ALIENS VS. PREDATOR – REQUIEM

Directed by: Colin Strause & Greg Strause

Starring: Tom Woodruff Jr., Ian Whyte, Jock, Good Guy, Hot Chick and Pot Smoking Comic Relief….oh wait, their characters had names?!?

Hell knows no fury like a fan-boy scorned, for Paul W.S. Anderson the year 2004 marked his induction into the infamous hall of fame for hated directors, what crime did he commit that caused him to be exiled to craphole island to live amongst the likes of Uwe Boll and Ulli Lommel I hear you ask, oh not much I reply, only the desecration of two of our genres biggest and baddest space beasties to ever hit the silver screen, he fucked up, pissed on, tore apart and repeatedly raped our beloved Aliens and Predators, never has the world of horror seen such hatred garnered for one man.

Can you imagine the reaction to news of a sequel? I don’t need to, I was there, it was bloody, it was violent and it was devastating. But then came a sliver of hope in the form of the movies amazing red band trailer, things were looking up, but that feeling of dread still hung in the air because if it all went pear shaped after our hopes were raised sky high then we would come crashing down, hard……...we were fucked from the beginning! Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem picks up exactly where AVP ended, with an Alien/Predator hybrid chestburster erupting from the dead body of the first movies main Predator, it grows bigger and badder in record time, tearing apart the ship and causing it to crash on earth, the PredAlien and several facehuggers scatter into the surrounding forest, replicating and growing in numbers.

Meanwhile, a Predator (who appears to be in some seat of power, though not explored in the slightest) is made aware of the crash and quickly hops in his ride and hauls ass for planet earth.

Introducing the human characters, you’ll have to forgive me because for the life of me I cannot remember their names, but that doesn’t matter because they are so fucking clichéd and stereotyped that they only need titles.

We get ‘Roughish Good Guy’, ‘Hot Chick’, ‘Jock’, ‘Badass Final Chick’, ‘Gullible Idiot That’ll Eventually Die’, ‘Child Who Must Be Protected At All Cost’.

For 30 or so minutes we are treated to every teen drama cliché known to man whilst action derived from the movies title takes backseat, it’s as if the Strause brothers made a 40 minute AVP movie and decided to add in teen drama for flavor, too bad it tasted like shit.

There is no way around it, they fucked up this movie, royally, it’s not nearly as bad as the first AVP but fuck me dead is it bad.

The movie's failure is due greatly to it’s human characters, for the most part the Predators and Aliens were not that bad, but factor in the Humans and it all goes haywire, there is an abundance of scenes with characters who don’t matter and are simply cannon fodder by the end, who really cares about these melodramatic teenagers and an alienated (excuse the pun) mother and her child when there are two of the universes deadliest creatures known to sci-fi-dom out there with potential for the biggest and baddest slugfest ever to be captured to film. And when the Humans do find themselves in the middle of and Alien and Predator ass-whooping it’s for a single fleeting moment.

If there is one thing we can say about either the Alien or the Predator franchises it’s that their characters were memorable; Ripley, Hudson, Hicks, Vasquez, Drake, Ash, Dutch, Blain, Harrigan. Here we got absolutely NOTHING.

Anyone who’s played the game or has half a brain knows that despite the actual title, AVP is essentially Aliens vs. Predators vs. Humans, and on that note, why is it so fucking hard to make a real AVP movie? Hell you could pull a total Sin City and do a shot for shot film version of one of the comics or even the damned computer game and it’d be friggin’ badass, fuck at least it’d actually be AVP and not some Dawson’s Creek crossover.

*Sigh* (Calm down Daniel, calm down) so was there anything positive about it? Yes actually there was but of course that had to be a spoiler as well didn’t it, god forbid they let the fans have their cake and eat it too (oh dear god did I just say that?) so we are given actual Aliens and actual Predators, unlike the bullshit that Anderson tried to pull on us these are the genuine looking sunsabitches we’ve come to know and love, no beefed up costume wearing wrestler Predators here, the Aliens and Predator has never looked so good.

It’s too bad we never get to admire them because for the most part they’ve immersed in shadows, it’s like the Strause brothers are trying to emulate the ‘what’s lurking in the shadows’ feel of the first Alien, hell that is what they were doing and maybe it would have worked had they not been hidden for the entire fucking movie, whenever we see either an Alien or a Predator it’s hard to tell the difference between them, not once do we ever get a good look at the PredAlien and by the final fight between it and the Predator in the rain I couldn’t even tell which one was which!

Thankfully the score isn’t half bad, fans of either franchises will recognize the various themes that have been integrated into score, the familiar Predator drums are heard throughout and there a hints of the original Alien score.

I know the age old saying of ‘what you don’t see is scarier then what you do’ but goddamn the movie is called ALIENS VERSUS PREDATOR, when I hear that title I envision badass fights between the two where we can see them as they tear up the streets and cause havoc and carnage everywhere they go, I want bloody and friggin’ guts by the bucket full, what we get are some burns, some cuts, some explosions and some spurts of the red stuff, most of which we cannot see because of the lowered contrast and the fact that they appear too be competing with Rob Zombie's Halloween in an effort to see how much nausea inducing shaky-cam shit they can throw at us.

It’s a damn sight better then the neutered piece of shit AVP was, but not by much.

Anderson looked to take a certain glee in taking all the Alien and Predator mythos and rules and completely throwing them out the window, whilst the Strause brothers decided to take every tidbit of Alien and Predator lore and shove it down our throat then proceed to add their own fan fiction into the mix, since when did a PredAlien ever have the ability to face hug and spawn chest bursters in matter of seconds, I’ll tell you when….never! It was simply the writers way to work themselves out of a corner they fucked themselves into and replenish the depleted stock of Predator cannon fodder. Rule be damned.

Don’t be surprised if there is another sequel, but I would like to ask, nay, beg the people at Fox, if you are reading this (and chances are you will never bother to lay eyes on these words) please reconsider this entire catastrophe, listen to the fans for once, Ridley Scott and James Cameron with Alien 5 does that sound more tempting then AVP-3? Why not give Rodriguez a chance with Predator 3?

Writing this review has made me think long and hard about the movie I had seen and I began to realize just what a mess it was, yes there were some good Alien vs. Predator moments but they were short and far between, the creatures for what we saw of them looked cool but then they were gone in the blink of an eye.

The gore felt forced and the damn thing was boring for long periods of time, this is a franchise which never should have been (by that I mean in this way).

We don’t want fan fiction, we don’t want hundreds of stupid ‘homage’s’ to the past films, we want our AVP.

That’s it, I’m finished, and I’ve lost my ability to think rationally, fuck this movie.

- Daniel ‘Danny’ Price

MOVIE: 2 out of 5