The surprising commercial success of Alien vs. Predator led the studio to commission a sequel, but, perhaps mindful of the fairly uniform negative reaction from critics to Paul W S Anderson’s movie, they elected to do it on a budget. Enter the Brothers Strause to make their directorial debut. Greg D. Smith investigates whether their hard-earned experience in delivering visual FX to other movies could translate into cinematic gold, or would this be just another hackneyed entry in a steadily declining franchise?

I well recall the first time I watched Requiem – renting it on DVD from my local Blockbuster (yes, it was that long ago), I was less than impressed by what struck me as a sort of weird hybrid of a teen slasher movie and the meeting of two of cinema’s scariest and most badass alien monsters. In the years since, the general gist of the thing had faded from my mind (in truth, I’m fairly certain I’d forgotten most of it within a day or two of seeing it), but the abiding impression of a cast of disposable and unlikeable characters lining up for their individual and predictable death scenes had stuck with me. Revisiting it now, for the first time in over a decade, gave me a chance to re-examine it, and what I found wasn’t pretty.

Picking up exactly where the last movie left off, Requiem has the newly emerged Predalien causing havoc on the Predator scout ship, and somehow setting it off to detach from the mothership and fall back to Earth. I say ‘somehow’ because in all honesty I had to look at the movie’s Wikipedia plot summary to find out exactly what was going on, so messy and indecipherable were the scenes themselves. But the fun was only just beginning.

Seeing the spaceship crash to earth while out hunting in the woods, a father and son rush to the site to discover more, but become unnerved by the sight of the ship itself and the sounds of movement emanating from all around them. The father and then the son get grabbed by facehuggers in short order, which we as the audience know isn’t going to end well for either of them, and then the film moves on. I don’t know honestly whether to admire the gutsiness of the directors for going with child murder so early in the film, or just stick with feeling repulsed at the casual way in which the movie deals with it, but fortunately, the film is having far too much fun pushing schlock on us in-between sub-90210 teen drama and Days of our Lives-esque family mundanity to bother lingering overly long on any one specific tragedy, even when it is the death by exploding chest cavity of a sub-10 year old boy.

As each of the other main players in this drama of nonsense gets introduced, it almost feels as if there’s a floating timer above their heads giving a rough estimate of exactly how long it’s going to be before they get messily killed by one or other of the titular antagonists. So flimsy are the character introductions, so throwaway the motivations and what passes for personalities, that they literally may as well just all be called meat puppet 1, 2 etc. rather than actually have names.

What’s even more annoying is that within those flimsy excuses for introductions are buried genuine nuggets that could be fleshed out to provide decent character and motivation. Why is it that Dallas was sent to prison? Why has he returned home now that he’s been released? Why does he have such a close relationship with the town Sheriff? What’s going on between him and Kelly O’Brien, the soldier who just happens to have returned home from the army at the same time he gets back (there’s definitely something, judging by certain looks exchanged between the two which imply tension). Who cares, the movie seems to say, as it skates right past these potentially diverting events and focuses on another bit of hammy dialogue, or Dallas’s younger brother Ricky staring at his crush Jesse, who is so painfully tropey as the ‘Cool gorgeous girl with an asshole jock boyfriend who really wants the geekier guy he beats up’ that it almost feels as if she’s some sort of ouroboros source material for the cliché itself.

This is an issue precisely because of the sort of movie Requiem wants to be – a horror film. It ditches any aspiration at science-fiction storytelling early, once the odd sequence of a lone Predator back on whatever passes for their homeworld apparently learns of what’s happening on Earth with the Predalien and friends and decides he’s going to go and do something about it alone because… reasons? At any rate, the point of a pure horror movie is that we care about the protagonist/s – we either learn something about them that makes us look up to or relate to them, so that when they die a horrible death it has an impact beyond being just messy to look at. Requiem has an issue on both angles here, with most of its deaths not being all that messy (compared to other stuff in the respective franchises) and none of its characters being in any way likeable or relatable.

But what about the creatures themselves? They got those right, surely? Well, yes and no. On the plus side, the new Predator we see here (Wolf, so the wiki page tells me) is reasonably decently rendered and performed. Ian Whyte reprises the duty from the previous movie and does a decent enough job, and the suit seems somehow better made than before, as does the face of the creature when inevitably revealed. His use of twin plasma casters seems a little like directors searching for a visual hook that can differentiate the character from those we have seen before, but is just about forgivable. What fails to stick is the motivation/personality of the character.

For starters, Wolf is carrying around some blue goop which dissolves all trace of whatever it gets poured on. Starting with the corpses of the father and son mentioned earlier (so their family and friends now can’t even find them) he uses this on every other Xenomorph he kills, apparently attempting to erase all trace of the Aliens, though it’s never clear why. Predators have been established thus far in the evolving franchise as trophy hunters, yet Wolf not only takes none, but actively dissolves the entire corpse of every kill. Nor does he even mark himself with the blood of his kills as per the previous movie. There is no perceived or perceivable benefit to, or motivation for, this clean-up act.

Even odder, the Predator seems to display no consistent attitude towards humans. Some it is quite happy to just murder out of hand, yet when it skewers Jesse with a thrown shuriken weapon, the implication seems to be that this is entirely an accident. Granted, Jesse was running unarmed, and earlier in the movie he doesn’t fire on Kelly when she leaves the gun behind and runs away with her daughter, but there’s still an odd inconsistency here as to why the Predator isn’t just murdering everyone in sight if the goal is to erase all trace of what’s happening.

On the Xenomorph side, things are a little better, if only because they’re much simpler. Aliens kill stuff and lay eggs. That’s their thing. The new Predalien seems to have a weird ability to lay multiple eggs in victims’ throats, resulting in a ‘Belly Buster’ where multiple baby aliens burst from the stomach. This seems to be reserved purely for women who are pregnant, as the movie takes on the tone of a teenager trying their very best to shock by doing the most taboo thing they can think of and then pretending that it doesn’t matter so that they look as cool as possible. Unfortunately, just like that teenager, all it does is elicit a kind of bored sigh from the viewer.

On the plus side, the Predalien at least looks interesting, and the final confrontation between it and Wolf is interesting visually as the two rather mirror one another, with similar gestures and fighting postures. That is, what you can see.

Because there’s another fairly major issue here, and whether it’s caused by the directors’ inexperience, lack of budget or a combination thereof is difficult to tell but it makes the film almost unwatchable – everything is very difficult to make out most of the time. It doesn’t help that much of the movie takes place at night, but jumpy cutting and editing and poor light sources throughout combine to make the film a visual mess. It’s a shame, because again there’s a large commitment to practical FX where possible, and a sense that there really is some great work that’s been done here on the visual front, but it gets lost in a dark visual murk that robs it of any detail or focus.

Musically, the movie actually does better than its predecessor, opting to include lots of homage to previous entries in both franchises. The return of the timpani drumbeats from Predator is particularly welcome, helping to make you feel as if you’re watching a film that at least is somehow connected. As the Xenomorphs surround and attack the survivors in the town square, gathered for a rescue that isn’t coming, the distinctive elephantine squeal of the Xenomorphs themselves is another welcome return. Unfortunately, as much as the music and sound helps, it also hinders, forcibly reminding the viewer of the much better entries in both franchises which have gone before.

If anything, the main issue which afflicts Requiem is the exact opposite of its predecessor. AvP was bland to the point of utter banality, but it was a unified blandness – there was a theme to the thing, however misguided, and it felt like a coherent (if dull and uninspired) movie. Requiem just feels like a car crash, unable to settle into one consistent theme, always pushing at the boundaries of something it can’t deliver. It wants to emulate the slasher movies of the late nineties/early noughties, but it lacks the budget to deliver the schlock convincingly, and the smarts to do it well. It also wants to be a Predator and Alien movie, with intense fighting and action scenes, but again budgetary constraint and inexperience conspire to rob it of any capability in this area. It plays like what it is – a sort of vague tribute to the franchises which spawned it which neither understands nor fully appreciates them, and attempts to make up for that lack of understanding with a confidence that is entirely unearned and unwarranted.

It’s possible if I had attempted to watch it with my brain switched off, as a bit of popcorn fluff, I might have had a bit of fun with it, although it’s doubtful when the characters are so unlikable and unfulfillingly sketched in, and the action is so consistently murky and difficult to actually see. But there is that small possibility that if you approach it as a sort of disposable, straight-to-video slasher flick (which it wasn’t – this had a cinematic release) then it might tickle you briefly. But it’s frustrating in the extreme to me that, twenty years after the superior original Predator movie was released, and with nearly two decades of source material from videogames to novels to comics to plunder for ideas and inspiration, this was the best that anyone could come up with.

Almost the very definition of cheap and nasty on multiple levels, this is one ugly mother of a sequel, and most definitely best avoided.