So Bill Clinton has been in the news lately talking about the ’90s-era crime bill, which few people on the left look back at fondly today. And from that perspective, this movie is really interesting, because made in 1990, it predicts a future 1997 where LA’s streets are (to use the phrase the movie uses repeatedly) “a war zone.”

So yeah, there was a lot more fear of street crime back then, in a way that moderns maybe have forgotten or find ridiculous.

Of course, there was also a shit-ton of racism back then — those gangs are all one non-white ethnicity or another, in a really hyper-obvious way that would be surprising in anything less offensive than like a GTA game these days — so I wouldn’t really hold this movie up as a defense of ’90s crime policy.

As it happens, though, this is supposed to be a movie about a Predator, and in that context… it’s weird. Because the Predator mostly spends the first half of the movie killing gangs, and by the time it turns to cop-killing, you’re almost thinking of it as Invisible Batman.

As in the first movie, it honestly doesn’t seem that cool or hard to beat (Danny Glover manages it pretty easily all by himself), and I have a hard time taking Alien vs. Predator seriously — Aliens would fucking take out the Predators in 30 seconds.

ALSO: Given how shitty these two movies are (especially this one, which is basically just pure trash), it’s kind of shocking to me that the Predator remained in the cultural consciousness long enough to be revived 14 years later in the AvP movie. Why did this not just fade away long before that?