10 Things You Didn’t Know About Predator 2
Many of the movies I grew up loving as a kid are still ones that I re-visit to this day. I guess that means that I either had amazing taste in action movies as a young lad or that I’ve never really grown up. You be the judge. What I do know is that there are a few movies that I didn’t care for at the time but have grown on me over the years. One such movie is Predator 2. Maybe it was because I was such a die hard fan of the original or because Danny Glover’s character is such a different type of hero when compared to the brawn of Arnie, but I can definitely remember not liking the film as a youngin’. Boy have I changed. Predator 2 will never be better than the original to me but that doesn’t mean that I don’t enjoy the hell out of watching it now. It’s such a great addition to the universe set up in 1987 with the original Predator that I think it is about time for me to apologize to Danny Glover and I’m partially doing that by presenting you with…
10 Things You Didn’t Know About Predator 2
1. Maria Conchita Alonso shadowed a female detective in preparation for her role. The detective’s job was to investigate murders involving black magic. She told Maria some wild stories about finding rooms full of bodies in plastic bags that were for sale.
2. Arnold’s character, Dutch, from the original Predator was written into the sequel but Arnie’s schedule didn’t allow him to do it. He had to decide whether to do this or Terminator 2. The movie mentioned that Dutch disappeared several weeks after the events of the first movie. The Federal Agent Keyes was supposedly the man who set up the CIA operation that we see in the first film.
3. Predator 2 was one of the first movies to show a bunch of video screens in the film. Aliens had a couple of scenes where they did something similar but Predator 2 went crazy. Showing video screens like they did back in the day was an absolute headache because everything had to be synced up perfectly and nothing could be done digitally like they do today.
4. Filming in the city was downright crazy. People who lived in the nearby buildings would throw bottles of piss or bags of feces at the crew. There were also rats big enough that some of the grips working on the film reportedly put leashes on them and walked them around. As they were cleaning out one of the alleys for a shot they discovered a dead body.
5. Gary Busey utters the line “Guess who’s back!” It was either a play on the Arnie line “I’ll be back” or because this was his first movie back after his almost deadly motorcycle accident. Busey’s accident actually caused him to be legally dead for a short time before he was brought back. It meant that Gary had all sorts of stories about his experiences that he shared on set with other actors. It also gave him a different experience to draw from for his role as Keyes.
6. The writing on the pistol that gets tossed to Danny Glover at the end is related to a character from the Predator comic books. The character was a pirate that went up against a Predator and fought bravely.
7. Over 20 cuts had to be made to the film for it to get an ‘R’ rating. There was no way that it could have been released under the NC-17 rating.
8. If you re-watch them, the Joel Silver movies during this era always tended to spill over into a random person’s home. It was kind of his way of showing the difference between the worlds of the main characters of the story and the normal people just living their lives.
9. They used a one-armed stuntman and a rig called a “descender” for the Predator fall after his arm is chopped off by Danny Glover. The scene was shot 13 stories up and the actor had one shot to get it down. The weapon that was used to sever his arm at the wrist was one that was new to the series. Director Stephen Hopkins brought a greater level of weaponry to the ‘City Hunter’ Predator than the simpler weapons of the ‘Jungle Hunter’ Predator. They had already worked out some of the kinks from the first movie and made most of the weapons as separate pieces that could be attached and not the solid molds like they had done a few years earlier.
10. Danny Glover was a big LA Lakers fan so they got a couple of the players to portray the Predators at the end of the film. They were tall, lean, and athletic so they were perfect for the roles. Each of the Predators were a bit different from one another because a team of creators worked on them to be such. The old gray-haired Predator re-used much of the same prosthetics from the first movie and was played by Kevin Peter Hall.
