The View From The Mountain

I was looking forward to seeing The Predator , but not because I was a big fan of the Predator film series. While I enjoyed the original 1987 Predator --with Arnold Schwarzenegger and a cast of manly men squaring off against an alien hunting them in the jungles--the sequel was atrociously bad, and I enjoyed the first Aliens Vs. Predators movie more because I’m a huge fan of the Alien film series, but the AvP sequel was also another inferior entry, too. And I admit to never really being a big fan of the Predator itself, either; as a movie monster, the Predator never really felt strong enough to carry its own film series. The real reason I was looking forward to seeing The Predator , which was released in the fall of 2018, was because it was directed by Shane Black. Shane Black is a writer/director who gave us such marvelous movies as Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang , and The Nice Guys . And he also managed to make a decent Iron Man sequel with the third entry in that series. Black got his s...

I was watching a movie talk show the other day and one of the pundits on the panel mentioned just how awful Alien Vs. Predator ( AVP ) was. It made me realize that I haven’t watched this film in a while. I had been a huge Alien fan since seeing the original Alien in theaters back in 1979 (and had seen Aliens , Alien 3 and Alien: Resurrection ) in theaters, also. I had never been a big Predator fan, seeing how the first film with Arnold (“Get to da Choppa!”) is really the only one that’s best of that bunch. But I enjoyed AVP when I first saw it on DVD back in 2004. Granted, the movie takes liberties with the backstory of both franchises--which may be the major sticking point for most fans of the Aliens and Predators, but upon re-watching this flick I realized that the backstory that AVP creates for Aliens actually fits into the mythology by having Lance Henriksen return to play the original owner of the Weyland Corporation, an early version of the firm that keeps popping up in o...