The Reel Rejects - PREDATOR: KILLER OF KILLERS IS...TOTALLY FREAKIN' KILLER!! MOVIE REACTION!

Episode Date: June 6, 2025

BRING ON PREDATOR: BADLANDS!! Predator: Killer of Killers Full Reaction Watch Along:   / thereelrejects   Visit https://www.liquidiv.com & use Promo Code: REJECTS to get 20% off your first order. On the heels of PREY & with PREDATOR: BADLANDS dropping this fall, we return to the realm of the Yautja to give our, Predator: Killer of Killers Reaction, Recap, Commentary, Analysis, & Spoiler Review!! Join Greg Alba, Aaron Alexander, Tara Erickson & John Humphrey as they embark on the globe- (and time-) hopping thrills of Predator: Killer of Killers, Hulu’s 2025 animated anthology co-directed by Dan Trachtenberg and Josh Wassung. Set before the events of the original 1987 film, this three-chapter saga pits deadly Yautja hunters against unmatched human warriors in Viking-era Scandinavia, feudal Japan, and World War II Florida—before culminating in a gladiatorial showdown on the Predator homeworld!! In “The Shield,” Viking raider Ursa (Lindsay LaVanchy, The Chosen One) leads her people in a bloody revenge quest around 800 AD—only to discover her “monster from legend” is the Predator, whom she confronts in a brutal axe-and-shield duel. “The Sword” follows Kenji (Louis Ozawa Changchien, Ip Man)—a cunning ninja seeking vengeance against his samurai brother—until he faces a stealthy Yautja amid the cherry-blossom-draped battlements of feudal Japan. Finally, “The Bullet” thrusts Torres (Rick Gonzalez, Miami Vice) into tense aerial combat during WWII in Florida, as he outmaneuvers a Predator from his cockpit in a pulse-pounding dogfight. Voice of Predator veteran Michael Biehn (Aliens, The Terminator) adds gravitas as the wily Yautja champion who orchestrates the final Predator-only arena match, where Ursa, Kenji, and Torres must band together to survive the ultimate test. Predator: Killer of Killers elevates the series by exploring untold eras and showcasing three distinct fighting styles—all while pushing animation boundaries with dynamic frame-rate shifts and 3D/2D hybrid textures. Whether you’re here for Viking gore, ninja stealth, or WWII aerial warfare, this anthology delivers some of the most searched-for Predator action in decades. Follow Aaron On Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/therealaaronalexander/?hl=en Follow Tara Erickson: Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@TaraErickson Instagram:  https://www.instagram.com/taraerickson/ Twitter:  https://twitter.com/thetaraerickson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Predator Twins. I just have to say that I know Jeff Leach, she's a comedian and Brock Powell. I went to high school with him. Yeah, dang, all right. Well, Tara, how did the homies do they did great i was just like i'm pretty sure i'll look it up later but i know those people all right man i freaking loved it i i thought it was really really good especially in the fact that

it was able to tell four stories i guess three individual stories within a culminating story and under an hour and a half that's crazy and it was it was so rich in character but also So the action was so diverse and really visceral. I don't know, man. That was incredible in the fact that it ties into prey. Like, okay, Dan Tractonberg, I see you, man. I see you tying in all the properties. And I wonder if that stuff's going to even tie into Badlands,

which comes out later this year. This man made two Predator movies in the same year. That's wild. That's cuckoo-cichoo for you right there. But no, I thought it was really interesting. I really resonated with the characters and I like that we found a way for them to even be all tied together

in a way that kind of made sense. It ties back to even some stuff we've seen in previous Predator films with line acknowledgments, technology we've seen before, little Easter eggs we've seen before, like the gun that wasn't Predator 2 and in Prey.

I just am blown away by the fact that not only the story was good but the animation was incredible as well, and the way that they were able to utilize its medium to heighten the action and do kinds of things we wouldn't be able to see in a predator movie in live action because obviously, CGI be expensive. Getting actors to coordinate certain scenes be expensive.

Not to say animation isn't expensive, but it's something that's a lot challenging, more challenging to do with physical bodies and stunts and whatnot. But, yeah, I also really enjoyed seeing the diversity and the different types of predators. We are just now starting to explore. Granted, I know the designs look a little different from Predator-Preditor movie, but seeing a more slender predator in the Japanese story

versus a hulking predator in the Viking story. And then you see like the Shao Khan of Predator is when they're on the predator planet. And seeing how that stuff or the, you know, the beginnings of that stuff was established in something kind of adjacent in the predator where they took the, the different warriors from different places and put them all in the same planet, but this is more of the Coliseum style. I don't know. I'm just super impressed, and I'm happy to be back in the Predator Worlds.

Tara, what do you think? I think Dan wanted to tell a story about parenthood. I mean, each story had a really strong connection to parents. Like, we start out with the mom and the kid, and the kid, obviously, when he goes to kill to save his mom, he learns that, you know, from his mom. And in the second story, the brothers, they don't. don't want to fight and then the brother that does and cuts down his other brother when we reunite with him again he has his dad's emblem he's wearing it it's sort of like you know even though

you don't want to think about like father becomes the son becomes father or i know it's different with the the first initial story but even the third one you know the son feels out the plane like the dad felt out the car and then he's like we got to flood it you know i think that uh i really liked the tie-in here, especially seeing my girl there at the end, that is like, Ohana, right? She had like family there at the end. And I know, we know that. We love her and we love what happened in that story. That was my favorite. And I think that what ties this all together is really family. And then, of course, at the end, to come together, we have to come together to fight the predator, although initially inside of each one of them is the instinct

to basically fight, really, and to be sort of a lone soldier. But them all coming together at the end is the only way that they're actually able to survive. And they actually all apparently do. I mean, I guess she's cryo frozen, right? She's freezing up in there. And who knows what happened to the other ones, but I really like that the initial story of it being together and walking us through what it is sort of to be a family, each one differently, but in the end, they all took something with them that they wouldn't have been able to get unless they were all together to achieve that. That's what I liked. Yeah, what you mean's family. Gee, how you feeling?

uh i feel like this opened up a world of possibilities for the future of the predator franchise and dan trackenberg truly is the man to lead the vision for all this i don't want to only repeat you know stuff that terra and aaron said same time got to leave a little bit of wiggle room for you john to say some words too there's four of us here i'll pick up the scraps i'll say that uh one of the most impressive parts about this anthology films are really really hard to pull off. It's really, you have to get people to care quickly and you have to tie it in some way. You don't have to, but usually it's like you either tie it in thematically or actual story-wise and they manage to do both. And in all three of them, you get a different

culture. You get different genre and slight different in style aesthetics, but not so different that when they do collide together for the story at the end that it doesn't feel like jarring you know there's there's distinct tone distinct characters and distinct genre on each one of them and i thought they managed to tell you know like in the and the and the first one with the ursic character the viking one uh i love how it's it is a story about like the cost of then And that theme seems to carry on with the one with the brother, with Kenji and Kyoshi. And so, like, I think they really thought we could do, like, cool shit. We could do cool animation.

We could do something that is hyperviolent. We could expand. What, how do you pronounce, to this day, I don't know how to pronounce the name of the Predators. I think it's Gaucha, but people in the comments probably know better than that. I don't know. But the fact that, like, you had three different ones of historical. culture and then you get to really dive into the culture with the predators here and you see the different types of warriors that they

accumulate into because the predators are warriors who like to hunt and our three characters are warriors who protect and you see how that level of protection comes into the ultimate accumulation yeah it's like universal language of warriorism and my personal favorite one would be the samurai one like aesthetically that just speaks to me I like how there was so limited of dialogue

Kane and Abel type of allegories are really easy for me to latch onto and I agree with Tara too it's like well all three had something to do with parenthood even the Ursa character she is the parent but she also suffers the repercussions

of her father and I like how they managed to give us a character arc for all of them especially a super strong one for the one that i thought might have been the the least strong in her own personal anthologies one like with ursa as i was watching and i was like okay yeah the strongest emotional one is probably like the other two are more emotionally strong stronger than the first one like i like the first one it's really cool but it's a little bit more like straightforward and then they managed to make what's cool is when they get to the finale with

her it makes her story stronger in her personal anthology one you know it's kind of like that effect when they do a great sequel and it comp and it makes the previous one better like how we watch like and or and then like it made rogue one that much better and i and they managed to do that in this one um film so yeah i thought this was a i thought this was brilliant and uh kudos to the animators and the the music and the sound design and i love how it was actually like really freaking violent and i hope this opens up the door for them to do more shit like this now in live action uh because i i can imagine this is like an experiment to see hey do will people jive with this kind of storytelling it would cost it would cost like insane amounts of money to do in live action so yeah maybe they could they're

they can really open up the door for more period pieces and maybe he is building of some type of cinematic universe, you know? I'm really excited for the future, Predator. Really am. Yeah, everything that Dan Tractonberg has added thus far or has been, you know, a lot of people work on these, but certainly his authorial additions to this franchise as we know it have felt very conscientious.

And, like, I appreciate that the Predator franchise such that it is has a lot of these, like, little interesting tweaks and details and things that change a little over time. And here you're jumping into a, you know, every story, even the wraparound are on different points in time, different parts of the timeline. And so like, yeah, in the really old one, a year 800, whatever, you've got this giant hulking dude. Then at 800 years later, it's this skinny looking dude with slightly different tech. And they're all kind of cut of the same cloth. The themes of the Yautchuk culture clearly are the same over that much time.

But, yeah, each iteration feels like kind of. handcrafted in a sense and this I thought was nicely proportioned because yeah it's like the first story is the most physical the most visceral and involves the character who is probably least likely to have any kind of line to their inner emotional state and then you go to the japanese story which is you know more emotional more poetic but still quite reserved and then you go to into the charismatic story of this you know kid uh you know in wartime and uh you know i liked the flavors of all of those and I like the way the wraparound

like I didn't realize we watched the trailer for this and I didn't get a sense really for what the wraparound would be. It was nice to be surprised by that. I didn't expect them. I didn't either because you could easily yeah just do a bunch of and like you this is proof that you could easily just do anthological predator

stories that maybe don't need to be feature length like part of me wonders if they took some of this because they're all good ideas and when prey came out and was the success that it was everyone was like oh man do one in like feudal japan do one in this time and place and this time in place and you know i'm sure there's a lot of debate over what gets greenlit as the next feature live action movie versus what else we could do but this was a nice bridger of the

gap to me because a it felt really well in tune with both prey but also just the franchise in general and b there were times where i was watching this where i felt the feelings i would get watching live action movie magic on screen, which I think is like a special thing to have, like there's a lot of dazzling animation out there. And this, I feel like, is probably rendered, again, in the modern fashion, by a computer, but the way they handled the brush strokes and the painted looking quality of everything, as well as the gore that you're not used to seeing as much of in this kind of media, again, animation, often being sort of miscategorized.

being for kids. But yeah, like this had a really nice escalation. And then by the time you get to the wrap around and the three of them had to work together, I liked the way that they stuck true to who we knew those characters to be. And in a short amount of time, made a decent amount of sense

out of how they ultimately wind up communicating with each other. Like, yeah, you get to the late point where you're like, how would he just intuitively know how to fly the plane? But that's the stuff that you're willing to forgive for the rest of the things that have been so well earned.

And, yeah, I liked all three of these characters. I liked the warehouse at the end, just the idea, the suggestion that they have infinite numbers of these champions from all over the world, the galaxy, etc. And yeah, like, these could easily be proofs of concept for movies that could be made live action down the line, or maybe, you know, certain ideas only need to be this long. It's like, I would love a samurai feature-length film,

But maybe this was for this creative camp, the amount of story they thought they could tell with that. And it certainly seems like these characters have the full potential to return again. So this was, yeah, this is a pretty solid slam dunk as far as I'm concerned. And it's fun. It's exciting to see a franchise in a time and place where especially, you know, franchises are more expensive than ever. And keeping the business of all that afloat is we're weirder than ever. and we get so many expansions on things that are kind of all right.

Like, this is actually exhilarating. And I thought the animation was really well. It complemented the subject matter, and the subject matter complemented the animation. And this feels like the exact kind of thing that should be like a thriving wing of Predators, have these tales from the Predator universe, and then occasionally have your mainline movie.

Like, I think this is, if this is success, I would love to see more stuff like this. and yeah anybody else got any other additional thoughts all right rejagnation summers here in between workouts filming traveling stain hydrated has never felt more important i actually get really excited to talk about these guys because i use them every single day yes i've mentioned it in several videos at the start of this year i weighed 218 i basically dropped about 42 pounds thus far starting january 25th and if there's one thing i've learned during this entire fitness journey proper hydration makes a huge difference and how you feel and how you perform. It really does matter.

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bad boy keeps me going. So no matter what summer brings, tear, poor, live more, you can go to liquid iv.com and get 20% off your first order with code rejects at checkout. That's 20% off with code rejects at liquid iv.com. Thank you again, Liquid Ivy for sponsoring this video. and making my day-to-day so much better. You do go, go, go. Oh, I was just going to say that that tracking shot, there's like, your budget would have to be absolutely insane.

When we're talking about the first story, the tracking shot where she is fighting all of those people, we do not cut, and then we zoom over to the sun and we realize the sun did some juicing. You're like, holy tamale, the amount of choreography and planning and just impossible, like, standards, because you're in the Arctic and there's snow. I mean, it's just wild.

And the amount of, like, gore that they can show is so cool. And obviously, in a, you know, a live action, we can't show. I mean, we could, but CGI showing a kid in a monster's belly. Like, how cool is that? But I think mainly what stood out to me with animation and just the freedom that they have is that you can make the shots look as beautiful as you want them. If you wanted to look like a golden hour shot,

you have that opportunity to have it be golden hour and like the light is perfectly hitting those yellow trees as they fight with the swords and the leaves are falling. That's just really hard to get with live action. And the feeling that it gives you because of that beauty is just it's untouchable. It's very hard to make that happen in live action. You get one shot at a golden hour shot.

you better hope you have really good actors who know their lines you cannot F up otherwise we've totally screwed it you maybe get two tries so in this you can just make it look how you want and that ending shot I was like my breath was taken away it literally in

every one of these it did look like a watercolor painting to me and I think that it's going to be difficult although I do think it is possible to make it look and have this sort of intriguing beauty come to life on scream and a live action, I do think it's going to be

really hard to live up to. But I think Dan would be the person to be able to do it because we saw pray and hell yeah. It bridges the gap really nicely because like this makes a lot of choices with how, like it bothers to have a lot of stuff added to the frame that would happen if you were actually shooting through glass. And it really well realizes the elements because you go from water and ice to you know leaves and trees and things to the air clouds and then it's just dirt and rocks

and everything and it's so like it's heightened you can see a kid in a monster's belly but there's a whole bunch of other stuff that's like grounded in ways you don't have to ground animation that lends it further credence and again for me anyway tricked my brain a couple times to feeling to having

the feeling like I was watching live action even if it's animated I got that sweep of like oh my god this aerial shots this dog fight you know like so so very striking you had a thought yeah yeah no i agree it had that that thing about it were like okay we can utilize our animation to showcase the levels of brutality these predators are capable of but i just wanted to say that i want to thank dan jacktonberg for rejuvenating some life back into the predator franchise i want to say the last predator movie we got before prey was at least little to say not very well received

in 2018 but you know with him capitalizing on the thing that predator 2 established with oh the predators have been around in human history for a long period of time and now us finally being able to utilize that fact to tell a different variety of type of predator stories or something I really appreciate. And I want to also thank him for not only being able to capitalize on that, but this and pray are a testament to the fact that if you have interesting characters, you can tell any kind of story you want to. You do it in a two-hour film. You can do it in under an hour and a half. Not only can do it under an hour and a half, you can do it in 20-minute increments and then have them all tie up together at the end and still have it be just as interesting as the individual

stories are and I'd like that the cornerstone of all four of these stories are hell all five of these stories including prey four or five debate or whatever but is family trauma and

the desire to achieve something you know Ursa wanted to to get revenge on the guy who killed her father the what was his name? The Japanese dude wanted to you know get respected and I guess

semblance of revenge on his brother and Torres really wanted to make his father proud and having all those things in tandem and their different motivations work together to come in a way where they can all find a way to exist but all towards the same goal but using their foundation of what their experiences were to catapult them to a resolution

I thought was done near flawlessly. And I'm excited to see the fact that he tied prey back into it at the end because, again, this is another character that he created that can not fit into the themes of those first three characters. And I'm excited

to see if they utilize that, whether it being in the animation or in a live action film, for them all to kind of come together to defeat the predators. It was exciting. It's like the Avengers coming together, but they're just people that are just proficient warriors throughout time. And that's That's beautiful.

I'm excited that they found an accessible point for not only Predator fans, but for people that are just a fan of good characters and good action to all rejoice in the new era of Predator that we found ourselves in. And possibly Fast and Furious fans because Taurus and Taurus in the car. Oh, snap. Oh, what? Distant relative. I see you, Dan. I see what you're trying to do.

I also appreciate it. I don't know if that was intentional or not, but the reference to Black Panther where his brother fell and they were looking over at the sunset, just like how killmonger and black panther did in that movie i like that i wonder if all of that is referencing like some old kurosawa movie or something like that or whatever but yeah a lot of great imagery gee any other thoughts i feel like anything i'd say would just be uh repetitive you guys all make great points and um one last thing okay i'm sorry you said you should actually have a thought did you actually uh yeah but it's okay no i want to hear the thought no go for it's a quick one quick one um

I like that we got to see a Hispanic gentleman in the 1940s war because we never seen that in that setting who was American and Hispanic. Okay, that's it. That's all I want to say. Yeah, I think Dan's really good at capturing, getting to know characters via through action. I think that can often be overlooked on how difficult that is to portray. A lot of times, you know, like we were seeing a big debate about that happening online regarding a character in The Last of Us.

And I think this is like a prime example. I think he did it with Prey. George Miller gets credited on that for Mad Max. And I think he did that. That's how you do visual storytelling efficiently in a genre like this. And he knows how to capture tension really well. If there's anything I maybe would have liked a tad bit more of in this particular chapter in this particular story, I did have a little bit of a

desire for more horror you know I like that the samurai one actually infused some of that and you know for this feels like a pilot in some ways and I think what they did here was better than what three seasons of what if I tried to do I know I know this is not an alt universe this is all canon to the main timeline of the predator storylines but this reminded me of that of like anthology tales that you try to tie in by the final chapter and i'm like he did this and they did this in one movie um versus you know seasons of television and i think this could open up the door for seasons of television of the predator world but i do think yeah if we can get a little bit more of the the horror like you have the tension you have the thrills the horror is like it comes with the territory and some degree of the suspense but yeah i think like horror is a staple of predator and i think he really brought that he brought that back in with prey being a horror action movie

and I want that back I can see how yeah it's like the format the compactness of everything kind of you could but it doesn't allow as heavily for yeah the space you need to like truly have the stalking kind of horror yeah yeah that's about it all right gang

what did you think of predator killer of killers what was your favorite segment and what would you like to see this universe tackle next what time place hero warrior or otherwise would you like to see or villain go up against the predator leave the comments in the comments down below and we'll catch you on the next one much love people be well