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["U Make Me Feel" by MK2 plays]
[James:] Welcome to the Kill Count where we tally up the victims in all our favorite horror movies. I'm James A. Janisse,
and today we're looking at Predators, the third solo Predator film released in 2010.
This third entry in the solo series, released after the two AVP movies, gets back to basics.
Similar to the first film it features an ensemble cast shooting a bunch of guns off in the jungle.
The difference here is the location and the number of hunters after the group.
Now they've got three alien predators on their trail, all of whom look great and whose
weaponry really benefit from the updated special effects. In fact the movie as a whole looks wonderful.
There are some beautiful long shots in the jungle, and a whole bunch of carefully composed group shots of the ensemble cast but unlike the
cast of the original film, the characters here are pretty much cardboard stand-ins.
Yeah, they're diverse on the surface, but there's nothing memorable about them and even the action hero one-liners are uninspired and forgettable.
[Cuchillo:] This is hell.
[Royce:] Last time I looked you didn't need a parachute to get there.
[James:] Still, us Predator fans are just happy to see more Predators in action.
How many members of the ensemble cast will survive the new hunt?
Let's find out, and get to the kills!
["Slow Shock" by Silent Partner plays]
The movie begins with a good boy who probably loves his mama, loves Jesus, and America, too.
It's Adrian Brody, playing a dude who we find out at the end is named Royce, but I'll just start using his name now.
He free falls through the air, his chute not opening until the last minute, and his crash landing smash cuts hilariously into a title card!
Hell, yeah, I'm on board already!
He wakes up in a jungle, and in no time at all gets a free-falling friend who lands right behind him.
It's an angry Danny Trejo!
But before he and Royce get into a shootout,
a third body lands between them, only this guy's chute didn't open, meaning he just
landed in the premier position on our kill count. Good job, nameless dude!
Any chances of an autopsy are put on hold from a minigun that sends Royce and Cuchillo,
Danny Trejo's character, taking cover behind a log.
This new Painless is being fired by Russian commando Nikolai,
and Royce puts the kibosh on his firing frenzy by telling him they're not the enemy.
Also joining the party is Isabelle an IDF sniper played by Alice Braga.
She mentions that she saw more parachutes yonder in the jungle, and as they set out to find them,
they're joined by another dude, yakuza enforcer Hanzo.
Next the group comes across a pair of dudes fighting.
There's nasty boy Stans, a death row inmate played by Walton Goggins,
and Mombasa, a death squad soldier from Sierra Leone played by Oscar winner Mahershala Ali.
They all finally finished their scavenger hunt of characters when they come across
Edwin, a weenie doctor played by Topher Grace, who they find stuck upside down in the jungle canopy.
They shoot him down from the tree and we're ready to start our movie...
...as soon as they can all figure out what exactly they're doing here.
[Edwin:] Can someone please just tell me what the fuck is going on here?
[James:] Everyone has the same story. They all woke up in freefall with no memory of any plane.
The last thing a few of them remember is being in combat and then seeing a bright light.
[Mombasa:] What if we are dead?
Although that theory sounds like a misunderstanding of the Lost finale, they don't shoot it down right away. This is him
[Cuchillo:] This is hell.
That's because this place seems pretty strange to them. Nobody recognizes the jungle around them,
the sun hasn't moved at all since they've landed, and look what happens when they try to make a compass!
It's ridin' spinners and it don't stop!
They head out as an alliance of circumstance, all extremely lethal people (save for Edwin)
But he proves his usefulness when he stops Nikolai from touching an extremely poisonous plant that would have caused total paralysis.
Nikolai thanks him and is all like [exaggerated accent] "I love this doctor!"
[end exaggerated accent] and as if nature wasn't lethal enough on its own,
there's also a whole bunch of jungle booby traps that the team walks into.
The traps scramble them, but don't succeed in killing anyone,
since the self-proclaimed loner Royce sticks his neck out to save Isabelle from a tiger pit.
Looks like the traps were set by this unfortunate Johnny Knoxville looking corpse
who they find with a hole in his chest and who Edwin estimates has been dead for about two weeks now.
After Royce tells them to keep moving, we get our first look at the 21st century Predator vision.
I like the update to it. It's more modern but not jarringly different.
When they finally get out of the jungle and onto higher ground, they face a stunning revelation.
They're not in any jungle on earth because they ain't even on that planet, son!
They on an alien planet! Yeah boyyyyyy!
[Royce:] We're gonna need a new plan.
Although, real talk, I don't know if that many massive solar bodies could be that close together,
what with gravity and all, but who cares?
This shot is awesome and would make for a great desktop wallpaper.
This alien planet is home to alien hounds too,
who run through the thicket and evoke a classic Predator shoot-'em-up scene.
The group blows the first hound up only to see that a whole bunch more are coming after them,
and this gives everyone a chance to fire off their individual firearms in a solid action sequence.
In it, we get a great look at the practical puppets made by Greg Nicotero,
a veteran effects artist most famous for his work on The Walking Dead.
Yep, that's a puppet attacking the gun lacking Stans,
who is saved at the last minute by his former wrestling opponent Mombasa.
[Mombasa:] As bad as you are, those things are worse.
These dogs are hard to put down, but that doesn't stop Royce from frickin' decapitating one with a hunting knife.
Eventually, they hear a whistle off in the distance and the surviving hounds retreat because they're such good boys.
The hounds are enough evidence for Royce to figure out that they're being hunted.
[Royce:] This planet is a game preserve, and we're the game.
Mombasa realizes that their group is short one craggly Mexican
and they find Cuchillo sitting in a small clearing with his back to them croaking out that he needs help.
[Cuchillo, distantly:] Help!
Royce wisely uses a rock to show that this is just a trap, so they all decide to leave him there,
although Isabelle is at least willing to give him some mercy with her sniper rifle.
Turns out you didn't even need to, Izzy my girl!
We see from a frontal shot that Cuchillo must have been dead all along. His face is all torn up and
you don't get that from a sniper shot. Turns out the cries for help weren't coming from Mr. Machete at all.
They were coming from a Predator!
[Predator, distorted:] Help me! Help me!
[James:] Royce's new plan is to hunt the hunters by following the dog tracks, and it leads them to a place with a whole bunch of
bodies and remains hung up.
Here's what's up: I'll add three to the list because that's how many freshly skinned bodies I see hanging up.
I don't want to count all these skulls and skeletons because, like what?
Do you want me to count all the headstones we see in any cemetery scene?
So I guess this is a new Kill Count rule: a dead body needs some flesh on it to count.
And yes, I'm sure I've already broken that rule before, and will do so again in the future.
I just do these videos to make jokes, y'all, I'm not an official dead body census taker!
Besides, the way more interesting thing they find at the campsite is a frickin' Predator!
Makes me real sad to see this OG looking Preddy Boi strung up on a stake like this, but the implications are pretty cool.
In this movie we're dealing with something so badass it captures the predator type that we know and love from the first two movies.
At least it's still alive, as it proves when it yells at all of them.
All that hootin' and hollerin' is sure to attract some attention
So it makes sense that Mombasa gets speared through the back out of nowhere and lifted off the ground.
Damn, killed before sundown. You didn't even get to enjoy any of this alien planet's Moonlight.
The others open fire, revealing the camouflaged predators for the first time and as they retreat back into the jungle,
we get to see the updated laser sights and plasma cannons as the aliens fire after them.
Also, Nikolai's minigun is taken out in the process. Hopefully he still has a sandvich on him.
The humans all end up taking some Arnie tumbles down a hill and into a lake fed by a waterfall,
which yes echoes the original movie, but I'll tell you what's new to this one: this frickin' recon bird
that soars over them getting their location and reporting back to its owner: one of three new super predators.
They've got no conscience, no empathy and we can talk about why they ended up that way, but first
Royce and co. will have to bring them to heel. The one with the bird is the Falconer Predator, the homeboy in charge of
the Hounds with the tusks on his mask is the Tracker Predator and the biggest baddest mamma jamma of them all
is the gold jawed scary bastard named the Berserker Predator.
Fuck. Yes. I love predators! The alien hunters, not the Harvey Weinstein kind.
During a lakeside debriefing of the total ass-kicking they just experienced, Royce somehow figures out that Isabelle knows more than she's let on
and forces her to divulge some info to the group.
Apparently she's familiar with the events of the first film and says the creature they saw strung up on the totem matches the
description given by the survivor of that incident.
Later on, after the Predators failed to walk into a trap set by Royce, one of them
winds up decloaking right behind him. Royce borrows Dutch's line from the original.
[Royce:] What the fuck are you?
[James:] But this time the question is answered because it turns out that ain't no predator at all!
[Noland:] I'm alive.
That's right. If you were worried there weren't enough characters in this movie, Predators has a crazy-ass
Laurence Fishburne as a U.S. Airman named Noland.
[Noland:] Noland, run away, live to fight another day...
Noland leads them across a ridge to his cozy little home inside a crashed alien spaceship.
Although the ship is dead the power still works, so he turns the lights on for everyone to get a good look at his squalor.
Nolan says he survived for 10 of the Predators' hunting seasons, and has even killed a few Preds himself.
He gives the others the lowdown on how there are two different species, comparing them to dogs and wolves.
[Noland:] The larger ones hunt the smaller ones. It's some kind of... blood feud, I guess. Been goin' on for a long time.
[James:] So that explains why our OG Pred Man was getting hazed at the campsite back there.
Laurence Fishburne gives a freewheeling performance as a crazed man with an invisible friend.
[Noland:] I Told you they wouldn't see it. I told you.
And when he mentions that the Predators have a working ship, Royce gets excited and wants to use it to escape.
But Noland just laughs at the idea, tells them all the hush up, and wraps himself up like a babushka lady for a nice little nap.
While he does that, we get tidbits of character development. Nikolai talks about his children, Hanzo finally speaks
when he finds an old katana that he likes, and Isabelle gets all thematic with the movie title.
[Isabelle:] We are predators. Just like them.
[James:] But then they realize there's smoke filling the room, and that Noland is gone.
He's looking to suffocate them all to death so he can take their gear and keep surviving on his own.
When Royce sees him talking to his invisible friend again, we get a back-and-forth of some ridiculous campy lines.
[Royce:] Say goodbye to your little friend.
[Noland:] You in my house, motherfucker!
Royce fires a shot that doesn't do anything to get them out of there, but does attract the attention of the Tracker Predator,
who Noland runs into while he's trying to escape. The predator uses his patent-pending shoulder cannon to
blow Noland's body apart entirely, just all the bloody bits everywhere, and then stands there in a pretty cool red tinted shot.
The Tracker Predator then apparently breaks open the door to where our heroes are trapped, but conveniently
disappears when they go to leave the room. seems like a forced plot contrivance, but whatever keeps the movie going I guess.
On their way out of the ship, Nikolai is shot in the back by the Tracker Predator and after he tries to crawl away get stabbed and
lifted up by the tusky Pred with his wrist blades. Before the Tracker Predator can finish the job though,
Nikolai curses him out in Russian and activates an explosion that incinerates the both of them and adds two to the kill count.
If only he had been getting ubered, Nikolai could have survived that.
Stans is real excited that one of the Predators is dead. He's straight stanning Nikolai for the kill.
But his celebration is cut short by a plasma shot to the back. Berserker Predator appears,
but before he can get to the others, Stans jumps on his back and starts stabbing him.
The lead Super Predator throw Stans to the Ground and the movie again borrows a line from the original.
[Stans:] Come on... hah... Come on!
But this time the predator acquiesces and just rips out Stans' spine and skull, killing the gangly Goggins and
giving us yet another cool shot of Predator doing its victory roar.
The surviving foursome are running away through some long grass when Hanzo decides to stop and do your standard
noble warrior shtick, nodding for the others to continue on while he does an exact copy of Billy's "stripping down to fight" thing from the
original. He's got that kick-ass katana on him, and the Falconer Predator appears down to clown with its own bladed weapon,
so the two embark on a pretty decent melee fight that we've never really seen in a Predator movie before.
It ends with one final strike from Hanzo that splits the Predator open at the waist and kills him.
But, as anyone who's seen a movie could guess by the way this is shot, Hanzo did not manage to escape unscathed,
and he too falls to the ground dead, adding another pair of warriors to the kill count,
and setting up this movie's finale. Edwin starts the final act by stepping into it immediately, and by it,
I mean a trap that really messes up his mobility.
Royce recognizes that he's dead weight, and even after Edwin tries to pass off Nikolai's family as his own
for some sympathy points, Royce sticks to his guns and leaves.
Isabelle is more compassionate and decides to help the weenie doctor limp through the jungle.
In no time at all, they walk into a trap and are strung up in a Preddy net.
Royce gets back to that campsite, because his newest plan is to free the jungle hunter predator
and get him to fly the alien ship off the planet. Seems unlikely to me,
but somehow the OG lookin' Predster understands Royce's English so our aquiline hero cuts him down
from the totem sending him crashing to the ground hilariously.
Apparently Predator never heard not to look a gift horse in the mouth, because
he gives Royce a once-over by the throat, but in the end he lets him go.
He picks up his mask from the ground and suits up, and it's a pretty great moment to see the OG Pred back in action.
Even better? He's played by Derek Mears, who was Jason Voorhees in the Friday the 13th reboot,
and who also just seems like a really nice guy.
The Predator beep-boops on his wristcand shows Royce that he knows exactly where he wants to go.
He starts the alien ship remotely from his wristband right as the Berserker Predator shows up with his haul of Isabelle and the doc,
which he promptly deposits into a little holding pit. What follows is something I never knew I needed: an all-out PREDDY FIIIIGHT! [airhorns]
The smaller jungle hunter and the larger gold-jawed Berserker boy go at it,
getting down and dirty and including as many elemental hazards as they can.
Meanwhile Royce gets to the spaceship that the jungle hunter remote started and which also
apparently has an autopilot since that thing is taken off.
The Berserker eventually gets the jungle hunter pinned down and goes to remove its mask so we can see an even uglier Predator face than the one we just started getting used to.
Christ. It's like a walrus infected by the Flood from Halo.
Well, there's no use living after seeing something like that,
so Berserker puts the jungle hunter out of its misery and swipes its head clean off followed by a Preddy yell.
Of course. Berserker runs out into a clearing just in time to see a spaceship leaving without him.
But good thing the dealership convinced him to get that remote detonation option
because he just blows that ship to shittereens before it's able to escape the atmosphere.
Down in the pity party pit, we get an absurd and senseless twist when Edwin pricks Isabelle with a scalpel infected with that slow-acting poison
he had pointed out earlier. He gives a real dumb bad guy monologue distorted by Isabelle's perspective saying why he did it.
[Edwin:] See, back home, I'm a murderer... I'm a freak. But here, among the monsters, I'm normal.
[James:] What the fuck? Because he's a murderer on earth, he wants to stay on a planet
where he'll definitely get killed by Predators? This is one of the weirdest and dumbest plot twists
I've ever seen, so good thing Royce shows up to cut it short with a one-liner.
[Edwin:] Oh you came back. [Royce:] I missed my ride.
He gets them out of the pit and while Royce is tending to Isabel,
Edwin tries to sneak up behind him and stab him, but Royce ain't going down like that
and he turns the scalpel back around on Edwin stabbing him in the throat with it.
He then drags the bleeding weenie back into the Predators' campsite right before Berserker Predator reappears.
The Predator finds Edwin with his heat vision, but when he turns the doctors body over an explosion goes off
that kills Edwin once and for all and sends the super predator flying onto his back.
It doesn't kill him though, robbing me of the chance of making some kind of twofer grace joke. Bastards.
Royce steps out to confront the stunned predator, covered in mud and yet again taking lines from the original.
[Royce:] I'm here. Kill me. Come on. Do it now. Kill me!
Guys it's okay to come up with your own stuff! Try it sometime.
Royce uses a club to beat the crap out of Predator's face, then narrowly avoids a blast from the plasma cannon,
but the predator still gets him on the ground in prime caking position.
That's when Isabelle recovers enough to take her rifle and shoot Predator in the torso,
allowing Royce to grab a nearby axe and wail on Predator with unbridled rage.
In fact, his hate for Pred is like a truck, Berserker. and that super Pred is out of luck, Berserker,
'cause Royce finishes off the big baddie with a decapitation, which plays out nice and slow like,
giving us a good look at all that glow-in-the-dark lime-green blood .
Also, even though this is the second Pred decapitation in the movie I've got no complaints. This shit is awesome!
With their foe vanquished Royce and Isabelle finally introduce themselves to each other, and the next
morning they watch as a whole bunch of new parachutes descend into the jungle,
fresh game for new predators to hunt.
The movie ends with another flat action line from Adrian Brody.
[Royce:] Let's find a way off this fucking planet.
With four times the predators as the original did we get four times the kills?
Let's find out and get to the numbers. Beep boop beep boop!
[electrical crackling, clicking]
["U Make Me Feel" by MK2 plays]
There were only 16 deaths in Predators. So, no. It was actually less than a quarter of the kills from the original.
The victims consisted of 9 human males, 3 skinned bodies of unknown gender, and 4 predators giving us a pretty unique pie chart right here.
With a runtime of a hundred and seven minutes that comes out to a kill on average every 6.69 minutes. Nice. [captioner's note: haha 69]
I'll give the Golden Chainsaw for coolest kill to Stans. I know we've seen the spine and skull rip before,
but never on a living person, and it's still so damn cool I don't mind that it's nothing new.
Dull Machete for lamest kill will go to the first dude who fell from the sky and died when his parachute didn't open.
He didn't even have a chance to get Predator'd. And that's it!
Predators came out in 2010 and has a sequel The Predator coming out on September 14,
so mark your calendars, especially because it's written and directed by Shane Black who played Hawkins in the first predator, so, you know
It'll treat the series with love. As always. I can't cover that until it's out on Blu-Ray
But until then I'm James A. Janisse. This has been the Kill Count. Thanks a lot for watching. This week's kill count
I want to thank a couple of patrons like Brendan Darby Madison, Marie Hawkes Heather Briley and Brady Cook
I know The Predator doesn't come out for a while, but its release date was originally in August.
Plus I need the next 10 weeks free. You know why? It's Halloween time! Tune in next week
when we finally start to count Michael Myers' kills. And the kills of a random Halloween mask maker. Be good people.