Predators: It’s Like Alien Vs. Predator Never Happened…

There was once a time when movies with Predators in were a good thing. Before those woeful Alien vs. Predator films turned the fanny-faced, murderous space-sociopaths into bickering figures of ridiculousness, they were arguably the biggest badasses in the movie universe, possessing all the killer instinct of Alien’s monsters, but without any of those namby-pamby maternal instincts. Robert Rodriguez, the man behind Sin City and Planet Terror, wants to take us all back to those days.

“It’s like when Warner Bros brought Batman back from the dead,” Rodriguez tells FHM of the project, which forgets the AvP movies ever happened. “Predator is undoubtedly a classic character that deserves to be resurrected”.

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Anyone who remembers the original 1987 movie – in which Arnie Schwarzenegger and a team of commandos find themselves stalked by an alien creature with a penchant for turning invisible and skinning people – will be on familiar territory. “I like to pretend this is a sequel to the first movie,” explains Rodriguez, who wrote the script and is on producing duties, with Nimród Antal (Armored) directing. “So you could watch the first movie and watch this movie and there is a little bit of a through-line that connects them.”

In fact, the new film actually could have been a sequel, since Rodriquez wrote the script 15 years ago and pitched it to Arnie, who liked it, but the studio considered it too expensive. “It was a little weird when Fox dug up this script from so long ago,” says Rodriguez. “But I still liked it a lot. Arnold’s character was in the original script a lot but obviously couldn’t be in it – the world has changed! So we kept the key ideas and updated it with new characters.”

The new film sees a disparate group of killers – a mercenary (Adrien Brody), a drug cartel enforcer (Danny Trejo), a black ops sniper (Alice Braga), among others – dropped, much to their confusion and subsequent screaming terror, on a strange planet; a planet that turns out to be a training ground for Predators.

“They’re being toyed with, hunted, studied, killed brutally,” laughs Rodriguez with a little more relish than is strictly healthy. “There are two tribes of Predator on this planet. There’s the tribe you know from the first movie and then there is this other tribe that is a lot more primal and sadistic – they don’t really have much of a code, they just want to kill.”

That second tribe includes new, weird Predator designs. There’s the Predator with ‘Pred-hound’ which is a sort of foxhound type thing, if you happened to have crossed a foxhound with a triceratops and a steroidal newt with anger management issues. Then there’s the Falconer, a Predator that uses a massive flying insect that gives its master eyes in the sky. Rodriguez, however, is keeping his mouth shut on the film’s secret weapon. “The worst of all [the new Predators] is Mr Black,” he all but cackles. “You’ll see what he does. Now he is badass.”

Predators is out August 6

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From the August 2010 issue of FHM India.