Reviews

***Spoilers***

One of the most famous of the old school man in a rubber suit 1950s classics, but you know what? It's always been mismarketed.

CFTBL wasn't the story of some horrible amphibious jungle creature terrorizing a group of scientists out on a boat leching over a token very busy and completely worthless pretty girl.

Instead, this was the story of a group of violent bullies invading some shy creature's living space, harassing it, attacking it, shooting it with a spear gun by way of greeting, drugging it repeatedly, kidnapping it, and then getting all huffy when it tries to retaliate. I mean sure, it killed a couple of native guides early in the movie, but as any student of history or movies will tell you that's just what you did back then with indigenous extras.

But after that? A pretty one sided bit of Earth bound Captain Kirking. I think the poor thing finally decided to just take the girl and leave because she was the only one who hadn't physically assaulted it by the end of the film. And so our roving gang of science thugs then conduct a home invasion and mug the creature in it's own living room. The poor thing should seriously lawyer up and seek reparations.

I am generally more willing to be open minded about rom coms than many, but this was simply not a very good attempt. Its got nothing to do with comparisons with the British original -- have not seen, and doubt I will. It has a whole lot to do with a meandering plot, lack of chemistry between the leads and a godawful performance/character from its supposed male lead (Jimmy Fallon).

Fallon walks onto the screen wearing the clothes and hairdo of a 15 year old and acting a decade younger than that. He's supposed to be a teacher you see, and of course its well known that school districts the world over love to hire individuals less mature than the children they purport to teach. The character is so extremely disturbed and irrational that I have my doubts whether any actor could have made him likable, but old reliables like John Cusack or Adam Sandler might have been able to give it a shot. Not Fallon, who is neither funny, nor an actor, but appears to think he is both. Not once in the entire course of the movie do you either believe Fallon in his role, or believe that there is any way these two people should, or would be together. Near the end of the movie there is a scene where Barrymore (who was cute as usual but could not carry this one alone -- its hard to have a one person romance) tells Fallon that its over, too much has happened, and she's moving on. And rather than feeling bad about the scene, or sorry for Fallon, you are actively cheering her on -- finally she does what she should have done months ago. But of course the plot mechanics won't allow that to be the end of it (an end which actually might have made a statement out of this mess), and instead we get to see the rational career girl throwing it all away to chase after this childish idiot and encourage his delusions. Its of course meant to be gooey and satisfying, but it actually made me more disgusted than anything else.

A movie not as bad as those who were actually disappointed in it might claim -- I think having a dripping disdain for the entire fanboy its-so-kewl origin of the AvP series may actually have helped when watching this one.

At this point all of the rules and atmosphere carefully constructed by far FAR more talented writers and directors decades ago have been almost completely lost to time. Its been 20 years since the last truly good Alien or Predator movie, and once you accept that and look at this as nothing more or less than a simple B movie ripoff, its not terrible. Hardly a ringing endorsement, but the best something like this can get. It certainly beat the brain dead PG-13 stupidity of the first AvP which tripped over its own comic book kewl to the point of being nonsensical.

AvP Requiem...well, its not a smart movie by any remote stretch. It is in every way conceivable a B movie. It has the clichés, the plot holes, the occasional non-sensical decision making (hello, you are driving a tank -- how about you just turn it around and head up the road OUT of town?). But looked at as nothing more than a B movie entertainment, its better than many, perhaps even most. The story is simple, straight forward, and generally the sort of thing that any hack can execute reasonably. Alien monsters crash to Earth near small town, everyone dies. And after half an hour of non-character development (the only actor to make any impact was a smokingly hot blond, and that only because she strips down to her underwear), the movie gets right to the carnage. This is no classic and you will forget about it within a week, but as B movies go it delivers fast paced scifi/horror fun without even pretending to explore larger themes. If they could have hired even one actor with any real presence, written one role with any real edge, it might even have been memorable. I think even amusingly bad acting might have been preferable to the vanilla bland nothingness on display here.

One note about this franchise, and the aliens in particular. In Alien the creature was possibly the scariest thing ever put on celluloid. Seemingly indestructible, experiencing neither emotion nor pain, able to live in any environment, a black dripping slimy combination of insect and reptile, it was the stuff of nightmares. But in sequel after sequel now we have seen far too much. And the indestructible aliens have been sacrificed on the altar of this fanboy series to become just another opponent. Tough to be sure, but we've seen hundreds of them killed at this point, and the Predator in this installment of the series singlehandedly wipes out dozens of them, sometimes three, four, five at a time in hand to hand combat. And so the Alien's fearsomeness seems almost at an end -- it began in Alien 3 when the last third of the movie had its prisoners playing tag with their Alien in order to lure it to its doom. And maybe now its almost complete as we finally discover that 20th century light arms are all that's required to put them down. Get a bunch of hicks with hunting rifles crammed into the back of a pickup and let's go Alien hunting. Fortunate that the crew of the Nostromo had not packed a single vintage M-16 in their cargo or the whole franchise might never have gotten off the ground.

***Various Minor Spoilers*** And by blithering idiots I specifically would like to point to the "writer" (some hack named Cooper Layne), and the director, a Mr. Rupert Wainwright. Producing this sort of garbage is bad enough. Doing so when you have a vastly superior earlier version on which to draw is pathetic. Did they watch the earlier movie? Were they simply too stupid to understand why it actually succeeded? Apparently so. Or so arrogant at the amazing successes of their own sad little careers that they thought they could do "better" by dumbing the movie down to sub-moron level and throwing in a few pretty faces.

So where to begin...

Let's see, first of all of course, it would appear Mr. Layne was unable to grasp the very simple connection between the fog, and the creepy/mysterious events of the first movie. Thus we get randomly killed dead dogs with no fog around, soggy footprints with no fog around, even the pickup truck's broken windows with no fog around. The fog is in fact irrelevant, because this hack is writing yet another braindead "ghost" story without any grounding in the original premise. We even get the sad stereotypical joke of a stock black jive-talking side kick popping up to do nothing but be the stock black jive-talking side kick.

Secondly of course neither the writer nor director, nor apparently burnt out old John Carpenter himself (who apparently took a wad of cash to lend his name as "producer") have an ounce of confidence in the very thing that made the first one work -- the cold blooded ice cold revenge of a pack of undead sea zombies. Proceeded by a freezing fog, hacking people up with a variety of pirate-esquire hooks and blades. So no, our new modern masters of horror decide that the completely standard and boring CGI pseudo-ghosts would be far scarier. And rather than emerging out of the fog to brutally maul people, that instead we will accumulate the standard array of stupid "let's be neat" death scenes, with genteel ghosts apparently kung-fuing people through windows, setting them on fire, throwing knives at them, killing them with shards of glass, and magically killing people through the disposal. As I've mentioned they simply did not get it. No consistency, no pattern, no tension, creepiness, fear, nothing remotely special about these ghost/zombies at all. Just another tired excuse for hack writers to try to outcool themselves with a bunch of pointless deaths. They even manage to completely write out the entire cold blooded and semi-logical motive for the zombies from the first film -- wanting to get back what was stolen from them and kill the descendants of the thieves. But the all wise dubious duo here thinks it has a better idea -- more or less write the priest out of the story, and have the zombies want...er...actually that remains pretty unclear.

Finally of course the classic sign of somebody who just should not be writing/directing horror movies -- the moronic urge to show everything. Repeat after me uberhacks -- the unseen is scarier than the seen. Repeat it 20 times before bed every night. 20 times in the shower every morning. Whatever it takes until it gets through your thick heads. Our duo of doom here so completely misunderstands the concept they ever dip so low as to show a cheesy "ghostly" hook banging on the doors to produce the formerly creepy knocking effect. And then pull out all the stops and erase any lingering chance of a scary movie with an utterly ridiculous "climax" -- going from the incredibly creepy image of a group of fog shrouded shapes with glowing eyes waiting to embrace the priest in the first movie to an extended scene of a cheesy pseudo-ghost throwing people around with his staff.

So given all the idiocy, how exactly did this movie avoid a "1" for me? Three things actually: first of all, I always feel compelled to leave room for the "Skeleton Man"s of the world in the sub-basement. Secondly, the cinematographer here actually showed a sporadic touch. Sporadic, but occasionally a professional shot that would have been worthy of a less vomitous effort. And finally, and perhaps most significantly, the three leads, Tom Welling, Maggie Grace, and Selma Blair, actually give it the old college try here and probably do about as much as they can with this material. Which ain't much of course. And with Welling woefully miscast because he is pretty. But they try. Blair in particular appears to have actually watched the first movie as she tries to channel her inner Adrienne Barbeau. And so they take a complete disaster, and while not saving it from being a complete disaster, at least, unlike the writer/director here, prove that they deserve to get another job in the business at some point.