AVPR: Aliens vs Predator – Requiem (2007)

(In theaters, January 2008) Sixth (or eighth?) in a series of instructions on how to stomp two franchises deeper into the ground. By now, aliens and predators are so familiar that they could be making plushies of them for all the non-terror they inspire. This film doesn’t add much to the mythos (barely a look at the Predator planet and a late Yutani cameo) and doesn’t do much with the now-generic monsters. The human characters aren’t particularly interesting either, and their gory deaths are far more ordinary than you’d expect. (Only a scene in a maternity ward actually stretches the boundaries of good taste and earns some begrudging kudos.) There are some okay special effects, but the men-in-suits shtick is all too obvious here. There’s really not much to say about this film: it’ll fade in memory even faster than the first Alien vs Predator, and that’s a telling fact in itself.