Whether you categorize it as action, science fiction, horror, or all of the above, PREDATOR (1987) is a god-tier film. With Dan Trachtenberg’s PREDATOR: BADLANDS (2025) set to surpass the franchise OG at the box office nearly four decades later, it’s time to talk about what made a ninth film possible: a brief but game-changing scene that lifted PREDATOR from interesting to indelible.
Though the film is a hybrid that refuses to be limited to a single genre, it’s impossible to deny that PREDATOR has action movie tendencies. And late-eighties action meant the machismo went to 11, a fact that required PREDATOR to venture beyond awe into something raw.
Screenwriters Jim and John Thomas threw down a gauntlet of emotion ranging from exhilaration to fear, but were keenly aware that to rise above the body count of action and slasher popcorn fare demanded the audience feel the toll of loss.
Despite boasting of peak Schwarzenegger, the bravado of Carl Weathers, and the otherworldly presence and performance of Kevin Peter Hall, none were up to the challenge of carrying PREDATOR to the mountaintop.
That daunting task was placed in the more than capable hands of Bill Duke.
The film’s first act firmly established the camaraderie between Duke’s Mac and Blain (Jesse Ventura), so when Blain fell, Duke took center stage.
After Dutch (Schwarzenegger) said “[Blain] was a good soldier,” Duke’s heavy-eyed declaration “he was my friend” superseded the well-worn trope of the revenge-fueled tunnel vision to come. Mac was mourning.
Accompanied by Alan Silvestri’s Taps-inspired horns, Duke knelt next to his fallen comrade, and those same eyes spoke volumes about years, memories, and an unbreakable bond. As the horns swelled and Mac took one last drink from the flask they’d often shared, only two words escaped Duke’s lips: “goodbye, bro.”
With two words and less than sixty seconds, PREDATOR clearly communicated that these weren’t one-liner-spouting action heroes inexplicably taking out an entire army, they were human beings trying to survive.
The culmination of the Thomas’ writing, Silvestri’s score, and Duke’s delivery created a magical moment that forced the audience to share the suffocating weight of Mac’s sorrow.
In that moment, PREDATOR went to a place few movies of its ilk or era dared visit—that soldiers were people—and sometimes people lose. A moment that guaranteed PREDATOR would stand the test of time.
The year is 1990. NASA had launched the Hubble Space Telescope, the Undertaker made his national debut at the WWF Survivor Series, and one of Stephen King’s greatest (and most controversial) novels was adapted into a visual nightmare that premiered as a two-part miniseries on ABC on November 18th, 1990. And to put it mildly, kids of the ’90s were never the same after seeing Pennywise on their large, boxy floor television set.
I remember quite vividly as a kid, being hyped up for this television horror event, and while my peers were entangled with the brand-new series Beverly Hills, 90210, all I could think about was this upcoming Stephen King movie about a killer clown. Mind you before you come at me, at this age, I had yet to read the book nor know anything about the story other than what I had seen via TV previews, as afterword I was to discover that Pennywise was more than a clown, and as a young horror nerd, I liked what I saw. So my eyeballs were ready, and after the first night of Part 1, I was both traumatized by a clown with a million teeth and my prepubescent body was enchanted by a young Jonathon Brandis. It was quite a new experience for a movie to both disturb me and set my loins aflame. Rather impressive, actually.
Outta my way, Bev. My heart burns there too.
My pre-teen admiration aside, STEPHEN KING’S “IT”, at the same time set the world on fire and brought about a resurgence in Coulrophobia (fear of clowns) in both young and old; however, for kids my age it begat a fear we never thought we may have, or much thought about and because of Tim Curry’s masterful performance, it ignited a long-standing match against anyone with a painted face of nightmares. I mean, let’s talk turkey since it’s November: I don’t know if it’s the makeup hiding their real faces; if it’s the sense of enforced fun, this idea that you’ve got to be laughing; or maybe it’s just that we don’t like anything that tricks us repeatedly, and makes us keep coming back for more. Clowns are fools who enjoy making others look foolish, after all. Nothing more distrustful and downright disrespectful than that. It’s as if this fear was hidden in our subconscious and awakened by Stephen King himself. So if clowns didn’t bother you before the premiere of 1990’s IT, they most likely had some sort of uneasy impact on you. Those are just facts.
And if you read the book after watching the miniseries, as many of us did, that didn’t help the cause much.
As long as the miniseries was, clocking in a total of 3 hours and 12 minutes, the experience of watching it seemed like an eternity, but in the best of ways, as Pennywise torments the Losers’ Club through his favorite clown apparition, a werewolf, a sewer-dwelling slime monster, and shape-shifting into seemingly normal inhabitants of Derry. Even IT’s final boss image of what is closest to his true self, a giant spider, with those awful effects that were almost unforgivable even in 1990, all that was merely background noise to Curry’s Pennywise the Dancing Clown and to this day if I were to ask you to paint me a picture of a scary clown, chances are you’re going to show me a picture of Pennywise.
The miniseries itself wasn’t a massive hit at first, but at the time, after the television airing, it was a whisper between kids at the playground that in turn fed into curiosity and ultimately a discovery of one hell of a new fear of clowns. The IT miniseries, among many of Stephen King’s works of the 90s, being adapted into television events like THE STAND, THE LANGOLIERS, and THE SHINING, outclassed them all regarding cult horror classics and mainstay power, and that is largely due to Tim Curry’s Pennywise performance at the end of the day with becoming a larger than life icon in the horror genre. So much so that when the remake was announced back in 2016, the million-dollar question was, “Who exactly has the balls to fill Tim Curry’s clown shoes as Pennywise”? It was Curry’s role and both charming and utterly terrifying rendition that gave an entire generation of kids nightmares and a lifelong fear of clowns. Curry’s ability to articulate the absolute joy in scaring the crap out of the children; children (the Losers’ Club) whom many of us could relate with in one way or another, is to this day unmatched. No matter how much budget you out into a movie, and I’m in no way knocking Skargard’s rendition of IT, but you can’t deny Curry’s study of this otherworldly monster and the impact he had on an entire generation and beyond. He was perfect.
Be proud of that, Tim. Fuck those kids.
Stephen King himself acknowledged, “his novel ‘IT’ probably contributed to your lifelong fear of clowns”, via the Los Angeles Times, and follows it up with, in so many words, “calm your tits, folks”. Real easy coming from a guy who also wrote in an extremely graphic child orgy into said novel. I think it’s safe to assume not a lot of things bother that man. And the resurgence of clown scares before the release of IT (2017), only validate that the character of Pennywise itself, harbors a tremendous influential power over our own psyche. That, in itself, is terrifying enough. To boot, we all know to steer clear of storm drains. Just another added phobia of sewers that at least half of 90s kids have.
November 22nd: A day that lives in infamy for two reasons. The assassination of President John Kennedy in 1963, and the birth of a WWF legend at the annual Thanksgiving wrestling tradition at the 1990 Survivor Series. Yes, I still refer to WWE as WWF by default because I’m a rebel, Dottie.
I’ll never forget that fateful Thanksgiving when our stereotypical giant Italian family got together for our fat-fuck annual holiday feast. Italian cold cuts platters, Italian Christmas Soup, the big turkey feast, and of course, the mother fuckin’ PPV holiday event of the year: The WWF Survivor Series!
Real talk- To this very day, no WWE event intros can hold a candle to the ones of the ’80s’ and early ’90s. If their sole purpose was to rile you up and make you want to suplex your little brother into the mashed potatoes, well then goddammit, they did their job!
Anyway, after the twelfth course of dinner, we all gathered around my grandparents’ oversized Magnavox floor television to witness wrestling mullet glory in all its splendor; with my eight-year-old ass popped squat right in front of this beast. Everyone was pretty excited for the entire program, with levels of exhilaration varying between us over what match we were most looking forward to. However, collectively we WERE VERY ANXIOUS for two things in particular with this Survivor Series: what the hell was in this giant egg that the WWF heavily hyped up in the weeks leading up to the program, and who, exactly, was this mystery Million Dollar teammate that “The Million Dollar Man” Ted DiBiase kept boasting about leading up to the feud group match with Dusty Rhodes and his American Dream Team?
Well, like I said. I’ll NEVER forget the intro made by DiBiase himself once the match was ready to get underway.
“I would like to introduce to you now my mystery partner. Led to the ring, by his manager, Brother Love, weighing in at 320 pounds, from Death Valley, I GIVE YOU, THE UNDERTAKER!” Followed by his signature maniacal laughter, (one that I always got a kick out of). And what came out of those tall, dark curtains leading to the arena was nothing short of a spiritual experience for everyone watching. I WAS IN AWE.
CHECK OUT THOSE DRUMSTICKS, BABY!
Roddy Piper took the words right out of our mouths: “LOOK AT THE SIZE OF THAT HAM HOCK!!”
The debut of one of the most celebrated wrestlers in history, a man who’d go on to win seven WWF (now WWE) Heavyweight Championships, as well as 25 WrestleMania matches, is truly a golden moment in wrestling history. From his entrance alone, we initially expected a slow-moving superstar that relied on gimmick and strength, but holy FUCK we were so damn wrong.
The very first opponent to get a taste of the PHENOM, as announcers dubbed him later on, was appropriately the legendary Bret “The Hitman” Hart. However, Hart’s teammates Rhodes, Neidhart, and Koko B. Ware all got a graveyard-style ass-whoopin’ at the gloved paws of the Deadman- with Koko being on the receiving end of the very first Tombstone Pile Driver. Now again, with a man as large as Mark Calaway (The Undertaker) you can imagine our surprise when this dead-eyed wrestler started moving around the ring like a beautiful ballet with wrestling moves. His agility paired with intimidation tactics was quite remarkable and unlike anything I had personally seen in my short-lived life up until then. And I can personally say with confidence it hasn’t been matched since.
I’m just glad THIS was his epic debut and not that of the goddamn Gobbeldy Gooker where The Undertaker himself was scared to death thinking that HIS WWF arrival was going to be not as the iconic dead man, but this awful gimmick instead as he described in Steve Austin: The Broken Skull Sessions:
“So about the time I got my phone call, they were doing this promotion where, on the show — back then they’d do three or four weeks in a row — they had this gigantic egg on the set. So this egg appears on the show, right? And all of a sudden my mind just starts going like, ‘Aw, man, they’re going to bring me in — now this is how outlandish the gimmicks were back then too — I’m going to be ‘Egg Man.’ I had convinced myself, to the point where my stomach hurt, that I’m going to be ‘Egg Man.’”
This Thanksgiving marks over 30 years since The ‘Taker stole the show in the WWE and watching his Boneyard Match with AJ Styles this past April, just proves my point all the more. The man is truly a goddamn treasure in the industry and he made a fan for life with me on that very first night in 1990.
And yep-this is my little tribute to the Phenom, OG and traditional style on my right-back shoulder done by husband and soulmate Bradley Pauley at our shop, Last Chance Tattoo. Funny enough, a few years back this picture made it to a tattoo list in Wrestlezone, and I just stumbled upon it accidentally. Oh, the internet is full of surprises.
Also, worth noting, is our seven degrees of separation with The Undertaker that actually includes our shop. Our dear, departed friend MoJo Thomas, who sadly passed away in 2020, was taught by Doc Dog and Smilin’ Paul of Las Vegas Tattoo Company-who initially was the artist of a few of Calaway’s tattoos! So yes, he was around while the Undertaker was getting drilled on his skin back in the early ’90s’ and I am so envious of this. Also, it’s a great story that intertwines a friend I miss dearly and one of my childhood heroes, and it had to be said.
Anyway, the debut of this magnificent specimen of a superstar definitely ranks up there as one of my favorite childhood pop-culture memories. So let’s relive it together with the magic of YouTube! Cheers to 30 years of non-stop beautiful, bone-breaking entertainment brought to you by the American Badass!
