‘If idd bleeds, we can kill it…” Arnold Schwarzenegger’s gung-ho commando announces his crucial insight in this classic slice of 80s action mayhem – now on rerelease – about a bunch of US special forces guys facing an extraterrestrial monster deep in the Central American jungle. The movie emerged 30 years ago from the deepest thicket of Reaganite America’s subconscious, just when the nation was anxious about Daniel Ortega’s Sandinistas in Nicaragua. The guys’ rude jokes, together with an apparently duplicitous female insurgent and the alien creature’s row of teeth may also point to a Freudian explanation.
In movie terms, it arrived via Jaws, Alien, The Terminator and Rambo, and recent comedies such as Tropic Thunder have paid affectionate homage to director John McTiernan’s unselfconsciously forthright style and his passionate love of automatic weaponry going off deafeningly and interminably.
Schwarzenegger plays Dutch, an alpha-warrior called in, along with a roistering band of brothers, when the government claim they need him and his crew to rescue some hostages from the jungle. But someone or something is flaying its victims alive. Dutch and his men find themselves being tracked by a creepy, murderous alien way up in the branches. Dutch isn’t going down without a fight.
Veteran screenwriter Shane Black has an acting role, as the wisecracking guy who loves bad jokes, the sort of character who is traditionally earmarked for an early exit.
