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Cast of alien vs predator requiem11/30/2022 This is in part because of first-time directors and long-time visual effects artists Colin and Greg Strause (credited, annoyingly, as "The Brothers Strause"), who apparently can't do anything right. Or is it? I have to give AVPR some credit: it's the first horror film I can recall where all during the rote "personal drama" shit I was bored out of my skull and longing for the stalking and carnage, and all during the carnage, I was longing for the personal drama. Instead, it's a perfunctory distraction from the main event. I suppose writer Shane Salerno (who, at the tender age of 25, got his big break as one of the five authors of Armageddon) had it in his head that all this would make us feel more when the characters start to die explosively bloody deaths, or more likely he knew that the promise of sex amongst twenty-something teenagers keeps asses in theater seats. The film isn't a slasher, but its lockstep adherence to the teen soap formula makes it very easy to think that it wants to be. In a film bursting with conspicuous flaws, the most obvious is that we are stuck watching an endlessly unappealing series of minidramas, primarily the sub-sub-sub- One Tree Hill tale of pretty Jesse (Kristen Hager) and pretty Ricky (Johnny Lewis) who has a not-secret crush on her. Otherwise, it's strictly a panoply of day-players and TV character actors. Also, he is played by Steven Pasquale, and must therefore pass as the film's "name" actor. Only one character, the closest we get to a protagonist, really sticks out in my mind, and that is because he is named "Dallas" in an ill-advised reference to the Ridley Scott movie. Mostly, it's only possible to define characters in terms of their interrelationships: the girl whose ex-boyfriend beat up the nerd whose brother is friends with the cop who is trying to comfort the woman whose husband and boy are missing. Seriously, I understand that crappy horror movies need big casts of quickly-defined characters, but it's been a lot of years since there has been a film with such a very large cast, so full of people that I can't quite distinguish from one another. The ship lands in the mountains outside Gunnison, Colorado, British Columbia, where scenes of the two species slithering around in the sewers are intercut with selections from the local community college production of Peyton Place. For a couple minutes, it's merely dreary and not unspeakably foul, as we follow a few predators around their nondescript ship, trying to hunt the beast before it kills them all and crashes their ship, along with its cargo of those crab-shaped alien things that plant their spawn in your belly. The new film starts approximately four seconds before the last film ended, so as to remind us that a predator-alien hybrid has just been born. Predator: Requiem is unmitigated trash in almost every way. No sir, a worse AVP film than the first one just couldn't be made. It would be rated R again, not the fainting-couch niceness of the PG-13 that kept AVP from the elaborate gore that has been a mainstay of both franchises since their origins. Anderson out of the picture, the psychotic mythology about adolescent predator aliens (of the classic Predator and the not-classic Predator 2) hunting slimy black aliens (of the increasingly debased Alien series) in a giant Antarctic pyramid had been jettisoned in favor of throwing some aliens at Small Town, USA, and loosing the predators to mow them down. Predator: Requiem could possibly be as bad as the first Alien vs.
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