With The Predator recently release we take a look back at the movie that launched the franchise, the 1987 Predator starring Arnold Schwarzenegger (The Terminator), this classic: the man vs. alien ‘rumble in the jungle’ movie is still a firm favourite with fans and it’s one that even 30+ years later it hasn’t been matched.

Major Schaefer Dutch (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is the leader of a military rescue unit looking for allies captured by guerrillas in the Latin American jungle. At first, it seems like any other mission: Schaefer and his team of seasoned combat veterans spot a guerilla camp, destroy it, and find the men they were sent to rescue executed. But when Schaefer attempts to lead his unit out, with a captured guerrilla in tow, something horrifying and inexplicable begins to happen: One by one the men are killed by a mysterious adversary – a predator from another world.

Suddenly human enmities are forgotten, for Schaefer and his dwindling band of survivors are no longer the hunters – instead they are being hunted by an enemy who blends into the jungle and strikes with inhuman ferocity, and more than human agility and power.

[click_to_tweet tweet=”So you cooked up a story and dropped the six of us in a meatgrinder? – Dutch #Predator (1987) #Quote” quote=”So you cooked up a story and dropped the six of us in a meatgrinder? – Dutch”]

Stalked by the unseen foe and stripped of his sophisticated weaponry, Schaefer must rely on more than physical strength and modern technology. With the jungle his only ally, he will draw on his inner resources of instinct and intelligence, as he faces his greatest challenge: to stay alive.

Predator Back To The 80s!

Directed by John McTiernan, just a year before Die Hard made him Hollywood’s most sought-after director, Predator has frequently been called the quintessential action movie.

The fight between one man and an alien that we would later see taking on one of Hollywood’s other famous aliens in Alien vs Predator has been a movie that even today with all the clever jiggery-pokery of CGI and over the top special effects, still holds the test of the time with its tense scenes of the Predator stalking the crack team of commandoes as they are picked off one by one in shocking ways, but all amazingly done with the movie technology of the 80s.

[click_to_tweet tweet=”There’s something out there waiting for us, and it ain’t no man. We’re all gonna die. – Billy #Predator (1987) #Quote” quote=”There’s something out there waiting for us, and it ain’t no man. We’re all gonna die. – Billy”]

Let’s not forget that the film features one of the best action heroes of the 80s the Terminator himself, Arnold Schwarzenegger, with his obligatory one-liners and non-stop action sequences that keep you gripped from start to finish, it’s no wonder that Predator is listed in a lot of people’s top ten of action movies and it’s in mine.

Predator is a movie that is an all-out action movie that shows that back in the 80s Hollywood knew how to produce action movies that would stand the test of time, something that we don’t seem to see much of these days, now that Shane Black’s The Predator has been released by Twentieth Century Fox, the franchise is showing that it still has some life in it, but where will the story take us next in the new movie and will there be any more Predator movies?

But for now, we can still go back to that jungle and relive those glory days of the 80s action flick and, for me, it’s still the best movie in the Predator franchise.