PREDATOR: KILLER OF KILLERS Review: Bloody, Terrific Tales of Action And Horror Nearly Undone by Overall Climax

A Viking clan-leader takes their son out for the ultimate Take Your Child to Work Day. Two brothers in feudal Japan are at odds on which one should have taken over leadership of the family when an even bigger party crasher arrives on the scene. And a grounded pilot during World War II takes to the air on the suspicion that there is something deadlier than the enemy patrolling the skies above.

 

Prey director Dan Trachtenberg follows up on that smash streaming hit with an animated anthology of tales. It builds on the same premise that these predators, the Yautja, a space-faring planet of bad-ass warriors, have been visiting our planet for centuries, whittling away unworthy adversaries until a champion of humanity bests them. 

 

The adult animated science fiction action horror anthology film was directed by Dan Trachtenberg, along with Joshua Wassung from effects studio The Third Floor Inc., who made the film in-house. Trachtenberg wrote the screenplay with Micho Robert Rutare, who was once associated with indie rip-off kings, The Asylum.

 

Game recognizes game, and one after another, other Predators (Yautja) come to Earth seeking the ultimate prize, to beat the best of our best. It's like a centennial intergalactic slasher film, with cooler gadgets and augmentations but no lore, as it happens every hundred years or more. The supernatural killer returns, kills all your friends until the Final One outsmarts them and lives another day. Or did they? Generations will have passed by before the next hunt begins, so there’s no one around to tell the tale of the last time the Yautja came to town. 

 

Let us start with the animation before we get into the story. The animation is, of course, terrific. The character design and animation style complement a form that gained popularity among the masses after a major steampunk series on another prominent streamer wowed viewers. We are unsure whether it is all in twos or threes, an animation term we have become aware of recently, and we are still learning how to identify it. We are interested in learning more about this and writing it out to serve as motivation for us to understand how to identify it in the future, when it is used for aesthetic purposes or for efficiency in the animation process. 

 

Further dissection of the film will reveal whether more easter eggs were hidden within it, but the most obvious one to appear in this animated film is Raphael Adelini’s flintlock pistol from 1715. An easter egg that first showed up in Predator 2 when it was given to Danny Glover’s character, Lt. Mike Harrigan, was brought back in Prey when Adelini himself gives it to Naru, and shows up again in Killer of Killers. How though?

 

Animation allows its creators to bend the laws of physics and create scenarios and action sequences that would otherwise be impossible to create in real life. Or, at the very least, not questioned by the viewer. With animation, you will believe that someone could get punched into the rafters of a building, punched so hard that the victim just dangles there afterwards, when their head becomes one with the solid, wooden beam. If you were to do that in a live-action Predator movie, suddenly it becomes impossible because the audience is engaging with real-life characters, and we still apply real-life dynamics and physical laws to whatever we’re watching, despite how impossible the scenario is. Funny how that works, huh? 

 

Once the rules of real life were tossed aside Trachtenberg and Wassung created some amazing action sequences. The Vikings chapter has a terrific Oner in it; something that would have required hidden cuts and stitched-together sequences in live-action. The Samurai chapter amplifies wirework, without the wires, and the chase sequence across the rooftops of a lord’s castle is one of the best things ever. Also of note, this chapter is dialogue-free, primarily letting swordplay and glorious violence do the talking. The third chapter with the WWII pilots made us queasy in a way we had not felt since we frist watched the chapter titled ‘B-17’ from Heavy Metal.

 

Now, the story. Once the Viking chapter is done, astute viewers will have already figured out what will happen towards the end of this one. What we will not know is the how, or the why, until the end. But, if there is one thing that the Yautja respect, it is a species that bests them in mortal combat. Over, and over, and over again. The pattern repeats so much in the franchise you would be forgiven if you thought, Jeez, do these guys have a slow learning curve, or what? Why are there no travel advisory warnings for Earth? Well, Tracthenburg presents a reason for that.

 

Still, from the WWII chapter on, the dialogue and scenarios start to get cheesy. Now, Hollywood films made about WWII after the war were brimming with a lot of Sis Boom Bah, tally ho, and praise our conquering heroes. The third chapter has whiffs of that, and it runs the risk of taking viewers out of the moment because even for an animated project that has stretched the limits of believability and scientific law, that lead-in to the climax begins to feel ‘cartoony’. Follow that with events during the climax that turn sci-fi horror into space action adventure territory and the project began to lose us, a bit.

 

We had intended to rip into this climax for taking what first felt like a cop out - uh, what do we do with these three cool-ass ideas after they’re over? At first, it begged the question: Were these ideas that couldn’t be fleshed out in feature-length movies? Each era in which a story has taken place - Vikings, Samurai, and WWII - has already been well-represented on screens, both large and small. And that must have been the trick that someone like Trachtenburg found themselves in at some point in the creative process. And then in the middle of writing this review - whoomp, bang - epiphany! We suddenly got it. All the while, what Trachtenburg wanted to explore further was not when these hunts occurred, but why they were happening in the first place. 

 

After presenting something novel like Prey, which refreshed the franchise by going back in history to a Pre-Industrial America, fans of the franchise began speculating and offering suggestions as to when the next Predator story could take place. But then it just becomes a case of later, rinse and repeat and soon we would begin bemoaning that going back in time offers up nothing different for the franchise, that is based on one premise: every hundred years or so, the Yautja come back to Earth in an attempt to rewrite Predator: The Most Dangerous Game. This is probably why Predator: Badlands appears to be the first live-action film in the franchise to take us off-world, or at the very least, into the future. Mix things up a bit.

 

To its credit, Killer of Killers takes us to a place that no Predator film has taken viewers before. However, Trachtenberg and Ruta present a novel idea at the end of this animated feature that could be explored further at a later time. Success provides opportunity, and if Killer of Killers and Badlands are successful, then the studio will provide the means to bring that idea to life, either through more intense animated violence or another live-action film down the road. 

 

Three very entertaining and violent tales come together in a climax that teeters on the edge of acceptance. Still, it is not until the final shots in the story that we see that Trachtenburg and company have been wondering why, in the first place, these centennial hunts take place. They have ideas about the Yautja's end game.