Lord Samper's Library

  Page Count: 112 Pages My eldest daughter had a friend over, yesterday afternoon, and that was my cue to take my youngest daughter into town for Frappucino’s and a spot of shopping, Really, it was meant to be about picking some bits and pieces up for my youngest but… There is a Waterstones bang in the middle of two places that we were headed to, I’d won some money on a scratch card and… There was a copy of ‘Predator Versus Spiderman’ on the shelf. I’ve always had a soft spot for the ‘Predator’ movies (the franchise is a hell of a lot more consistent that the ‘Alien’ series), even more so since I introduced them to my eldest. These days then, I’m a little more willing to give other media a go so, here we are… Marvel's greatest hero faces off against the galaxy's greatest hunter in Benjamin Percy's grittiest PREDATOR series yet! In PREDATOR VS. WOLVERINE, we saw a single Predator stalk the killing machine Wolverine. In PREDATOR VS. BLACK PANTHER, Yautja invaded Wakanda and n...

Well, maybe not that positive, one of these films wasn’t actually that great, but the next week and a bit is (hopefully) going to be a pretty big deal for me so I wanted to start it off on the right note. Well, try any anyway ;o) Anyway… I did manage to get a little reading done over the weekend, there’s nothing like a long bus ride to make some headway in a ‘Siege of Terra’ book, but I started things off with a movie and ended up just continuing from there :o) And here’s what I watched… ‘Predator – Badlands’ (2025) In which a young Yautja warrior (I believe they answer to ‘Predator’ as well) is cast out from his clan but finds a new family on his journey to confront the ultimate adversary… I’ve got to admit, I was a little wary of what I think is the first ‘Predator’ movie to carry a ‘12’ certificate; I mean without the horror, gore and flayed bodies hanging in the jungle, is it really a ‘Predator’ movie at all? On the other hand though, my eldest daughter and I love to hang out and...

I know... Two posts, two trailers. It's not how I normally do this but in my defence, I am looking after a cat that is steeped in evil and hates me with every piece of her dark soul (except when I feed her). To be fair, she has very good reason to hate me but that's a story to be told in the comments if anyone wants it ;o) On a slightly nicer note, I'm also looking after a rabbit with a dislocated toe; she's not happy but all she wants to do is be made a fuss of, I can do that :o) So yep, no book post today but we do have a new trailer for 'Predator: Badlands' and it looks like fun...

Yesterday did its best to defeat me but I fought it to a standstill. Well, a ‘standstill’ being about half five in the evening when I turned my laptop off and ordered a pizza ;o) I wasn’t in much of a state for reading so I ignored my latest TBR pile and settled down for a spot of TV instead… ‘Predator: Killer of Killers’ (2025) A Viking raider, a Ninja from Feudal Japan and a WW2 fighter pilot must each face a Predator on safari before going on a journey of their own… I’ll be honest, I love all the ‘Predator’ movies (even ‘The Predator’) so don’t expect too much objectivity here ;o) With that out of the way, ‘Killer of Killers’ is beautifully animated and looked superb from where I was sat. More importantly though, ‘Killer of Killers’ absolutely granted a longstanding wish of mine to see how a Ninja would do when facing off against a Predator; the inclusion of a Viking Shield Maiden was a very welcome bonus. I don’t want to give too much away other than to say that we’re left in no do...

YouTube has a habit of throwing up AI created trailers which I hate, mostly because I'm awful at seeing them for what they are, at least for the first minute or so. Having watched this trailer, I had to go away and Google 'Predator - Badlands' because I still really wasn't sure what I was looking at... But no, 'Predator - Badlands' is actually a thing and... I'm not sure about this one. On the one hand, my daughter and I love watching 'Predator' movies together so there's no doubt that we'll be watching this but... It feels like they're trying to make a 'Star Wars Expanded Universe' out of the Predator universe and I'm not so keen on that. Maybe I'm completely wrong, I'll watch this in November and let you know ;o)

I was in no fit state to get any reading done, over the weekend, but luckily, I was in just the right mood to sit in my comfy chair and watch some TV. Well, a lot of TV actually ;o) Me and my eldest have a little movie night on Friday so I thought I'd take the opportunity to watch 'Alien vs. Predator' and 'Alien vs. Predator Requiem' and see if either would work for next Friday. It won't surprise you to learn that we'll be watching one but not the other... And I'd never seen a 'Saw' movie, until I saw that 'Jigsaw' was on Netflix and I thought 'why not...' Let me tell you about them ;o) 'Alien vs. Predator' (2004) A pyramid lies between the Antarctic ice. But what has it called, and what is hatching within it...? An archaeological team are caught between two warring alien species, one of which must not be allowed to escape the pyramid... Sometimes I feel like I'm the only person who enjoys 'Alien vs, Predator';...

It’s time to pay one final call on the ‘Predator’ Omnibus before I lend it to my daughter for a spot of ‘Summer Holiday Reading’. I think it’s the perfect book for reading in the sun, by the way, but I’ve got a feeling that you reached that conclusion long before I did. I’m always the last one to the party ;o) But anyway… I went into ‘Big Game’ with the scores level across the collection as a whole. ‘Concrete Jungle’ knew its job and did it well, ‘Cold War’ wasn’t bad but it didn’t really hit the heights that it was aiming for. ‘Big Game’ was going to tip the scales one way or the other then, which way would they fall…? Deep in the rugged New Mexico desert, a strange craft has landed and a Predator hunts for human prey. For Corporal Enoch Nakai, a Navajo soldier, it is a legend come back to life: the return of the horned monster who was destroyed by the hero Nayenezgani, the mythical monster slayer. Using the wisdom of his ancestors, Nakai will confront the Predator in a final battle...

So back in May, I bought myself a copy of ‘The Complete Predator Omnibus’ ; mostly because me and my oldest daughter had been getting into the movies and partly because I’d had a rough day and that was only going to end one way if I was silly enough to go into Waterstones ;o) There was another reason though… I’m a completist, especially when it comes to reading books in a series. I’d enjoyed ‘Concrete Jungle’ and that was enough for me to grab a copy of the omnibus when I saw it. Last month saw me take a little break from the blog but I didn’t stop reading ;o) It was just comfort read stuff that I knew I’d enjoy and there were two stories in the ‘Predator Omnibus’ that I hadn’t started yet so… Off I went. First up was ‘Cold War’ and… I’ve got to say that it wasn’t all that. Something has fallen from the sky over the Siberian wilderness and soon, decapitated human bodies are littering the surrounding area. The Russian authorities are baffled, but deep within the Pentagon, someone knows...

After a week with my kids, they've gone off on holiday for a fortnight which has left me at a bit of a loose end... Of course it hasn't ;o) Last night and today have been all about book hunting and watching a couple of movies that I've been meaning to get round to. The title of the post gives it away a bit, okay a lot. I'll tell you about the books tomorrow but for now, here's what I've been watching... 'Prey' (2022) A skilled Comanche warrior protects her tribe from a highly evolved alien predator that hunts humans for sport, fighting against wilderness, dangerous colonisers and this mysterious creature to keep her people safe. I don't often have 'must watch' films that I can't wait to see (books are a very different matter but it's not like you didn't know that already...) but ever since I first saw the trailer for 'Prey', I've been getting pretty excited about it. Well, I watched it last night and I can safely t...

So last week I was in the process of hitting a big reading slump and tackled that by picking up some comfort reading, albeit comfort reading that I’d never read before (If that makes any sense? You know what I mean). You’ve already seen my review for ‘They Came And Ate Us’ , which ended up being just the book that I needed last week, and now we’re onto the next book on that list… I love ‘Predator’ movies (yep, even that one, I love them all) but have never dug too deeply into the ‘book tie-in’ side of the franchise; I did read ‘South China Sea’ a long time ago but that’s about it really. When I saw ‘Concrete Jungle’ in the Brockley bookshop, I figured ‘why not?’ and promptly made it a ‘comfort reading goal’. I finished ‘Concrete Jungle’ last night and, well… Let me tell you all about it. With record-breaking heat come frayed nerves and a rising crime rate. New York City detectives Rasche and Schaefer are assigned to look into the most brutal murders they’ve ever seen – flayed bod...