Alien vs Predator: Requiem (2007)

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I'm actually going to open this up with a criticism about the previous film I forgot to mention, which lends itself to a lot of my criticism about this chapter of the 'Alien' franchise. Spoiler alert, but 'AVP' ends with a glimpse of what has become known as the "Predalien;" the result of a Predator getting itself hugged in the face. The idea of a Predalien is, by all accounts, awesome, and it could have made for a much more wild climax to the previous film. But they chose to make it a cliffhanger they could potentially cash in on later, and cash in they did... not?

Honestly, I could have sworn I remembered this getting a straight-to-video release. Apparently, it was released theatrically, but on Christmas Day of 2007, debuting at #6, and continuing a brief run, seemingly overshadowed by other titles. It probably didn't help that it was a hard-R movie when the last one was PG-13. And although this all really should lend itself to a nice, refreshing hard-R, there was something about this that even I thought might be a bit too much for the average fan of either franchise... or too little (the Predator here doesn't do much of anything).

The gist of it is that it picks up where the last movie left off - with the birth of the Predalien aboard a Predator ship that happens to be hauling Xenomorph eggs. Said creature pulverizes the rest of the Predators on the ship, causing it to crash land on Earth, thus allowing the Predalien and a whole whack of facehuggers to roam free. A couple of facehuggers immediately take out a father and son, and if I'm being totally honest, this whole opening scene is actually pretty sweet. But it just goes downhill from here.

To start with, too many damn characters to keep track of. Ex-con, Dallas Howard (Steven Pasquale) reunites with his younger brother, Ricky (Johnny Lewis), who has the whole problem where he's in love with a Jock named Dale's (David Paetkau) girlfriend, Jesse (Kristen Hager). Meanwhile, Kelly O'Brien (Reiko Aylesworth) comes home from serving in the US Army, to her husband, Tim (Sam Trammell), and daugther, Molly (Ariel Gade), and the mother and wife of the aforementioned kid and father, respectively, Darcy (Chelah Horsdal).

I know that doesn't come across as much worse than something like 'Independence Day', but a movie like that is more about those people as opposed to the offending alien invasion, so it works. We come to a movie called 'Alien vs Predator' to see Xenomorphs fighting Predators, which we do see, but even then, just barely. This film is so incredibly dark and full of shadow, it's hard to tell what's going on a lot of the time, and poorly edited fight scenes between the Predator (who only comes to Earth to clean up the Aliens' mess) and Xenomorphs don't help.

The film isn't only dark with lighting, either. There are moments I feel it goes a bit over the top, even for an 'Alien' movie, like an attack on a maternity ward that, while I can credit the film for making me squirm, doesn't feel quite right for some reason. The film is often boring, gruesome (even for one of these movies), I don't care about any of these characters, it's poorly written (although the line "the government doesn't lie to people" did make me laugh), and when the action does hit, you can't even see it. All in all, this one's pretty skippable.

1/5

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