Last night, I was alerted to a movie on Netflix streaming that was so bad it was just wretched. These days I have less and less time for the bad stuff. My Netflix streaming queue used to be filled to the gills with 1-star wonders, everything from 80s schlock to low-budge action starring Christian Slater and Cuba Gooding Jr. (there are many). Now I have mostly high star-rated sophisticated artsy fartsy stuff and TV shows.

But this movie, called Flesh Wounds, is basically a complete rip-off of Predator. I had to see it for myself, so I started it up. OMG! It was a total suckfest with almost nothing original. The big main difference was that the “predator” was actually a super-charged cyborgish soldier.

It was such a rip-off, though, that it almost felt like the director was just watching Predator behind the camera. All the memorable scenes were present: the “predator view” showing heat signatures with the altered audio and the breathing sounds in the background, the “there’s something out there” moment, the shooting all your ammo into the jungle bit, the bad guy fixing his wounds and yelling about the pain part, the girl getting sprayed with blood, the “if people died here, where are the bodies?” one, and on and on. I kind of feel like some production company wanted to do a remake, but couldn’t get the rights to use the characters and title, so they just went rogue and did it anyway. Even the music was way too close.

I couldn’t actually finish the movie, but it was fun seeing how much they could fit into such a short time. The Mockbuster genre lives on!