Blain Cooper was the heavy weapons man on the rescue team led by Alan "Dutch" Schaefer in Predator, the 1987 film in which Jesse Ventura played him. A tobacco-chewing veteran with a handheld minigun he called Old Painless, Blain flew into the jungles of Val Verde with Dutch's men to find a missing cabinet minister. He fought through the guerrilla camp with a wound he ignored, then became the second member of the team to die when the Jungle Hunter shot him through the chest.
Biography
Earlier Life
Blain Cooper served as a sergeant on Dutch's team, the small rescue unit that Dillon brought in to recover a cabinet minister lost in the jungle. Of the men Dutch led across the border, he carried the heaviest gun on the team. The team arrived at the American base in civilian clothes, and Blain rode in wearing mirrored sunglasses and a black T-shirt. Mac later recalled a mission in which a whole platoon of 32 men had been cut to pieces, and only he and Blain had walked out of it without a scratch.
The novelization by Paul Monette filled in more of his past and marked him as the biggest man on the team. There he weighed 240 pounds, carried tattoos on both arms and a five-inch scar across his forehead, and served as the weapons and ordnance specialist. In the same book, he and Mac had served in the 101st Airborne in Vietnam fourteen years before the mission, and they had survived an ambush near Khe San together. The novel also said that the men had no friends or brothers back home and lived for action, which explained how closely Blain bound himself to Mac.
The Helicopter Ride
On the night flight across the border into Val Verde, Blain cut himself a plug of chewing tobacco and offered it around the cabin. Every man refused it, and he mocked them as slack-jawed cowards before boasting that the stuff would make each of them a sexual tyrannosaurus like himself. One of his teammates told him to strap it on his sore ass, and Blain laughed along with the rest of the cabin. In the novel, the ritual showed how well the men knew one another, and none of them, Mac included, took real offense at the tobacco or the insults.
Blain had little patience for Al Dillon, the CIA man who had joined the team for the mission. In the novelization he spat a stream of tobacco juice between Dillon's legs and onto the toe of his combat boot, and Dillon told him that he had a real bad habit. Mac and Blain grinned at each other as if they had won a small skirmish. When the helicopter reached the landing zone, Mac rappelled down the ropes first and Blain followed him into the dark, whooping in the novel like a man riding a bucking bronco.
The Guerrilla Camp Assault
In the jungle the team found the wreck of the minister's helicopter and the skinned bodies of Jim Hopper's men hanging from a tree. Blain readied his minigun as the team closed on the guerrilla camp, and in the novel he was the one who declared it payback time. When a hostage was shot, Dutch sent Blain and Mac to take out the machine-gun nest while the others hit the guards and the fuel dump. Blain swept the huts and the rebels with Old Painless and helped clear the camp, where the team took Anna Gonsalves prisoner after the fight in Val Verde.
During the assault, Poncho Ramirez saw blood running down Blain's arm and told him he was hit. Blain answered that he had no time to bleed, and Poncho asked him whether he had time to duck before a grenade went off. The novel made the wound a grenade fragment that lodged in his shoulder while he covered Billy Sole. Blain flashed Mac a peace sign, and Mac joked that it looked like a Purple Heart to him. Blain carried on with the march as if nothing had happened to him.
The Jungle March
On the march toward the extraction point, Mac remarked that he had seen some bad bush before but nothing like the Val Verde jungle. Blain agreed and told him that the place made Cambodia look like Kansas, and Mac called it a little taste of home. In the novelization, Mac offered him a pull of Tennessee mash from his flask on the trail, and the exchange became a quiet ritual between two Vietnam veterans. Neither man knew that an invisible hunter had followed the team since the camp.
The hunter killed Rick Hawkins first, and Dutch ordered a sweep to find his body. Blain took his place in the search line and moved through the undergrowth with his minigun at his hip. Alone for a moment, he dared the unseen enemy to come at him and promised that Old Painless was ready for it. In the novel, a false alarm from a tapir drew him to say that his gun had no patience, and then he heard a voice that copied Hawkins asking whether anyone had ever heard of a toothbrush.
Death
The hunter fixed the three-dot sight of its plasma caster on Blain and fired a single bolt through his chest. Mac reached him seconds later, saw the creature's shimmer in the trees and picked up Old Painless to empty it into the jungle. The rest of the team joined in, and the barrage cut a wide swath through the trees without finding a target. Dutch examined the body afterward and noted that the wound was fused and cauterized, with no powder burns and no shrapnel, which no weapon he knew could have made.
The Predator novelization gave Blain a different death. There a spear entered at the base of his spine and carried his heart out through his chest into the trunk of a bamboo tree. The creature began to empty his body before Mac came running and drove it off with gunfire, a far more brutal end than the clean burn wound of the film, and Monette gave Mac a fuller view of the attacker. In both versions Mac was the first to reach him and the only man to glimpse what had killed him.
Blain's Body & Honors
Dutch ordered the men to put Blain in his poncho and carry him with them. At the night camp Dutch told Mac that Blain had been a good soldier, and Mac answered that he had been his friend before saying goodbye to him. Mac took it from Blain's pocket, polished it, drank from it and put it back, telling his friend that wherever he was going, two bits said he could use it. He saluted him and zipped the poncho closed.
Mac took the first watch and spoke to his dead friend under the moon, recalling the platoon of 32 men and vowing to cut Blain's name into the thing that had killed him. A snapping twig broke off the vow, and Mac charged into the dark after the sound while the others shouted for him. Mac came back having killed a wild boar, and Poncho mocked him for taking down a pig. In the confusion the prisoner Anna was left unguarded, and Billy called the major over to the spot where the body had lain. Blain was gone, taken from the middle of a camp ringed with flares and claymores.
Billy reported that the body was gone, and another man said that the thing had come in through the trip wires and taken it right out from under their noses. The tracker found that the boar had set off a flare and that there were no other tracks. Dutch concluded that the hunter had come only for the body and was killing them one at a time, and Billy likened it to a hunter. In the Monette novel Billy found the canvas bag slashed open, bloody and empty while the men stood over the dead boar.
Personality & Traits
Blain was loud, crude and proud of it. He used his tobacco and his insults as a way to test the men around him, and his teammates answered him in the same coarse language as a sign of trust rather than anger. Toward outsiders such as Dillon his manner turned colder, and he made his contempt plain without saying a word. His toughness bordered on the absurd, since he brushed off a bleeding wound with a single line and fought on. The novel framed that bravado as part of the bond that held the team together.
Beneath the swagger lay a deep loyalty to Mac. The two men had survived Vietnam and a massacred platoon together, and they moved through the camp assault and the jungle march as a pair. Mac's grief after the death in Val Verde showed how much the friendship meant to both of them, since he called Blain the only brother he had in the novel and later lost his own life hunting the creature that had killed him. Blain himself never spoke of fear, and his last words were a challenge thrown into the trees.
Weapons & Equipment
Blain's signature weapon was Old Painless, a General Electric M134 minigun cut down to be fired from the hip. It fed from a belt of ammunition in a pack on his back and spun six barrels, putting out a stream of fire that cut down trees and huts alike. The site's team profile listed an M60 grip fitted to the gun. After Blain died, Mac took up the weapon and fired it until the belt ran dry, so the gun outlived its owner by a few minutes.
Blain wore a bush hat on the march, with webbing that held his ammunition pack in place. In the Monette novelization he cut his tobacco plug with a ten-inch combat knife and loaded his gun with a magazine of belted shells before the camp assault. The minigun gave the team its heaviest firepower, but it did nothing against an enemy that could not be seen, and the Jungle Hunter killed him before he could fire it. His chewing tobacco went everywhere with him, from the helicopter cabin to the jungle trail.
Behind The Scenes
Jesse Ventura played Blain in Predator, which John McTiernan directed for 20th Century Fox from a script by Jim Thomas and John Thomas. Ventura had served in the US Navy's Underwater Demolition Teams during the Vietnam era before he became a professional wrestler, and the film was one of his first major acting roles. The film opened in the United States in June 1987, and Ventura joined Arnold Schwarzenegger again in The Running Man later the same year. Ventura went on to serve as Governor of Minnesota from 1999 to 2003.
Old Painless was built from a General Electric M134 Minigun, a vehicle and aircraft weapon that the production adapted to be carried by one man. The same weapon served for Mac's barrage after Blain's death, when the whole team fired blindly into the jungle. Stembridge Gun Rentals, which supplied the film's weapons, later modified the same minigun with a new grip and handle for Terminator 2: Judgment Day, in which Arnold Schwarzenegger fired it at police outside Cyberdyne Systems in 1991. Ventura later borrowed the bleeding line for the title of his 1999 book, I Ain't Got Time to Bleed. Paul Monette's novelization from 1987 added the tattoos, the scar, the flask and the alternate spear death to the character.
Famous Quotes
- "Bunch of slack-jawed faggots around here! This stuff will make you a goddamn sexual tyrannosaurus, just like me."
- "I ain't got time to bleed."
- "I hear you. This shit's something. Makes Cambodia look like Kansas."
- "Come on in, you fuckers. Come on in. Old Painless is waiting."
Conclusion
Blain Cooper was the crude, unbreakable gunner of Dutch's team, a Vietnam veteran who chewed tobacco, mocked his friends and fired a minigun from the hip. He fought through the guerrilla camp with a wound he refused to notice and marched into the jungle beside Mac, the friend who had survived everything with him. The hunter killed him with one shot, and Mac lost his body in the night after promising revenge. His death in Val Verde was the moment the team understood that something more than rebels was stalking them.
Appearances
- Predator (1987)
- Predator novelization by Paul Monette (1987)
Tag Categories: Predator Universe Characters | Predator Lore
