Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem (2007)

AVPRAliens vs. Predator: Requiem begins where 2004’s Alien vs. Predator left off: with the miracle of birth! To be precise, an Alien-style chestburster rises from the womb-like corpse of a Predator — behold, the PredAlien! (Seriously, that’s what 20th Century Fox calls it.) This milestone occurs in space, aboard a Predator ship (PredShip?), which the newborn causes to crash-land on Earth, thereby loosing the Predators’ jarred collection of live Alien facehuggers on the quaint, quiet town of Gunnison, Colo.

Following the spacecraft’s distress signal to our planet is a clean-up Predator (Ian Whyte, The Scorpion King 4: Quest for Power) whose figurative job is to mop up the mess left behind using explosives and a beaker of blue acid. He makes that damned clicking sound while going about his business. Skirmishes occur amid the great outdoors, but also in the town’s sewer system, nuclear power plant, high school pool and hospital — woe be to the visibly already-pregnant woman who gets mouth-raped by the PredAlien.

AVPR1VFX wunderkinds Colin and Greg Strause (Skyline) spend the first act of their feature-directing debut setting up members of their expendable human cast — an ex-con, a pizza delivery boy, an Iraq War vet, the customary cop and so on — and the next two acts knockin’ ’em down. To my surprise, they do a much better job establishing those earlier stages than in dishing out Requiem’s supposed meat. That the characters are introduced with so little personality should tell all about the degree to which the brothers’ film disappoints, especially in the only area in which their target audience gives a damn. They’re no Paul W.S. Anderson.

Requiem might be a fanboy’s dream if we could see the sequences that justify the “vs.” portion of the title. For whatever reason — perhaps to mask some digital seams? — these scenes appear unforgivably dark on disc just as they did in theaters; they’re even trickier for the eye to decipher than the movie’s “what is that?” one-sheet. The Strauses work from a through-the-motions script by Shane Salerno (2000’s Shaft remake), whose coda sets up a never-made third film. Neither Anderson’s original nor the Strauses’ sequel were able to meet the inherent potential of this spin-off franchise, but the Strause boys really squandered it. —Rod Lott

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