Aye Vee Pee

Today’s entry concerns the Alien vs. Predator movies. Mostly the second one.

A free movie rental, or rather, the obligation to rent a movie once you receive one, can be a very good thing in some situations, and a very bad thing in others.

For instance, it would be a very good thing in a store that contains many good movies that are of interest to the entire family to whom you are now obligated to rent a movie. It is a very bad thing if your local video store is composed just about entirely of crap nobody cares about, EXTREMELY unoriginal horror movies, and softcore porns (all of which, I swear to god, have the exact same cover). Just as luck would have it, our local video store is the latter, so having to rent a movie from there is a very difficult task.

But still, there I was, prowling the aisles of soul-crushingly stupid movie after soul-crushingly stupid movie, trying to find one that was not soul-crushingly stupid. Oh sure, I could have just satisfied myself by renting one of the more interestingly stupid horror movies they had in stock, but this was one of those times when the family was actually expecting a new movie to enter the home, and no doubt they would be disappointed if I brought home “SLASHER MOVIE FULL OF VIOLENCE AND TITS – THE EXTRA VIOLENCE AND TITS EDITION” to watch all by myself with all the hours of free time I have that they don’t.

Thus, surprise, surprise, I couldn’t find anything. Seriously, what is wrong with my video store? It’s not like the family is that hard to please, either. So, my mom arrived to ask if I had found anything of interest. My answer of no led her to start her own investigation. Her ideas of what the family wants to watch, it turns out, are much different from mine, as her first suggestion was Snakes on a Plane.

Feeling the need to make a counter-suggestion, and quick, I said, “Well… what about the new Alien vs. Predator movie?”

She took my suggestion, and that’s how we rented “Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem”, the UNRATED edition.

So basically, we ended up with “SLASHER MOVIE FULL OF VIOLENCE AND TITS – THE EXTRA VIOLENCE AND TITS EDITION” after all.

Don’t think that I’m putting the film down by calling it that, though, since the main selling points the box feels the need to throw in our faces include words like UNRATED and MORE GORE, but that doesn’t change the fact that “SLASHER MOVIE FULL OF VIOLENCE AND TITS – THE EXTRA VIOLENCE AND TITS EDITION” is a bit of an overstatement. Whatever added blood and guts there are, they’re not “TOO SHOCKING FOR THEATERS” or anything like the box will tell you, and there are no tits beyond the cleavage you’d expect shown in a horror movie.

Now, the movie itself. When I first saw the trailer for the movie I was certain it would suck. Two pop culture icons famous for killing loads of people, fighting against each other in a small town in the woods? Sounded like Freddy vs. Jason all over again, which just amplified how useless I felt the movie was. We already HAD Alien vs. Predator, and we already HAD Freddy vs. Jason. Why do either again?

Well, it turns out that AVP 2 is not like Freddy vs. Jason very much at all. See, in Freddy vs. Jason, things HAPPENED, and in Freddy vs. Jason, when things happened, you could SEE THEM HAPPENING.

Those are the two major flaws with AVP 2. One is that you can’t see a darn thing. Most of the movie takes place at night. Now, I was under the belief that movies had gotten the hang of shooting convincing nighttime scenes while still letting us be able to see everything alright, but I guess I was wrong, because in AVP 2 everything is DARK. It’s so freaking DARK that you can never tell what’s going on, and that doesn’t help when they shoot the battle sequences so poorly and quickly that all you can really tell is that there are Aliens and Predators in the same room snarling at each other and waving pointy things around.

Then we have the fact that nothing tends to happen in the movie, or, at least, nothing in the way of Aliens fighting Predators. The first half at least is almost nothing but characters getting introduced, Aliens killing characters and making more Aliens, Predator getting real angry, repeat. It’s not really Alien vs. Predator so much as Predator Does Not Tolerate Alien’s Tomfoolery. I mean, I like watching Aliens tear people apart as much as the next guy, but I distinctly remember that concept already being explored in a movie that I can’t put my finger on. Oh, wait, now I remember. It was called ALIEN, and ALIENS, and ALIEN 3. When the Predator DOES finally get off his lazy butt to pound some Aliens into acidic soup, we barely get to see any of it by combination of LOL DARKNESS AND SHODDY CAMERA WORK and LOL WE CAN’T THINK OF ANY WAY TO MAKE THIS FIGHT INTERESTING SO LET’S ABRUPTLY CUT TO WHAT THOSE ANNOYING HUMAN CHARACTERS ARE DOING AFTER THIRTY SECONDS.

Alright, movie, I’ll humor you. How ’bout ‘dem humans? There are these teenagers, and if there’s one thing I want film and TV Show executives to hear from this post, it’s this, WHOSE LIVES AND LOVE TRIANGLES WE DO NOT NOR WILL EVER EVER CARE ABOUT. The movie actually has a pretty cool unexpected turn when Sulky Teenage Hero’s love interest gets killed instantly just when we think she’s entered Definite Survivor territory without any sort of romantic last words or any of that crap, and then they get our hopes up even more when Sulky Teenager Hero gets suddenly impaled through the chest by an Alien’s tail for being stupid, but then they screw that up by having him survive it and continue on like nothing happened. There’s this one chick who was in the military but doesn’t really do much in the way of putting that military training to good use other than fire a machine gun decently well, though in horror movies skills like that can be expected from pretty much anyone off the street and their dog. Finally we have Military Chick’s daughter. Early in the movie I was happy to see that the makers had the testes to actually kill off a very young boy in a very bloody way onscreen, something most horror movies tend to shrink away from. Military Chick’s Daughter easily counters this by being an obnoxious and useless… thing (I would rather smash my monitor with my head than call her a “character”) and not enduring any physical harm whatsoever other than getting her face a little dirty. She’s so uselesss, in fact, that once the “action” starts kicking in she just sort of disappears for long segements of time, and I start thinking that maybe she WAS one of the people who got killed in that last mess of screaming, roaring, and blood, but then she shows up again so we can all marvel at how adorably easy to kill she is. It’s not like the plot would be affected if an alien just gobbled her up while nobody was looking, but then I could probably say that about at least half of the characters.

Now, the main reason why everyone praises this film all the time is because of how it is no longer “limited” by the PG-13 rules of the last AVP movie, and how NOW we can truly have the BLOOD and GORE that a film like this is SUPPOSED to have! These people I cannot even begin to understand. In the first AVP people died and there were even neat little splatters and everything. What more do you want? Adding more blood and guts does not make things better. When I watch March of the Penguins I don’t pout about the lack of mutilated penguin carcasses. Granted, comparing Alien vs. Predator to March of the Penguins seems a bit far fetched, but the same basic principle applies – we came to see Predator/Alien fights, not endless maulings of civilians. This principle is something that the first Alien vs. Predator understood, but the second is too distracted by “LOL R RATING”.

Where does that leave us, then? I recommend the first Alien vs. Predator if you TRULY want to watch Aliens and Predators kicking the crap out of each other. Sure, they make a stupid choice of having Predator team up with the humans, and you don’t see very many ripped open stomachs, but that’s a small price to pay for finally being able to watch Aliens and Predators fighting. However, if you’re more into watching Aliens and Aliens alone disemboweling everything in sight, with a neat guest appearance of Predator, Alien vs. Predator 2 is for you.

Hmm. Alien vs. Predator vs. Penguins. I’d rent that.

~ by krakenzilla on August 15, 2008.