You start to get worried about the 1.85:1, 24p transfer right from the off, as the 20th Century Fox logo appears looking downright dreadful - smothered in levels of grain and dot crawl you'd be disappointed to find on a VHS videotape.

Fortunately this noise level does drop off somewhat once the film itself begins. But it certainly doesn’t completely disappear either, leaving us with a picture that nearly always looks a little gritty, and at times looks positively rough.

Just occasionally the fuzziness will lift like a veil from the picture, leaving you with a much smoother, more polished finish more in keeping with what we know Blu-ray to be capable of. But if anything these moments merely serve to make the transfer overall feel more frustrating, as they raise the question of why so much grain has to exist elsewhere.

After all, if some shots can look better than others, it’s hard to blame the quality of the original master print for this Blu-ray transfer's bewildering inconsistency.

It's not just the grain that causes offence either. The picture sometimes looks rather soft too - more like a DVD than a Blu-ray - and dark scenes occasionally look grey and flat.

Having said all that, aside from its occasional soft bits this Blu-ray transfer is definitely sharper and more detailed overall than the DVD, with just enough of an HD edge to make it the finest way of watching Predator at home we've seen to date, especially if you've got a really big screen.

Colours are well rendered too, as the transfer handles nicely such notoriously tricky issues as the rich greens of the jungle foliage, the skin tones of the marines' soon-to-be-lost flesh and the rich red - and glowing green! - of the liberal quantities of blood that get spilled.

But despite having its moments, my over-riding feeling about this Blu-ray's picture quality is one of considerable disappointment. Such a classic, well shot film really deserves better.

For instance, the bit where pretty much all of Arnie's posse unleash everything they've got into the jungle in the hope of hitting the camouflaged alien sounds raucous enough to make your ears bleed.

However, there are audio problems. Dialogue sounds a little thin and detached from the mix at times, and even occasionally distorts a touch – such as when a deranged Mac chases after the alien.

There hasn’t been any great attempt to push ambient effects such as bird song around your surround sound system either; most such effects just come out of the centre speaker with the dialogue, preventing the soundstage from sounding particularly clear, or enveloping you in the film’s world as a really good multi-channel mix should.

The chirruping of the crickets at certain phases of the film is particularly annoying with its centre speaker positioning, since it actually sounds at times more like a glitch in the digital decoding of the DTS-HD Master Audio mix!

The only part of the mix that really and truly impresses - other than the aforementioned souped up bass channel - is the score, which has been shifted into the surround sound domain with a subtlety and effectiveness strangely lacking elsewhere.

For the record, linguistics fans, the other mixes available aside from the English DTS-HD Master Audio one (which obviously ‘downscales’ to standard DTS if you don’t have a DTS-HD-capable AV receiver) are Italian and Spanish 5.1 standard DTS mixes.

Look up Predator in the DVD section on amazon.co.uk or wherever, and you’ll find a rather nice special edition release; a two-disc job stuffed with extra feature goodies including a commentary track by director John McTiernan, a text commentary by a film historian, a documentary, seven Making Of featurettes, out-takes, deleted scenes, special effects segments, and plenty more besides. And I’ve really been looking forward to having a proper excuse to go through all these features in detail.

Problem is, not a single one of them has made it on to this godforsaken Blu-ray release. Press the ‘pop up menu’ key on your Blu-ray player’s remote, and all you get are Set Up, Scene Selection and Trailers options.

Ah, sorry – there is an extra feature: one theatrical trailer for Predator, as well as trailers for Planet of the Apes and Eragon. Well, whoopee fucking do.

How Fox can live with itself for not putting all the Special Edition extra features onto this supposedly next-gen release is beyond me – especially as they’ve had the gall to go to the trouble of stuffing a couple of adverts for upcoming discs on there.

What’s particularly ironic about these trailers for other Fox titles is the fact that based on this pathetic Predator effort, if I was a paying punter I’d be strongly considering avoiding all future Fox releases like the plague unless review sites like this one tell me the studio is finally starting to get its Blu-ray shit together.

Let’s not forget, after all, that Fox also managed to ‘lose’ a few of the Special Edition DVD features off its recent Blu-ray release of The Day After Tomorrow.

Aside from rank laziness – unforgivable on a film with such a devoted fanbase as Predator - the only reason I can think of for the lack of extras on this Predator Blu-ray is that Fox is intending to launch a Special Edition version at some point in the future. But if this is the case, it’s little short of exploitation, with Fox deliberately launching a crap version first in the hope that Predator fans will cough up for the same film on Blu-ray twice once the Special Edition appears.

I am officially not a happy bunny.

For a review of every feature on the disc, click here.

The first thing to say is that in keeping with current Fox fashion, there’s no ‘up-front’ menu; the film just kicks right in as soon as you put the disc in the tray. Personally I’m quite a fan of an upfront menu – not least because it means you don’t miss a couple of minutes of the film if you pop out to make a cup of tea after putting the disc in your Blu-ray player. Oh well – at least you’re not forced to sit through loads of up-front trailers and such like, I guess.

The pop-up menus are also bland in the extreme. All that happens is that a big gun pops out from the bottom of the screen with the disc’s three paltry options – Set up, scenes and trailers – lying along its barrel.

There’s nothing fancy about any of the sub-menus, either. Selecting language just brings up ‘language and audio’ and ‘subtitle’ options along the top of the gun barrel, while selecting Scenes yields an entirely bland shaded box containing thumbnails of four chapters at a time. Zzzz.