Aliens Vs. Predator: Requiem (AVPR)





Directed By: Colin Strause and Greg Strause

Starring: Steven Pasquale, Reiko Aylesworth, and John Ortiz

It's always terrible to see a bad movie making money.  When it does, you already know that Hollywood plans to shovel more of the same crap into theaters some time down the road.  After having raped both the Alien and the Predator franchises in the awful flick Alien Vs. Predator, Hollywood decided to have another round of this pointless conflict in Aliens Vs. Predator: Requiem (AVPR).

After the events of Alien Vs. Predator, the Predator spaceship leaves Earth with the surviving Predators and captive facehuggers.  There's just one problem.  One of the Predators was attacked by a facehugger in the temple.  When the Alien-Predator hybrid hatches and splits the host Predator in two, it quickly begins to terrorize the ship.  All Predators aboard the ship are killed.  Without someone driving the ship, it crashes on Earth, coincidentally in Colorado.  Now, the hybrid and the facehuggers begin terrorizing humans all over the town of Gunnison.

Ricky Howard (Johnny Lewis) is a teenager who works for a restaurant delivering pizzas.  He delivers a pizza to Jesse (Kristen Hager), a girl from school in whom he’s interested, and chats with her for a while at her place.  Not too pleased with this, Jesse’s boyfriend Dale (David Paetkau) and his two friends beat the hell out of Ricky and drop his car keys into the sewer.  Dallas Howard (Steven Pasquale) has just been released from prison and returns to Gunnison to reunite with his younger brother Ricky.  When he finds his little brother in a jam, he helps him out.  Meanwhile, soldier Kelly O’Brien (Reiko Aylesworth) has returned home from active duty.  She meets her husband Tim (Sam Trammell) and her daughter Molly (Ariel Gade) after not having seen them in quite some time.  What all these people have in common is that they’re residents of Gunnison and will soon be under attack by Aliens on the loose.  They all end up in a local sporting goods store.  From there, they fight to survive the vicious creatures that are tearing their homes apart and killing everyone they’ve ever known or loved.

Aliens Vs. Predator: Requiem is an all-time low for both the Alien and the Predator franchises.  Colin and Greg Strause create a horror film that offers nothing new and nothing thrilling.  There’s not one damn thing that is actually scary about this movie.  The screenplay is predictable, so every pathetic attempt at frightening the audience can be seen ages before it actually happens.  The directors use blood, gore, and dismembered limbs to try to instill fear, which fails at every turn.  On top of this, the actors are terrible, and their bad performances underscore the fact that their characters add no value to the film whatsoever.

My biggest gripe with AVPR is how it undoes the mythology behind the five earlier installments in the Alien franchise.  The most important thing that directors of the Alien Vs. Predator films need to remember is that the Aliens remained hidden until the events that took place after the Nostromo landed on LV-426 in Ridley Scott’s Alien.  They weren’t running loose on the streets of America for all the world to see.  By bringing this “warfare” between Aliens and Predators to the streets, it’s very difficult to conceive of a futuristic world 200 years later where we don’t know about Aliens.  It’s not like camera phones were not around at that time.  It’s hard to believe that somebody didn’t snap a photo or capture some footage of the aliens and predators in action.  It’s even harder to believe that they didn’t send this stuff to someone else around the globe.  Undoing nearly 30 years of Alien mythology is a colossal mistake that cannot be simply brushed aside.

After Alien Vs. Predator, Hollywood should have let these franchises retire.  Instead, they put together one of the worst sci-fi horror flicks of all time.  AVPR is a disgrace to both the Alien and the Predator franchises.  Obviously, Aliens Vs. Predator: Requiem gets a wasted rating.  I rarely break out this drink recommendation, but the only way to endure AVPR is with some Jäger bombs.