What Even is a Predator Movie? | The Backdrop

Been putting off watching this one until I had the time to devote my full attention to it, and it did not disappoint. My hat goes off to you, yet again, Mr. Mooney.

Commenting before watching like the worst kind of opinionated scrub, but I'd always thought the whole core premise of Predator is obviously pretty much about taking a stock action movie premise and then dropping a Predator into it. The original is an 80s Arnie testosterone-overloaded action movie that turns the ridiculous muscle men into the teens in a slasher flick, the sequel is a very early 90s cop movie (with a touch of comic book to it), and so on. Killer of Killers makes it obvious by outright having an anthology of period piece action movies interrupted by an alien big game hunter. (Ed: Called it!) There's a reason why there's so many Predator crossover comics going way back and to this day, and why a lot of them are actually pretty good- because the entire premise is basically a crossover to begin with, literally just drop a Predator into an existing situation and see how things shake out. And why everything from Star Trek to Danny Phantom has antagonists that are basically Predators with the serial numbers filed off. And also a key part I think is that, the Predators, the Yautja, by themselves, aren't really that interesting. Pretty much riffs on Klingons with being more obviously privileged big game hunter dicks going on turkey shoots and usually getting eventually punished for their arrogance. It's their interactions with others and the way people respond to them that becomes interesting. Badlands IMO follows on from this just by taking a different tack, what happens when a Predator lives long enough to actually learn from being humbled.

"Adrian Brody-esque dreadlocks" killed me. Well done

Thank you for continuing to reinforce just how baffling bad "The Predator" is. And also, this is an awesome deepdive into the themes and structure of these movies.

Great video, and nice to see Slash/Back get a mention

Class act

Phenomenal job on this one

Was it Jesse who added the video clips to this? He may have had a bit too much fun with this one. Great episode to everyone involved.