I have to say there were some exciting moments in this movie. Now for the bad. Most scenes were shot so dark that nothing was visible, except when they wanted you to see some gratuitous gore. There's something about every shot, it's almost good. The lighting is nice, the setting is good, but the composition is off, so you miss the grandeur of a feature film. The characters are setup dead centre, with the top of the head cutoff and obscuring any of the background. Instead of being larger than life, the screen seems small. The Brothers Strause are focused on f/x and have a long and respectable list of visual effects credits. Unfortunately the most important part of a movie is story, story, story.
I enjoy a good gore-fest as much as anyone, but setting the scenes up so the children have to witness their parents (not once, but twice) get ripped apart is just pandering, that's blatantly trying to force the audience to feel horror. That's the gore equivalent of a big eyed child painting... on black velvet. Another thing that bothered me was using the teen-slasher-movie format. Was this necessary? It brought nothing but a cheap, formulaic device to thrill the audience of 13 year old boys.
With far too many characters, they tried, with laughable obviousness, to endear you to, and care about, then have them ripped in half, within a rushed 3 minutes. Not enough time was spent on the characters to allow you to like, accept, or care about them. And the characters that time was spent on, were unrealistic, vacant, and pointless. Awkward and meaningless dialogue detracted from their credibility even more.
I can't understand how people can rate this movie a 10 and then say it wasn't as good as Alien (1979) or the original Alien vs Predator (2004). Is there a rating above 10 now? 10+? Does Alien rate a 10 + infinity?
I feel kind of angry at this movie, because it wasted a great idea. It could have been so much more, but sank to so much less. The say they went for the NC-17 rating because that's what the fans wanted. Why cater to a select few, when you could have made a good movie that everyone would want to see.
Just because it was done in previous movies doesn't mean you have to do it again. Predator gets injured – we need to see him use a med kit. Predator walks out of the water – we need to see that again.
It's interesting to note, that as I was looking through the reviews on IMDB, the majority of people who love the film were from the States, and the ones that hated it were from the rest of the world. Not sure what that says, but it is interesting. I usually knock off the ratings of 1 or 10, because I don't think there are many movies that equal either, and to give this movie such a high or low rating, that would mean movies like Alien, Aliens, and Predator would be off the scale, maybe a simpler scale of good or bad should be applied.
If you're a fan of the Alien or Predator series, or good movies, you won't like this one.
***Spoilers***
Why dissolve evidence with the blue gooey liquid, when you leave a skinned man hanging in a tree, not to mention all the blood splatter covering the town. Harvey Keitel's “The Wolf”, wouldn't have been so sloppy.
1 ½ out of 5
www.imdb.com
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