Scary Movies: Alien vs. Predator: Requiem

Alien vs. Predator: Requiem takes place shortly after the finish of the previous film in the combined franchise, where we saw a predator ship take off from Antarctica with xenomorph face huggers aboard, unbeknownst to the ship’s predator crew. A fight ensues between the immature xenomorphs and the predators, resulting in the ship crash landing on Earth somewhere in rural Colorado. The ship’s only survivor seems to be a xenomorph, which sets out in search of prey.

This could have been interesting–we’ve only previously seen the xenomorphs on ships in deep space, alien planets, or a remote Antarctic base. A xenomorph on the loose in modern-day America could be a really terrifying experience. I mean, I can imagine a truly good and scary film resulting from that premise. Unfortunately, I’ll have to keep imagining it, because this was not that movie.

After a perfunctory scene where the xenomorph kills a father and son out camping, we move to the nearby small town and meet the film’s main victims, er, characters. Oh, there’s a waitress and a sheriff and an ex-convict and a high school kid and the girl he has a crush on, plus her ex-boyfriend who’s a bully, and several others too. None of them really matter because all but a couple are slated to die, and the movie doesn’t really do anything to give them a personality beyond their function. The waitress is a stereotypical waitress, the sheriff is exactly how you’d expect a small-town sheriff to be, etc.

Meanwhile, a predator back on the predator planet has gotten a message that the ship has crashed, and heads out to Earth to see what’s going on. Fortunately his ship must be pretty fast because he arrives by the next evening, when the sheriff has started investigating the numerous missing persons reported around town. The predator gets to hunting the xenomorph, who has taken its still living victims to the local hospital and set up its slimy, steamy egg room in one of the wards. There’s a truly disgusting and inappropriate scene when a baby xenomorph explodes from a pregnant woman’s abdomen as she’s about to give birth.

Eventually, lots of people die, whether killed by the xenomorph or caught in the crossfire of its fight with the predator. A couple of the humans manage to survive, the US Army shows up, and none of it matters because we have no reason to care about the characters, not a single one of them. At some point, the movie ends.

Alien vs. Predator: Requiem (2007)
Story/Plot/Characters— Geez, this makes the first Alien vs. Predator film look like Citizen Kane. The dialogue is atrocious, the characters are nothing more than cliches, the small-town sets are probably stolen from some straight-to-cable horror movie, and there’s nothing in this that’s original or thought out in any way. (.5 points)
Special Effects— The special effects are sub-par. Shouldn’t they have been better? Wasn’t this a big budget production in a sturdy franchise? Many scenes are so shrouded in darkness that we can’t see what’s going on–a sure sign of producers who aren’t confident in their special effects. The predator is less realistic and effective than the one in the first Predator film, which came out twenty years previously. I’ll give the movie half a point for the pregnant woman abdomen-bursting scene, which was at least something I hadn’t seen before (not that I needed to see it this time, but whatever). (.5 points)
Scariness— There are scenes that are disgusting, inappropriate, dull, and hackneyed, but nothing that could be called scary. (0 points)
Atmosphere/Freakiness— There is nothing atmospheric or freaky about this. (0 points)
Total=1 point (Avoid)

Wow, the worst rated movie on my list. You know you’ve made a bad movie when watching Atom Age Vampire would be a better use of your time.