1997
Back in my hometown, there was a thirtysomething movie expert named Danny who would I consider to be the Obi-Wan Kenobi to my Luke Skywalker. Because Predator 2 took place in 1997, I naturally brought it up. He heard a rumour that Jean-Claude Van Damme was going to play Raphael in Predator 3, which was going to be a prequel. Sadly, it didn’t get made. In essence, it would’ve been like a period version of Alien 3 due to the limited technology in dealing with the predatory extra-terrestrial.
Get Joseph Kuby’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
To understand why this rumour made sense, Harrigan in Predator 2 is given an antique flintlock pistol which is dated 1715. An inscription reveals that the pistol belonged to Raphel Adolini (a character who had his own story in a comic book). As for JCVD, this was before his mainstream movie career came to an end. After that, it was all B pictures. Anyway, Danny and I agreed that Predator 2 was better than the original. It was unpredictable with Harrigan being a regular guy despite being a policeman. The fact that it wasn’t as successful as the original is ironic because the protagonist was more in keeping with the likes of Die Hard than Commando (which the original Predator was like).
When I told Danny that I saw The Fly II, he told me that the guy who played Martin the Fly was the original actor to play Marty McFly in Back to the Future. I was told that Eric Stoltz was cast because they wanted an actor who looked like the unavailable Michael J. Fox. One of the executive producers, Kathleen Kennedy, would later implicitly confirm this in the 2010 Blu-Ray documentary by saying: “We started really looking for somebody who might embody many of the qualities that Michael had.”
Before watching Eric in The Fly II, I saw him in the cable TV première of The Prophecy. Well, I should say partially saw him because I wasn’t allowed to watch certain parts of the film. When I saw The Fly II, I didn’t realize that it was the same actor. When I saw Anaconda in late 1997, I didn’t realize that it was the same guy from The Fly II. Being a fairly obscure actor allowed Eric to be a chameleon. Years later when I browsed Usenet, someone commented on his performance in Killing Zoe by exclaiming that it’s hard to believe that it was the same guy who played Keith Nelson in Some Kind of Wonderful. When someone uploaded a YouTube video of the bedroom drug deal in Pulp Fiction, someone remarked that it’s hard to believe that it was the same guy who played Rocky Dennis in Mask.
