There’s a climactic action sequence near the end of Prey that is set in the deep forest at night during a gentle snowfall. It represents the final face-off between the towering alien of the Predator franchise and a slender adolescent Comanche girl who’s trained herself to be a great hunter. The scene is lit by the alien’s iridescent green blood dripping off leaves and trailing across rocks and smearing the combatants as they fight. It’s gripping, edge-of-the-seat stuff — exactly the kind of climactic scene that action film fans crave.

In fact, the whole movie, currently streaming on Hulu, is a remarkably effective and imaginative revival of the sci-fi/action Predator franchise. Though roughly done in many ways — such as the sometimes terrible CGI of the animals, particularly the mountain lion — overall it’s a fast-moving, exciting little action film. Writer-director Dan Trachtenberg (10 Cloverfield Lane), working with screenwriter Patrick Aison, is to be congratulated for coming up with a wow of a premise: the first of the ferociously aggressive, nearly unkillable “predator” aliens to arrive on Earth lands in Comanche territory in 1719.

If you know your movie lore, in classic Westerns, the Comanche are often represented as a formidable Great Plains warrior nation, but in cliched terms of villainy. Still, a certain awe was often built into those Westerns, with the single word “Comanche” whispered by white settlers terrified by massacres out on the plains.