ALIENS VS. PREDATOR - REQUIEM (UNRATED EDITION) (2007)

The movie is directed by the latest Hollywood brother directing team, namely the Brothers Krause.

Colin and Greg Krause however had no directing experience outside a few music videos. They share their commentary track with producer John Davis (a veteran who worked on many of the previous film in the franchise). On it the terms "homage" and "tribute" get thrown around a lot. In this case they are both short-hand for "derivative."

Also the directors seem most obsessed with the graphic gore sequences in which amongst others children and pregnant women get killed off in sadistic ways. Somehow it is difficult to imagine a consummate professional such as Ridley Scott or James Cameron chuckling about how their favorite scene is one in which a young boy watches his father die before dying himself . . .

The script is like a piece of fan fiction instead of the genuine article itself, filled with in-jokes only obsessives would spot and nasty, mean-spirited gore. Their commentary track gives all this away (don't bother with the second audio commentary by the make-up guys - too many dead silences).

Marketed as Aliens vs. Predator 2 outside the States, AVP:R follows up on the 2004 Alien vs. Predator directed by Resident Evil-director Paul W.S. Anderson. As promised by the Brothers Krause, AVP:R boasts much more blood and gore than that film. But that is somehow missing the point: it is rather difficult to care for any of the bland by-the-numbers characters in the movie. It also lacks the strong central protagonist that Sigourney Weaver provided to the previous Alien films. Instead the Brothers Krause's favorite film in the two franchises seem to be one of the weakest ones, the Arnie-free Predator 2 which practically killed that franchise off for most of a decade.

To recap: when a Predator/Alien hybrid runs amuck on a Predator spaceship, the ship crash-lands near a small town in Colorado. Soon the townsfolk are stuck in the middle of a battle between the aliens and the predator sent to clean up their mess. The other phrase thrown about a lot in the director's commentary is "the best we can do," which obviously refers to the limited budget the film-makers had to work with. Filmed in Vancouver, Canada to save on costs with a cast of unknowns, AVP:R indeed does the best it can under the circumstances. Production values aren't that bad (although it doesn't always translate that well to the confines of the small screen) and there is loads of mindless action.

THE DISCS: The "unrated" moniker may lead you to believe that there is a whole lot of extra gore in this DVD version as opposed to the theatrical cut. This is however not the case. Sure, there is some extra gore, but the few minutes of extra footage added to this version are tiny scenes mostly deleted for reasons of pacing.