined by a new competitor. My favorite moment in that first Predator film comes fairly close to the end. Schwarzenegger goes off the cliff into a pool of water

in the canyon below. He's dragging himself to the shore, panting and spitting up water and trying to recuperate, and he doesn't notice as a splash about fifty or so feet behind him. In the theater, I saw it, but most of the audience didn't notice, which I thought was really fucking clever of the filmmaker, making an invisible alien just show up in the background with no bones about it. This story The Sword seemed to be filled with breathless

moments just like that. Oh and Tracktenberg isn't afraid to give us new weapons in the Presator's arsenals. We've got a wrist mounted a rope dart, some heat seeking harpoons, there are explosive darts, a serrated whip, and there's this fucking shockwave glove thing. Oh man, oh man. Each of these stories, I'd like to point out, would work as a short film on its own. The fact that they tie in so seamlessly to one another is one of

the movie's charms. The final story is called The Bullet and we're in World War two baby North Africa, and we are dealing with fighter pilots and a Predator pilot and dog fights and the Andrews sisters I mentioned breathless right There's also an epilogue that I'm gonna say fuck all about right now. Suffice to say, I think we are in good hands with the Predators for the foreseeable future. I was excited for bad Lands. I am fucking beyond stoked. Now we are going to leave you here, but before

we do one last bit of predator trivia predatrivia. There's now a genus of a goblin spider called Predator unaps because its face looks like the predator's mandibles. In addition, there are now a bunch of subspecies, all with strict predator nomenclature. There's the Predator Unaps Schwarzeneggery, the Predator Unaps

Makelliot for Carl Weather's character mack Elliott. There's the Predator Unaps of Varta for the filming location, and the Predator Unaps Peter Hawley for Kevin Peter Hall, the original actor to play the Predator. The latest classified is named the Predator Unaps Vayucha, which is now the accepted name for the Predators. Gang Aliens are xenomorphs because of an offhanded line in Aliens, and now the predators are the Yaucha because of a line in Prey. Have we hunted enough

facts for you, young lady? I don't care what you say. I think we have. So we're gonna piece out gang tune in this Friday. We are going to hopefully be taking a look at andor finally with Antonio Lapour. Thank you for joining us here at the roundup. HP is our composer. We're on weirding Way Media. If you want to contact me at Father Malone on all the socials, Father Malone seventy one at gmail if you want to drop me a line, and Patreon dot com slash father alone.

If you want to give us some financial support, buy me a new ankle. This one is toast anyway, Thank you all for joining us here on the roundup. We're gonna leave you, well, what else do you think we're gonna leave you with?