Yautja Fest - Aliens vs Predator: Requiem (2007) - Midnight Viewing

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
M hm, weary, weir.

Speaker 2 (00:25):
Read we can kill.

Speaker 3 (00:27):
It, shouting at the wading fish English. What time? Hell?

(00:51):
I welcome back midnight viewers too. Yeah. Oh chuffs, it's
the latest edition. Hey, Patreon listeners here in the month
of August. Hello, everyone else in the Maiden Freed sometime
in September.

Speaker 2 (01:09):
We are back.

Speaker 3 (01:11):
It is another attempt to examine the lifestyles of predators everywhere.
This is our first direct sequel to any of the
films that have come so far. This is Alien versus
Predator Requiem. Here's the trailer. Oh my god, just nobody's home.

(01:52):
Who's outside the window? See no monster? The towels completely overrunning.
We'll see on me. He's evacuation plan. Okay, that was

(02:22):
part of the trailer, because the majority of the trailer
was just sounds, lots of screeching and people shouting and
guns going off and lasers blasting and face huggers chittering
and alien motion trackers beeping, even though that sound is
from one hundred and seventy years in the future. But

(02:43):
I do want to say one thing. At the time
that this trailer came out, we were all so far
over this franchise and concept that I didn't notice how
good the trailer actually, now I showed this trailer. I
showed this movie as a projection back in two thousand
and seven and rewatching the trailer. The trailer's great because

(03:06):
the trailer starts the way the movie should have, which
is it slowly introduces us to the town of Gunnison, Colorado,
and it shows us the townsfolk, and it gives us
the population, and then it shows the predator or the
predator alien ship crashing, and then the population turns into
a counter and starts winding down as people in the

(03:27):
town start dying in the trailer. It's a great fucking
trailer for a terrible fucking movie. HP. What's your first
experience with AVP or was it this was this year
inaugural Journey on the Ocean that is Requiem.

Speaker 2 (03:44):
This literally the first when I watched this for this podcast,
was the very first time I've seen this movie. I'll
tell you what that trailer that you just described that
you played a little bit of a minute ago, I
want to see that movie because that's not the movie
that I watched the other day for this podcast. But
we'll get into it.

Speaker 3 (04:02):
The first thing I noticed in rewatching the trailer, it
was appreciably brighter, like, for instance, you could see everything
on screen. It was fascinating. Having seen the movie previously,
both theatrically and on home video, and then again for
this podcast. You know what I did this time, turned
up the brightness on a television screen all the way up,

(04:22):
and I saw everything for the very first time. I
wish I'd.

Speaker 2 (04:26):
Thought of that, because that's one of my chief complaints
is that it is so infernally dark and murky and frankly,
the editing doesn't do this movie, and he favors either.
But on the positive side, the things that I could see,
the scenes that were bright enough for me to make

(04:46):
out what was going on, I will say this, Father
Milonemy might be my highest compliment of this movie is
the bits that I could see were actually better cinematically
than the last movie, Alien Versus Predator. This movie did
feel more cinematic than that movie. That makes sense.

Speaker 3 (05:07):
I do understand what you're saying.

Speaker 2 (05:09):
I'm not suggesting that it was shot extremely well, but
it's hard for me to explain that the texture it
didn't look as cheap as the last movie.

Speaker 3 (05:19):
I understand what you're saying. This feels like a movie
because this movie was directed by people who wanted to
make a movie, and the other one was made by
a guy who wanted to make a franchise by any
means necessary. Those filmmakers here are the brothers Strauss. That's
their credit for directing here. Written by Shane Sellerno, the

(05:40):
genius behind Armageddon. That's not my description, that's Michael Bay's
description of him. Also based on characters and situations created
by Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Schuston and Jim and John Thompson.
This movie stars Stephen Pasqualely Ray eko Ailesworth, John Ortiz,
Johnny Lewis, Ariel Gade, Sam Trammel, Robert Joy in a

(06:03):
role written for Adam Baldwin but scheduling prevented him from
portraying Garner once again from Predator Too. And the film
also stars Tom Woodruff Junior, and Ian White as the
Alien and Predators, respectively. This film starts immediately at the
end of the last film, Hpop, what's the story here?

Speaker 2 (06:26):
So the story here is astute listeners to the podcast
will remember that Alien versus Predator ends with the slaying
Predator being carried on to his ship by his comrades,
and the final shot is a alien predator hybrid chest
burster coming out of this dead predator. This movie begins

(06:50):
at that very moment where the chest burst the creature
comes out of the predator's chest. There's a firefight, and
the ship ends up crash, landing back on Earth before
it can leave to get back to the predator home world.
So the plot is the ship is crashed. Oh and
by the way, there's also face hugger samples critters like

(07:14):
in basic class cases, presumably for this predator to seed
other hunts. I assume that's why they're there. Sure, So,
so it crashes. Not only does this pre we'll just
call it, I hate to call it this because I
think it's a dumb name, but the pread alien as
it's referred to, is not only is that on the
loose and wreaking havoc, but these face huggers have gotten

(07:36):
out when the ship crashes and almost immediately starts to
seed this town in Colorado, this unsuspecting small town in
the mountains, and it becomes a Basically they're trying to
figure out what's happening and save the town before it's

(07:57):
completely overrun with creatures.

Speaker 3 (07:59):
Me.

Speaker 2 (08:00):
While there's been a distress signal sent to the predator
home world. This was actually cool. Father, This I have
to say, we're gonna be look spoiler alert, we're going
to be bagging on this movie a lot.

Speaker 3 (08:11):
Oh, but we're going to kick the shit out of
this movie. But there are some elements that are actually
a lot of fun and interesting.

Speaker 2 (08:19):
Yeah, namely this where they the distress signal goes back
to the So you see the alien home world and
the predator home I'm sorry I said alien, I meant
the predator Homeworlducha Prime, Yeah, Oucher Prime. And it's cool looking.
It makes me want to see more of it. So
a predator there, a Yaucha, gets intercepts the distress signal,

(08:42):
gets into his ship and flies back to or flies
to Earth ostensibly to deal with this this crashed ship,
find out what's going on, and deal with any of
these creatures that have escaped. And that's the scenario that
we're presented with here in this By the way, I
didn't know when we set out to do this. When
you gave me my homework, I did realize you were

(09:05):
giving me the Robert Altman, Nashville of predator movies, because
this movie is sprawling and not in a good way.
Like when you were going through the cast list this
there's so many. I don't think I even I know
one character's name through the whole movie.

Speaker 3 (09:25):
That's it.

Speaker 2 (09:25):
There's probably what there's at least ten twelve main characters
that you're trying to keep track of.

Speaker 3 (09:32):
Do you know the is it the lead character Stephen
Pasqually's character's name Dallas Howard, not Bryce Dallas Howard, who
was an active actor at that moment in history. Bryce
Dallas Howard was, But no, is it Dallas Howard?

Speaker 2 (09:45):
Yeah, that's Dallas because they I think they use his
name more than anybody. There's the sheriff, but that's not
really his name. There's Dallas's ne'er do well, younger brother.
I don't know his name. There's a girl that has
the hots for the younger brother. I don't know her name.

Speaker 3 (10:02):
It's my favorite character because she gets pinned to a
wall accidentally.

Speaker 2 (10:06):
Who is that actor who was in Can't Hardly Wait
and that thing you do? Ethan Embry?

Speaker 3 (10:12):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (10:13):
This the younger Brother was like a poor man's Ethan Embrey.

Speaker 3 (10:16):
That's I could not stop thinking about him like a
photostatic copy of him. There are very few recognizable basis
in this movie. The only one I recognize is John
Ortiz as Sheriff Morales. And that's only because I fucking
love that movie Kong Skull Island, and he's one of
the scientists in that movie.

Speaker 2 (10:33):
See, I recognized him too. He's the only one I
recognized for a different movie. He was in Silver Linings Playbook.
He was Oh yes, he was married to what's the
what's your name? That's her name? Why am I blanking
earned her name? The one Jennifer Lawrence, save her sister,
Who's say the last dance for me? She was in

(10:53):
one of the Bourne movies. You know, I'm talking about.

Speaker 3 (10:56):
Julia Styles and Julius Stiles. He's lit on Bexter.

Speaker 2 (11:02):
He's married to Julia Stiles, but he's under so much pressure.
He's stressed from the pressures of marriage and having to
He's really good in Silver Linings Playbook. That's what I
remembered him from. But that's aside from him, I recognized
no one else. I think you made the point that
this is like alien versus Predator.

Speaker 1 (11:21):
The cw avp AVPCW absolutely it feels like a pilot
for a CW show, and then fucking face huggers are
jumping on people's faces.

Speaker 2 (11:35):
Yeah, it has that look. That's sort of because this
is two thousand and seven. That's prime time for the CW.
I think was that when did the Archie reinvention take
hold on the CW.

Speaker 3 (11:47):
A little bit later, but this is prime like One
Tree Hill and that entire wave of television actors who
had already populated all of the remakes of horror movies
at the time.

Speaker 2 (12:01):
It's like post scream. I think that's it doesn't hurt.

Speaker 3 (12:04):
That doesn't help that the movie rather is shot in
Vancouver like every fucking CW production.

Speaker 2 (12:11):
Exactly, and like the CW. The people in this there's
people in this movie that are supposed to be high
school kids or high school age like fake like fake
Ethan Embry, but him and the girl that he's dating
or he's trying to date, and her bully gang that
she's affiliated with, not gang literally, but just a bunch

(12:33):
of tough kids. They all look like they're in their
mid twenties and they're supposed to be playing high like
literal like even if they're seniors. They still look way
too old.

Speaker 3 (12:43):
And all of these people populating this town are they
just are involved in so many fucking subplots. It's out
of hand. It's like when we talked about alien versus Predator,
I said, it doesn't it doesn't endear it character to
us for them to rifle out some line of dialogue

(13:05):
about I have a family at home. Oh okay, now
I care about you. This film seems to double down
on that idiotic notion by giving us a bunch of
stories with characters we don't care about, in the most
cliched plots possible. Here is the brother, the bad boy
brother who has been in prison, returning to the small town.

(13:26):
How's he going to fit back in? And his younger brother,
his ne'er do well younger brother, who's constantly being beaten up,
and he can't get the girl, but he's trying real hard.
And now the military woman returning home and her daughter
doesn't recognize her. At what is any of this? There's
a fucking a there's a face hugger on a hunter

(13:49):
in the forest right now, and something's going to burst
out of them. And you're all none of your stories
are going to matter. But we spend so much time
with their stories in this ninety minute movie.

Speaker 2 (14:01):
It's exhausting. My head is spinning in the first fifteen
minutes because they're throwing character after subplot, and these subplots
you can see them coming a mile away, like this
sort of high school kid who's trying to get the
girl but her boyfriend's a bully and all this. And then,
like you said, the military mom comes home and the

(14:21):
daughter he doesn't. She's having trouble adjusting to her having
her back. That there's a sheriff. There's this hunter and
his son that are I think they're the first people
that are killed. I will say this, this movie is
not afraid to get really ugly, like very distasteful, Like

(14:42):
I'm no prude when it comes to movies whatever, but
it gets ugly quick. So this the ship crashes and
this hunter and his young son, what's the kids supposed
to be like nine years old or something. Yeah, they
go out to investigate the ship and one of the
face huggers jumps at the father, who shoots it with

(15:02):
his rifle, but the acid from the face hugger's blood
gets on his arm and the arm falls off in
front the child. Is watching all of this, and then
the face hugger comes out and slams on the dad,
and then it slams on the kid. And then they
wake up later and the son wakes up just in

(15:23):
time to watch a face hugger burst out of his
father before another one bursts out of him. Man, it
is dark.

Speaker 3 (15:33):
This is the assault on Precinct thirteen of Predator movies. Sure,
no holds barred here. Look, you've got young filmmakers. This
is their first film. They've been pitching a alien versus
Predator movie since they had come to Hollywood. They are
a couple of visual effects guys. Okay, they had moved

(15:54):
out after seeing Aliens. So inspired were they that they
came out out and tried to get a job on ILM.
Ended up working freelance on a bunch of properties. Ended
up forming Hydraulics, which is their visual effects company. They
did a bunch of music videos and stuff. They would
eventually do that movie. What was it Sky? Something in

(16:14):
the Sky Skyrise, Scott?

Speaker 2 (16:17):
Was it Skyrise either that or Skyscraper? I know the
one you're talking about.

Speaker 3 (16:21):
No, it was the one where the people are being
taken up into the alien ships like the Rapture.

Speaker 2 (16:28):
Oh oh, the not the rock movie.

Speaker 3 (16:31):
No, No, not that thing.

Speaker 2 (16:32):
All right, I'm going to look it up here. I
know the one you're talking about.

Speaker 3 (16:35):
Because Skyline Skyline with Eric Balfour, who was a guy
I thought was going to be a huge actor but
then ended up doing virtually nothing. Yeah, they'd eventually do
Skyline as their next feature, and they produced a bunch
of sort of offshoots of it. But this is the
movie that they wanted to do, and they, like I said,
they pitched a version of their own version of Ailie

(16:55):
Verse Spreader that got turned down. That was before the
Paul Anderson movie. And then when this movie came together
very quickly, which feels like a we got to keep
the rights situation, like we made enough money on the
last one, but we got to make this real quick
with the crew that we already have. These guys got
hired with one month to make the movie. So that's

(17:18):
where the behind the scenes is is where we're at.

Speaker 2 (17:21):
But if you're working on a very tight timeline and
you're trying to make this thing ostensibly on the cheap
and be efficient about it, like the last thing that
I would do is deal with a movie that is
so I keep using the word sprawling, but there's no
other word for it. There's so much ground to cover
with every subplot, and there's it's just it gets so

(17:42):
exhausting trying to keep track of everyone when all you're
really doing as a viewer some a fan who's coming
to this movie is you're just waiting for the mayhem
to start and it just takes forever. There's no real
This is a problem that we talked about with the
last Dailien move Alia versus Predator Boo. There's no suspense. Really,
this movie is mostly about gore, I think, because like

(18:06):
I said, it's not afraid to get ugly. There's a
lot of gory, nasty effects with this. It's an R
rated movie.

Speaker 3 (18:12):
Correct, it wasn't it, But yeah, the previous film was PG.
Thirteen and was much derided for that.

Speaker 2 (18:18):
So if you came to this looking for for a
lot of blood and a lot of violence, then you
came to the right place. My problem with it was
that I just found some of it. Again, at the
risk of sounding like a prude, I just found it distasteful.
Not to skip ahead too much, but there's even a
scene where the predators or the aliens are taking over

(18:40):
a hospital and there's a woman there, a pregnant woman
who's being attended to by a nurse. The nurse is
dispatch by the alien, and then the predator alien comes
in and impregnates a pregnant woman right there, and then
multiple times right and then through plot machinations, the heroes

(19:01):
end up there. We'll talk about why and how they're there.
And this poor pregnant woman is webbed up like victims
of aliens are. We've all seen it in all the
alien movies. And sure enough, the chest bursting happens, but
like you said, it's not just one alien. There's many
aliens bursting out of a poor pregnant woman's belly. It's just,

(19:24):
I don't know, it just seemed very It just seemed
in poor taste in my opinion.

Speaker 3 (19:29):
Look, this is a very mean This is the meanest
of any of the films, and it did come out.
Like I said, My point was about talking about the
brother straus Werg was these are young filmmakers in two
thousand and seven. If you remember, back then, the saw
movies and torture porn was all the rage. So it's

(19:49):
not unexpected that it would seep into this movie, but
it doesn't. You know what I want to say, because
I agree with you, it is distasteful. Nevertheless, it's the
most memorable part of the movie. It's probably the best
part of the movie. Like all of those scenes, The
actual best part of the movie is what you mentioned,
which is that they have a predator character here nicknamed Wolf,

(20:14):
named for Winston Wolf, the Harvey kai Tell character from
Pulp Fiction. Because he's a cleaner, which means he's technically
named after Victor from The Fun Nikita or just Nikita
if you're in France, because he's basically a bounty hunter
character who picks up the distress signal. My favorite part
of the entire movie, HB is the fact that our

(20:35):
lead predator alien is effectively Bruce Wayne because he's just
sitting in his chair. It's Bruce Wayne from Batman Returns.
He's just sitting in a chair doing nothing, and then
a little screen pulls down and says, hey, there's action
on Earth, and he's like, I'm on it.

Speaker 2 (20:51):
It's cool. Because he goes to his back wall, there's
a whole bank of different predator helmets and he looks
he's just like Batman. He looks, he picks one that
is well suited for he.

Speaker 3 (21:04):
Picks the one that looks most like Casey Jones from TMNT, And.

Speaker 2 (21:08):
Yeah, I wanted more of that. Now. The thing of
it is, I guess the ultimately like the notion of
a predator of this crash and a predator having to
come and clean up the mess and deal with it.
That actually is a really compelling idea for a movie
like and actually a part of its time in making

(21:30):
the predator kind of the protagonist.

Speaker 3 (21:32):
It would have been a Private Eye movie with the
Predator as the gum shoe. I fucking loved it.

Speaker 2 (21:39):
I thought that would have been so cool, and I
was hoping by then, by the time you meet this predator,
I knew that I wasn't getting that movie. I just
there had been too many red flags leading up to
that scene. But I guess there is a great idea
for a movie there. It's just not written well, it's

(22:00):
not executed well, it's not directed well, and it's not
edited well. But someone somewhere could have made a great
movie out of that idea.

Speaker 3 (22:08):
In a lot of ways, this movie feels like a
direct response to Alien versus Predator. Whereas that film sided
with the aliens, this one sided more with the Predator,
and that one was PG. Thirteen. So they went not
only are they went hard r for this one, and

(22:30):
according to cinematographer Daniel Pearl, he felt the previous film
was too well lit with too many lockdown cameras, and
he wanted to change that by turning off all the
lights and swinging the camera around wildly on a cameraman's back.

Speaker 2 (22:44):
So confusing. There were scenes. There was a scene where
the Predator's finally squaring off against all of these xenomorphs,
and as a movie actually actually thought what I thought
in watching it. One particular scene, I thought that he
had killed the Predator alien hybrid because it was so confusing.

(23:04):
But no that they obviously leave that confrontation till the
very end of the movie, as they should. But it's
not a good sign when I'm losing track of characters
and not understanding what's happening action wise. It's not mapped
out well. It's herky jerky camera and editing, and it's
just so dark you can't see anything. I should have

(23:25):
bumped up the brightness on my computer when I watched
this that was the smart thing to do bottom along.

Speaker 3 (23:30):
And when I showed the movie, I controlled the brightness
in the theater. By the way, let me just say
for most of you who are still going to movie theaters,
and you should, if your screen seems dim, definitely go
complain and tell them to stop skimping on hours on
their bulb, because that's what they're doing.

Speaker 2 (23:48):
Let me ask you, actually, another sort of question about that.
Because everything is predominantly digital projections now, is it. It's
not the same process by which you have a light
bulb that's illuminating a piece of celluloid.

Speaker 3 (24:03):
So how prevalent is that there's still a light bulb?

Speaker 2 (24:06):
Really?

Speaker 3 (24:07):
Oh, yes, you're still throwing light.

Speaker 2 (24:11):
I guess you would have to be, because it's not
the bulb you're watching it.

Speaker 3 (24:14):
Yeah, the bulb has not changed. It's still a big
motherfucking xenon bulb man. And so you can throw out
the same amount of light, if not more, because they're
the reflectors are even better now. The fact is those
bulbs are expensive, so you want to save hours on them.
The best way to do that is to keep them
just a little dim. And when they start going dim,

(24:36):
just leave them until they finally blow out, which leaves
well us literally in the dark.

Speaker 2 (24:43):
So there, you said, there's xenon bulbs there. There's been
no advances in LED or anything like that.

Speaker 3 (24:49):
Hey, you know what, I've been out of the game
a little bit, But they were filled with xenon gas
when I was still a projectionist, when I was dealing
with digital projectors. Cool.

Speaker 2 (24:59):
It makes sense now that you say it, because obviously
you're not watching television screen with pixels. It's still an
image that has to be thrown via a bright light
up on a large screen. But I can't say, I
don't know. I'm trying to think of the last time
I watched a movie and I thought it was really dark.
I don't know. Never really occurred to me that I
could ask them to turn up the brightness.

Speaker 3 (25:20):
The last time it happened to me and I went
and complained was a Fast and the Furious movie. The
whole end sequence took place at night, and I couldn't
see fucking anything. I was like, am I going to
drive in in the middle of a busy city? Like?
How am I not following action in this major blockbuster? See?

Speaker 2 (25:38):
I have a similar issue, but with video games. When
you start a video game like Assassin's Creed or whatever, oh, it's.

Speaker 3 (25:43):
Usually a set the screen to yeah, make sure the
logo is just verrely visible, and then you spend the
rest of the game going where is everything?

Speaker 2 (25:51):
Yeah, so I from experience, I just bump it up,
usually about as high as I can take it, until
it's blown out, Like I don't want it to look
too low contrast or whatever. But yeah, if I see that,
I'm like, I'm not gonna bring it up just the
hair above visible. No way, I bump it up much brighter.

Speaker 3 (26:09):
Than I'm not looking to be a character in the movie,
certainly not in this movie. The entire military subplot exists
our character, so her character can fly them out at
the end. Yeah, she doesn't really do anything, so there's
no resolution between her and her daughter.

Speaker 2 (26:25):
What the story is.

Speaker 3 (26:26):
She's coming back from her tour of duty and her
daughter doesn't really know her and they have no connection,
and she feels bad about that. The husband has more
of a connection with the daughter. And then the husband
gets jumped and eaten by an alien and mother and
daughter go running and that's it and it's not the
la father, Mom, I love you now, thank you so much.

(26:48):
I've missed you.

Speaker 2 (26:49):
So there's no like scene, there's no arc to any
of their the subplots or their relationships. There's no I
could see if they introduce, let's say this ex convict
character saying, oh, I wish I just once I could
have been the hero in my own personal movie or whatever,
and then give him that heroic act to fulfill his

(27:09):
character art. There's none of that, certainly not with this
military mother. But again, if we're talking about this being distasteful,
by the way, not just to continue this trend the
military mom, there's the daughter and the husband.

Speaker 3 (27:21):
That's it.

Speaker 2 (27:21):
They're just a family of three. But the husband was
a poor man's Jason Ridder. I couldn't stop thinking of
him in this because he looked just like Jason Ridder.
I don't know, maybe it's a thing with me.

Speaker 3 (27:31):
But anyway, that isn't acted by the way named Sam Trammel,
which I think some of our female listeners are going
to be mad at you for saying.

Speaker 2 (27:39):
That, but go ahead, why was he in something that
I should know?

Speaker 3 (27:43):
I believe he was in true Blood whatever.

Speaker 2 (27:47):
Anyway, continuing this idea of it being distasteful mildly, if
not egregiously. The way that the father is dispatched is
so inexplicably. The military mom has brought a pair of
night vision goggles back from whatever military situation for the daughter,
which is it's like Chekhov's night vision goggles, because you

(28:08):
know they're gonna be used to spot an alien lurking's
and the daughter can't get to sleep. She puts the
goggles on, she sees a xenomorph walk lurking. She complains, Mommy,
there's a or your daddy, there's a monster, and they
do what parents do. It's a cliche. Or there's no
under the bed, no, okay, And then he goes to

(28:29):
the window and he's like, see, honey, there's no monsters.
And just at that moment, the xenomorph like whips its
tail in and kills the father right in front of
this poor daughter. I'm just like, what the hell, man.
It's like, they don't miss an opportunity to crank up
the sort of distasteful meter. If there's something that is
going to be cruel and gross and unfortunate for the

(28:53):
people in the scene, they leap at that opportunity, right,
Why have someone Why have a xenomorph impregnate somebody, unless
why don't we just have him impregnate a pregnant woman
who's in this dire situation. Why if you're going to
kill a guy, why not kill him right in front
of his daughter as he's trying to calm her fears
about the monsters outside. It just seemed rather cruel to me.

(29:16):
I keep harping on this, but that's really how I felt.

Speaker 3 (29:19):
And it's an old joke because they had the same
goddamn joke in the Monster Squad. Daddy there's a monster
in across that. Oh look, scary monster. He turns on
the light and the mummy is standing in there, like
reaching out of him. Ohay, is that that might have
been Mummy Daddy from Amazing Stories. I get them both confused.

Speaker 2 (29:35):
I think that might be it.

Speaker 3 (29:37):
But that's that's saying. Is this is just the lazy
fucking that. It's not even an original bed because I've
seen it done in a half dozen horror movies. This
one's just being really mean about it. This one's being
very saw about it. Jess saw very The child has
to see the father murdered in front of him. Look,

(29:57):
this is several years after the events of nine to eleven,
and we're all feeling a bit like anything is possible
and we can all go at any time, and we're
all still nervous, and we all know that monsters are
real and can come out of the night and kill us.
But this is a cheap knockoff movie. It is not
saying any of those things. It's just a reaction and

(30:21):
a copy of those like better ideas.

Speaker 2 (30:24):
Exactly, But it's just there's so much. There's a group
of homeless people living in the sewer that figure into
this because the sewers connected to this forest where the
xenomorphs are breeding, and I'm like, okay, is this another
character that I have to learn who they are and
what they're doing. Though they're dispatched very quickly, there's a
battle that the predator, So finally the predator does find

(30:48):
these xenomorphs and they start to battle back and forth,
and that even that's confusing because they change locations and
it's not always clear where they're going, but it's at
a certain point they end up a power plant and
the nuclear power plant, and we all can see where
this is going because I'm like, okay, they're going to
get into a fight, they're going.

Speaker 3 (31:08):
To knock up you know. I'm just hp, Can I
just say something because that was something that was not
confusing that the plot you're talking about there, we get wolf,
the predator comes down, finds the crash ship, dispatches it,
and then starts tracking the aliens. Yeah, and that that's

(31:31):
leads and that leads him to that power plant where
we watch him scan and see them go running in there.
So we all know that and where we are. That's
the only part that did make sense. That was the
only geography that I was following and gave a shit
about that.

Speaker 2 (31:47):
That aspect where the predators tracking the Xenomorphs, that all
makes sense. What I'm saying is a couple of things.
First of all, like they they don't end up at
the power plant immediately they've gone to they go to
a school, and then they're not at the school, and
then they're here. They go they kill somebody in a
diner or some people in a.

Speaker 3 (32:04):
You're talking about the xeno morphs and their pattern of behavior,
which is fucking boncos and makes absolutely no sense for
what we have seen so far in the Alien series overall.
Is the most organized alien species we've ever seen.

Speaker 2 (32:20):
Right, But what I'm saying, ultimately, at the end of
it all, when they ended up at a power plant,
I knew exactly where this was leading. It was so
unsurprising that of course they're going to knock the power
out just to amp up the danger that's happening in
this town. Because now the powers out everywhere nobody it's bedlam.
People are trying to evacuate, and then the sheriff and

(32:44):
then the National Guard are brought in. I think the
sheriff has contacted the National Guard to bring them in
because it's chaos.

Speaker 3 (32:51):
This is a situation where you would actually need the
National Guard where it makes that makes sense. Are taking
over your town, that makes sense.

Speaker 2 (33:00):
And that sequence I thought was actually amusing in a
good way because they show up with all these tanks
and weapons and they are dispatched almost immediately by these
zeno morphs. It's not even a fair fight, they're just
they're killed immediately, So.

Speaker 3 (33:15):
They you know what I was thinking during the military
sequence of this, Yeah, there are very few military sequences
in aliens where we're watching that squad do their thing.
But it's all skillful and amazing and just compare it
to what's going on here. They have the same resources, right,
it's all In fact, they have more resources here because

(33:37):
they have access to lots and lots of military vehicles,
whereas in Aliens they had to make one out of
what is basically a forklift for pushing around airplanes. That's
what that ATV vehicle was, right, And he made a
fucking amazing tense sequence when they land and are exploring
for the first time, it's it's incredible here They've got

(34:00):
all of these tanks and stuff moving into town and
and we have an alien attack and it's all worthless.

Speaker 2 (34:07):
Yeah, it just doesn't. It leads nowhere. But another kind
of at least something that was logical to me in
the midst of all of this stuff happening is after
the National Guard are wiped out, the sheriff who has
organized a survival party. It's him. It's this guy Dallas,
his brother.

Speaker 3 (34:27):
It's all the subplots have come together.

Speaker 2 (34:29):
They've finally all come together in a way. Although, yeah,
the military mom is there. He gets one of the
radios and he contacts colonel to let him in the army,
an army colonel to let him know what's going on?
And can you bring an airlift to get us out
of here? Like that, as he's talking to this colonel,
you see the colonel on a military plane and as

(34:52):
the colonel's trying to keep the sheriff on the line
or whatever, he's looking at. First he's looking at footage
of the National Guard getting wiped out, all of the
body cams and everything, and then you see him running
simulations to see how far this thing will spread, because
it's clear that they know something that's happening. It's not

(35:14):
clear immediately that they know it's an alien thing. They
know that something's happening, and they know that it's gonna spread.
That was cool because you because I knew, okay, because
he tells him go to the center of town. That's
where the airlift is gonna be. But in my mind,
I'm like, oh, they're just they're gonna nuke the town.
And that actually was logical and it made sense, and
I thought it was a, like I said, a logical thing.

(35:34):
But the thing that gave me the most amount of
joy about this movie father, Yes, because not because of him.
In this movie. First of all, he was the only
guy next to Ortiz that I recognized and really recognized him.
He's been in a million things. This is gonna be
a bit of an aggression, so indulge me on this.

(35:55):
Oh boy, So he as you said, he's played by
Robert Joy. He's been in a million bit roles. We've
seen him in a bunch of stuff, but most intriguingly,
Father Malone. I looked up his thing on IMDb. The thing.
You and I may be the only ones who even
care about this, but fuck it, I'm just gonna go
into it. He was in one episode of a nineteen

(36:17):
ninety TV show called get Ready for This Maniac Mansion?
Do you remember, Father Malone? When Father Malone and I
were in high school, we used to play this called
It was a point and click adventure called Maniac Mansion
by Lucas Arts. Lucas used to make video games and

(36:38):
it was play on. It was a little rocky horror
because it was this mansion with a crazy evil scientist.

Speaker 3 (36:44):
Who's doing all these things, and it was as close
to rocky horror as we could get at the time,
and at the time, by the way, we couldn't even
get it on video. If you wanted to see rocky
horror mixture. You had to go to a midnight movie
screening of it.

Speaker 2 (36:58):
This TV show, which I have no memory and I'm
pretty certain you don't have a memory of it. This
show Maniac Mansion was a sequel of sorts to the game.
It took place twenty years after the events of that
original video game or computer game. And but get this, Okay,
here's the crazy part. The other stars. The stars of

(37:20):
this include are you ready for this? Joe Flaherty, Eugene Levy,
Oh my God, Robin Duke Martin Short, Deborah Thieker, who
was Gwen Fabin Blunt, and Guffman. She was basically in
Christopher Guest's repertory of mockumentaries, Tony Rosatto, Andrea Martin. Dave
Cronenberg is in this as himself. This show is bananas.

(37:45):
I've I was so shocked to read about this thing.
It ran from nineteen ninety to ninety three. Obviously you
can tell from the cast list that it was Canadian
in origin.

Speaker 3 (37:56):
It ran on.

Speaker 2 (37:57):
Canadians is animated, No, it's live action. It ran on
you YTV, which was a Canadian network, and it also
ran on the Family Channel in the US for three years.
And I was just knocked out. This is the cream
of the setv crop and others in this thing. I
enjoyed going down this rabbit hole of Maniac Mansion about

(38:19):
a million times more than I show this movie Father alone.
I'm sorry for the digression, but I had to mention
it because I was so surprised by this information. Maybe
we should look I think the they're on YouTube. I
haven't looked it up.

Speaker 3 (38:33):
Oh, we're definitely going to be investigating, and I know
I'm going to watch every episode at least once. Yeah,
let's talk the Predalien for a moment. Let's talk.

Speaker 2 (38:42):
I'd love to, but I'd love to follow moment, but
I couldn't make him out. Couldn't see him.

Speaker 3 (38:47):
You saw him, listen, I didn't, I'm telling you.

Speaker 2 (38:50):
Aside from a few herky shots of his head, I
don't know what he really looked like. But I'm sorry
continue he looked like Barney what.

Speaker 3 (38:58):
In the initial draft the script, the preed Alien was
supposed to murder everyone on board the predatorship and then
be dispatched, and then the ship was going to crash
and the Aliens are going to behave as normal, making
a queen taking over this town. And then the executive said, no,
we liked that preed alien from the last one. Make

(39:20):
that the villain. And so we get this based on
the notion from Alien three that an alien will take
on the traits of whatever host it has used genetically.
So we have this alien slash predator hybrid who somehow
is a queen and controls the actions of the other

(39:42):
aliens around it, and thus it can lay eggs somehow
orally with no because they've sort of logicked it in.
If you listen to any of the commentaries on any
of these discs that it's a stage in between the

(40:03):
creation of the over positive. It's all bullshit. It's the
stupidest innovation in any of these alien and or predator movies.
It's the dumbest thing that somebody has added to the mythology.
People say that this one is out of cannon, which
is a drag because some things in this movie I
did like. But if it means that we can wipe

(40:25):
out the predalien from consciousness, let's go ahead and do that.
Because it is not only clumsily handled, it is very
dumb looking. It is.

Speaker 2 (40:35):
But again, this is one of those things where it
was established an alien three. You're right that an alien
will take on secondary characteristics of whatever it is, whatever
host that's used. So it's not a bad idea. It's
not executed well in least for a myriad of reasons

(40:56):
we've already stated. But it's not about I didn't buy
this idea. I was confused more than anything when the
pread alien impregnates this pregnant woman, because it's not a
face hugger that comes and gets her. He attacks her
in the hospital and it's like a kiss that he
gives her and you can see the eggs going down

(41:16):
her throat and again a wonderful, tasteful shot in a
film filled with them.

Speaker 3 (41:22):
So I was you keep saying he, but it's a she.
That's a queen.

Speaker 2 (41:26):
Okay.

Speaker 3 (41:27):
It the preued alien, nicknamed Chant by the crew because
it's the most distasteful character they could think of, Chant
from Weird Science.

Speaker 2 (41:38):
Weird Science.

Speaker 3 (41:39):
But Chan is a female, Okay.

Speaker 2 (41:42):
I didn't think that through. It makes sense if this
thing is producing eggs to impregnate other people, but again
it was all to confuse. I get it. It's an
alien type creature and there's no character that's gonna exposition
something to give you a context for what it's doing.

(42:02):
But at the same time, like at least a predator,
a normal predator, a yaucher creature, you know what you're getting.
And it telegraphs its motivation and its equipment and everything
it's doing very clearly. It picks up that spinning blade
thing and you know it's gonna whip it around. By
the way, one thing I have to say about the predators,

(42:25):
they are very poor shots in this movie from the
very beginning, because this predator alien hybrid is running around
the ship and one of the others at the very beginning,
one of the predators is on the ship is using
its shoulder cannon to try and target this thing and
kill it. But every time it tries to shoot, it misses.

(42:48):
Like like, I guess it's supposed to be that the
pread alien is too fast and that's what causes the
ship to crash. It's that this thing is shooting wantonly.

Speaker 3 (42:58):
This thing is and firing a ajectile weapon inside a spacecraft,
as if that won't depressurize everything and cause a crash,
as if it as it does not only that, HB
remember the absolute room full of badasses we met at
the end of alien versus predator. The ancient one alone

(43:23):
would have been able to deal with anything. It's so
insulting that they've gone with this. Why not just craft
a whole new movie. Who cares? Why link it at all?

Speaker 2 (43:33):
Also, because the predators are always so conscious about if
all us fails, if they're incapacitated or they're overrun, they
are clearly taught as a race to self destruct because
they can't, especially in the case of an alien, because
they can't risk that this thing is going to spread

(43:54):
across the universe. So I guess ultimately, and that's in fact,
that's what this wolf predator. The first thing he does
when he lands on Earth and finds the down ship,
the first thing he does with the ship is he
sets the self destruct and blows it up so that
it can't be found and any of the other creatures

(44:14):
that are around will be dealt with. But what I
don't understand is as this ship, as they're trying to
fight this pred alien, I don't see any of the
other badass predators. Like you said, someone should have been like,
all right, we made a this isn't happening. We can't
take out this thing. This is something we're all right,
self destruct sequence alpha, that's it. You wouldn't have a movie,
of course, But doesn't that make sense. These are pragmatic creatures.

(44:39):
They're hot to do this.

Speaker 3 (44:40):
You are absolutely right. Like, the one thing that we
know about predators is that they will commit suicide rather
than let things go out of their own control. And
here we've got an entire ship of them, and we're
just supposed to believe that this pred alien has vested
every one of them to the point where that is
that they've taken their fine option away from them. Okay,

(45:02):
makes a ton of sense.

Speaker 2 (45:04):
It's yeah, it's really just exasperating.

Speaker 3 (45:07):
And can I reiterate that my dissatisfaction with the continuation
of the bony zeno morph skull. It cannot stand the
everything is now the warrior alien and not the sleek
dome of the big chap from the first Alien. I
know we're getting a lot of it in the New

(45:27):
Alien Earth series, so I'm very satisfied, but I just
want to say, again, enough with the bony skull alien.

Speaker 2 (45:34):
Here's a question I have for you. This is a
bigger question. Do you think this movie represents the nader
of both franchises? The Alien and Predator franchises.

Speaker 3 (45:48):
Yes, because there was only they were. The only place
to go was up after this, right, I mean that's.

Speaker 2 (45:53):
Yeah, that's what I mean. There's only one way to go,
and that's up. Because he couldn't get any worse than this.

Speaker 3 (45:58):
That is correct, because I will and we will discuss
problems with the future Predator films in the series, but
they cannot and are not worse than this film. So, yes,
this is the lowest of the Predator films, definitely. I
don't know if it's the lowest of the Alien films.
It might be.

Speaker 2 (46:18):
Yeah, you have problems with Prometheus, but that's.

Speaker 3 (46:22):
Most I have big problems with Prometheus.

Speaker 2 (46:26):
Right, But that's purely story. That's we're not talking the
craft of the movie itself.

Speaker 3 (46:32):
Oh no, it's gorgeous, you know. That's a gorgeous movie,
and the performances are really good in it, and I
like a lot of the action in it. I just
don't think it's the Alien movie, right.

Speaker 2 (46:41):
That's what I was thinking as I'm watching this, because again,
on one of the beauties of this series of episodes
that we're doing is I'm coming at it as a
complete newbie to most of these movies. So I'm curious
what the arc of these sequels is. Are we at
the lowest point. It seems to me that we are,

(47:03):
because I know that we were coming up to like
Predators and then the Shane Black movie and of course
Pray and bad Lands eventually. So it's comforting that it
can't get any worse than this, because this is a
bit of an endurance test.

Speaker 3 (47:17):
Here's something that I did like, At least initially, it
seemed that finally somebody was taking the alien blood seriously.
When the Hunter shoots the face Hugger in a mist
of blood sprays the air, and then his part his
forearm drops off like a log. I thought, oh, wow,
somebody remembered that in that first Alien movie, just a

(47:40):
few drops of blood from the face Hugger ate through
most of the hull of a ship, and I thought, wow,
we're definitely going to get that, and we get a
lot of it here. But then at a certain point,
our lead character is sitting beneath an alien. It is
literally on top of him, and then he blasts open
its skull and just runs away and everything's fine.

Speaker 2 (47:59):
Yeah, he would have been seriously probably he must have
been killed because there's another there's a moment where the bully,
like the Alpha Bully is does someone shoot an alien
above him? There's some somehow the alien blood gets on
his face.

Speaker 3 (48:17):
And it eats it away immediately.

Speaker 2 (48:20):
Yeah, which is another in a movie filled with horrible images,
but that I agree with you one hundred percent. There
there's a lot of acid blood stuff happening. They're not
missing an opportunity to make something extra gross or extra
give you that kind of shiver at something happening, And
the acid blood's a big part of that.

Speaker 3 (48:40):
That's a big part of anil the Zeno morphs, and
I hate when they skimp on it. It's and I
hate that they it has over time become more and
more of just an irritant and less of a corrosive
acid that will eat through everything in that. I noticed
in the New Alien series that when they have a
container for the corpse of an alien, it's a heavy

(49:02):
duty plastic underneath, like we would do here on Earth
with a corrosive acid instead of more metal.

Speaker 2 (49:09):
Right, right, But let's continue on this because I'm we
mentioned a few things here, but what else did we
like about this move? What else worked? If anything? Else
because we already talked about the whole world of the Predator.
That was really cool.

Speaker 3 (49:23):
Two sons on the Predator world two sons.

Speaker 2 (49:26):
I know, I didn't notice.

Speaker 3 (49:27):
Looked really hot there, which makes sense considering that's their thing.

Speaker 2 (49:32):
It did, and effects wise, I thought that whole sequence
because worked because the wolf Predator gets this signal, he
brings up this heads up display kind of thing and
you can see he actually plays back like a recording
of everything that's happening on this ship, the pread alien
escaping and running around and the thing going down. That

(49:53):
all worked really well. So technically I think some of
the effects work. Particularly, it would say the use of
CG in this, I thought it was actually pretty good.
It was used effectively.

Speaker 3 (50:05):
It certainly was because everything that took place on the
Predator ship with the pred alien attack was all CG.
There were no practical sets there at all.

Speaker 2 (50:14):
Looked great. Well after that looked great.

Speaker 3 (50:17):
These guys are an effects company basically, so they handled
the majority of their own effects, and it, like you said,
it does look mostly great. Some of the face hugger
stuff is sketchy and a lot of the other effects
are okay, But yes, overall the I do think the
visual effects when you can see them, are really good.

Speaker 2 (50:36):
Right again, some of the shots, the scenes things, it
looked again I keep using this word. It looked more
cinematic to me. There was a texture to some of
the shots that I thought worked really well. It looked good,
It looked. It didn't look like it's being shot on
a bunch of sets. I believe that they were in
this small town in Colorado, that all worked, that all

(50:59):
looked fine. So that's another thing in the plus category.
When you could see things, certain scenes looked pretty good.

Speaker 3 (51:07):
That's definitely a plus. Sure, here's another plus. I don't
have one. It's definitely not the screenwriting combo of the
gun store owners and stoners. Let's get that joke in here. Somehow.
Were those characters supposed to make us laugh in some
way because they were stoned in the middle of all

(51:28):
of this, and then we're immediately brutally murdered. The gun
owners who seemed unable to handle guns. Why did they
go to a gun shop? Can maybe I dozed off? HB.
Why did they go to a gun shop and not
the police station when they needed weaponry?

Speaker 2 (51:43):
One thing on that I thought initially the first thing
I thought was this looks like a pawn shop, and
then I thought this must be a gun shop, but no,
it's actually if you go back and watch them, it's
a sporting good store.

Speaker 3 (51:57):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (51:57):
So on that basis, it doesn't seem all that illogical
that these two Stoners would be working there, because it's not.
They're not purely selling firearms to people. That would be
unsafe to have these guys working that kind of shot.
But if they're selling Camo vests and Duck calls.

Speaker 3 (52:15):
Okay, that makes sense that they're not adept with the guns. Maybe.

Speaker 2 (52:19):
Yeah, it's as if you worked like here Dick's sporting
goods store here, it's probably elsewhere too. They used to
sell you can get like running gear, you can get sneakers,
you can get skiing, you can get all this stuff.
They used to also be able to sell you guns.
So I look at it that way, like they don't
have to be an expert weaponsmith to work there. That

(52:42):
part didn't bother me so much. It was goofy, and
it didn't. I think they are looking for a silly,
cheap stoner laugh. But that didn't bother me quite as
much because I knew that they were just going to
be dispatched almost immediately. It's like when low Rent ethan
Embry's managed at the pizza shop that he's working at,
ends up becoming part of this group that the sheriff

(53:05):
is shuttling to the center of town. As soon as
they picked him up, I knew that he was not
long for this movie, because anybody who's even half of
a prick in this movie gets it, and I think
maybe that's maybe part of the point. Maybe there's a
wish fulfillment thing happening here where you want to see
these asshole characters get killed in awful ways. So that

(53:27):
was predictable for me.

Speaker 3 (53:29):
I wanted some of our leads to get killed in
unpredictable ways. My favorite bit in the movie is when
the Predator, a wolf, dispatches two aliens with one of
those spinning discs and it slices them in half and
then catches hold of one of our leads and pins
her to a wall. It was really brutal and horrible

(53:49):
and made me think about the Predator in a way
I haven't thought about him for a couple of movies,
since maybe the first movie, where it was like Jesus
Christ what are these people up against like that? I
thought that effect was fantastic. I know it's gruesome to
say that, what are you gonna do? It was a
great effect.

Speaker 2 (54:06):
The effect was fantastic. But again I'm left thinking about
the poor aim of this predator, because.

Speaker 3 (54:14):
There's no poor aim. That girl ran into the shot.
She ran like he did. He accomplished his goal, and
then she stepped in front of the blade.

Speaker 2 (54:23):
I suppose that's the case. I guess she did. It
was her fault that she ran into this blade. I
at the time, I thought, can't you aim that blade
any better? Predator like you're you just seem It's like
the joke that stormtroopers are all have terrible aim because
they can never hit anything they're shooting at in the
Star Wars movies. That's how I felt about the predator

(54:44):
in this movie. But I see your point. Maybe it
was her fault.

Speaker 3 (54:47):
This predator's got the blue juice, he's got the he's
got the magic erase juice.

Speaker 2 (54:52):
That made no sense to me at all, because he's
investigating the ship, the down ship before he blows it up,
and he concocts this liquid, this blue iridescent liquid from
the cases that were holding the face huggers. He mixes
it with something, and somehow this juice he drips, so

(55:15):
he pours it on things and they just dissolve into nothing,
presumably because he's trying to erase any trace of what's
been happening. Like he pours it on the hunter and
his son and they just dribble away into nothing. But
what was that stuff and why did it have to
what does he mix I maybe I just wanted too much,

(55:35):
too many explanations, too much explanation from this, but like,
why is he using this liquid from this face hugger
juice and why is it? I was very confused by that.

Speaker 3 (55:46):
That's always the best parts of these movies.

Speaker 1 (55:48):
Man.

Speaker 3 (55:48):
This is the Predator to situation again where he's using
bathroom tile to help cosgize his own wounds. It's like,
what was that about that? I don't know, he's an alien.
They do it weird shit.

Speaker 2 (56:00):
That's another fair point. Okay, I'll give you that one too.

Speaker 3 (56:03):
Yeah. I love the blue dissolving juice, the Reccom serum.

Speaker 2 (56:08):
And every Predator movie has to have the requisite scene
where the predator gets knocked on his ass and.

Speaker 3 (56:14):
Can patch himself back up. Oh man. I love when
the predator has to patch himself back up and it's
like Anton Sugar and No Country for Old Men. When
he's in that bathtub, you're breathing really heavy.

Speaker 2 (56:25):
Yeah, there's a medical triage scene in every Predator movie,
at least up to this point. I'm sure there'll be
some predators and the Predator, but I don't have to
wait and see.

Speaker 3 (56:34):
I guess if I remember deckerd he has to break
his fingers back into place at the end of Blade Runner.

Speaker 2 (56:39):
That ooh man, that sequence because I saw before I
saw this is a tangent before I saw the entirety
of Blade Runner and understood what the movie was as
a kid, I flipped over to HBO Let's SA and
that scene where Roy is breaking his fingers and this
is for Chris cracked. That is a for a nine

(57:02):
ten year old kid. That's a heavy sequence, man, because
he's just breaking several two or three fingers in the
guy's hand.

Speaker 3 (57:10):
He's breaking He's breaking Han Solo's fingers. You're nine years old,
that's Han Solo and this android is fucking him up.
It was horrifying. I agree.

Speaker 2 (57:22):
It was so savage and that's obviously the point. But man,
when you seeing these things, seeing these things out of
context as a kid, it's it's a trip anyway, digression.

Speaker 3 (57:34):
Over, Hold on one second. How long have we been talking?

Speaker 2 (57:38):
Let me see there's usually a counter somewhere, right, I
guess it's been about we started at about an hour,
I think.

Speaker 3 (57:46):
Right, somebody else to say, trying to thank every trying.
I didn't really take notes this time because it was
just too painful.

Speaker 2 (57:54):
Let me look through what I have here. Oh, we
can talk about the ending of the movie. We didn't
talk about that yet. So the town, so they make
their way, this little party of survivors make their way
to the helicopter on top of the hospital and they
take off. It's the military. Mom, it's Dallas's brother who

(58:15):
has been impaled I believe by a by an alien tale.

Speaker 3 (58:21):
Yeah, I thought somehow. And then in the next scene
he's there again. I was like, way, what was there again?

Speaker 2 (58:26):
So it's just the three of them on a on
the helicopter. Oh, I should mention before that that the
predator I'm jumping all over the place. The predator's shoulder
cannon has malfunctioned. So the predator has taken it off
of his shoulder and fashioned it into a pistol, and
Dallas at some point has found this pistol and he

(58:49):
was using it to kill xenomorphs. Anyway, the three of
them are on that chopper that takes off. The bomber
comes and bombs the shit out of the town. It's new,
it's gone, and the helicopter crashes because of the shockwave,
but everybody survives, and then the military come and pick
them up. And part of that is he surrenders this alien,

(59:12):
this predator pistol thing, and presumably they're taking to where
they're going to go.

Speaker 3 (59:17):
I'm surprised with the regularly with the rest of the
tone of this movie, that they weren't all summarily executed,
and then they take the predator's pistol off of their corpses.

Speaker 2 (59:27):
That would have made a lot more sense given what
we just what we find out is what happens is
we cut to this military installation looking building and Robert
Joy's character, the colonel, is walking with some haste with
a briefcase and he goes into a room where there's
a woman there somewhat of authority, and he produces he

(59:49):
opens the briefcase, and the woman says, the world isn't
ready for it, but the colonel replies, it isn't for
our world, is it, Miss Utani, and presents her with
the pistol. The idea being this is it's the Wayland
Utani thing that we're going to see hundreds of years hence, so.

Speaker 3 (01:00:12):
We've seen Whyland and that's the alien portion of it.
The Utani. We're now establishing that they're the predator portion
of things. Yeah, which it was supposed to conclude with
a dissolved to much later in the future, and that
alien pistol in use by some sort of colonial marine

(01:00:34):
contingent that have settled on a planet which is the
Alien home World, where a group of predators are fighting
for their lives on the surface. The end Alien Versus
Predator three was supposed to take place entirely on the
Alien home world, with these space marines helping predators. Maybe
they should have gone with that with this move.

Speaker 2 (01:00:56):
Yeah, yeah, this is a long way to go just
to get that alien the predator weaponry in the hands
of the Utani Corporation. It's a long way to go
for that. You're right. If they could have just covered
that with a crawl at the beginning and opened up
on that predator alien colonial marine conflagration on that home world.

(01:01:19):
That would have been badass.

Speaker 3 (01:01:20):
Oh my god, are you kidding me? Some outposts somewhere,
because look, honestly, I wish they had made that third
movie just so we could avoid the whole Prometheus nonsense.
You could make an alien home world cannon, then you
avoid all of the fucking engineers and their black goo bullshit.

Speaker 2 (01:01:38):
But that's the big ending, that's the big reveal.

Speaker 3 (01:01:40):
At the end of this time, Utani Corporation is involved.

Speaker 2 (01:01:44):
Yeah, So anyway, beyond that, I'm not sure what else
there is to dig into this. We've talked about the
poor acting. Have we talked about the poor acting? We
talked about we.

Speaker 3 (01:01:54):
Have that, but we don't have to. I don't think
we need to pile on the poor actors who are
saddled with this terrible screenplay, because, make no mistake, it's
a terrible screenpoint. How this movie was not just about
an alien or rather a predator sitting in the home world,
gets a distress call, goes what's going on there, and
then goes and investigates a case on Earth. I don't understand.

Speaker 2 (01:02:14):
But yeah, and there's even moments I don't think we
talked about this that come out of nowhere that make
no sense. So there's this girl that's got the hots
for the younger brother of the convict, and she entices
him to go to the pool.

Speaker 3 (01:02:29):
At the high school because of the course, we're watching
a fucking CW episode.

Speaker 2 (01:02:35):
But the whole reason behind this is that she can
strip down to her underwear and basically we can leer
between lear at this woman who's being seductive. It has
no bearing on any of the events of the movie
because very that's the moment where the lights go out
because the power plant is destroyed. They got her there
just so they could undress her, so that everybody could

(01:02:57):
leer at her, and that's it.

Speaker 3 (01:02:58):
It just I'd like, I'd like to point out that
this was a time in popular culture where assless white
women were constantly being ogle at in movies and it's like,
what are we even looking at here? And can I
And I mentioned earlier that the so far from the
alien films we've seen, the aliens are very organized. They

(01:03:19):
always have a purpose, they're always doing something like we
never see an alien just resting right but their plan
here makes no sense whatsoever. There's no central place they're
working out of. It's all just randomly running around. How
many eggs is this queen possibly laying that we're getting

(01:03:40):
this many zeno more?

Speaker 2 (01:03:42):
This is supposed to be like a hive mentality, right,
They're all working to support a queen and the colony,
and everything they do is supposed to support that. But
what we get here is essentially a bunch of slash.

Speaker 3 (01:03:58):
I was about to say, it's a slasher movie. There's
just like going from house to house and neighborhood to neighborhood,
but there's no purpose to it. And the other point
I was going to make is we once again get
the fucking alien life span. The life cycle of the
alien sped up or slowed down depending on what the
plot fucking needs. Like these hunters get face huggered and
alien pops out of them and suddenly there's a fucking

(01:04:20):
full grown adult. Like, Okay, was.

Speaker 2 (01:04:23):
There any canon established on the alien life cycle? Because
you're right, they do grow very quickly from a little
chest burster to the full sized alien. But at that
point do they just stay the same size and that's it,
or do they die quicker. What's the lifespan of an alien?
I guess is my question to you.

Speaker 3 (01:04:44):
Oh, I don't know what their eventual lifespan is. I
don't know if they mutate even further. See, this is
all something interesting that a skilled writer could do with
the Xeno Morphs's characters. But my point is that it's
established in the first Alien movie that there's at least
a few days between impregnation of an alien embryo till

(01:05:04):
it's chest bursting, and then a day maybe or two
before we get the full blown warrior or drone, And
here it's like a matter of hours. It's like now
people when they get bitten by a zombie, they turn
into a zombie, as opposed to in the Romero sense
where you die from whatever and then you come back.

(01:05:25):
Here it's just it's like it's a game of tag.

Speaker 2 (01:05:28):
Without knowing that getting back to the story and the
setting and how it could it might have been improved,
my impression without knowing actually what transpired is that it's
as if somebody, like somebody said to themselves, Okay, look,
my uncle has access to all these sets. Let's say

(01:05:49):
my uncle owns a hardware store and someone wants me
to make them a predator movie. So let's write something
that takes place exclusively in a hardware store, and we'll
figure out the story as we go, like and we've
already got a predator suit, right. That's because it felt okay.

(01:06:10):
We have access to these locations in Vancouver or wherever
it was. We don't have a lot of money, but
we know we can shoot at a hospital, a plant,
a power plant, and a diner or something. Let's figure
out a movie based on all these places. We can
shoot these locations and everything else will fall into place.

(01:06:32):
Because I think again, if you came at this instead
of that way of creating a script a screenplay, if
you had started by saying, look, I want to make
a kick ass alien versus Predator movie. How do I
do that. Let's put the budget aside for a minute.
Let's figure this out. We want to start on the
predator homeworld where get to distress signal? He does all,
how do we get from A to B? And then

(01:06:54):
let's make something cool out of that. I got the
sense that they started It's like Johnny Bravo and the
Brady Bunch. Right. He fit the suit. That's why he's
Johnny Bravo. There was no greater plan around it. I
got the sense here they're like, we can shoot at
these locations in Vancouver. Let's figure it out and it'll
make sense eventually. That's my lasting impression of the story

(01:07:15):
of this movie.

Speaker 3 (01:07:16):
Yeah, it's all hastily slap dashed together, both in intent
and in drama that I can't figure this story out
at all. I don't care about any of these characters
the least invest that I've been in any of the
scenarios or any of the characters thus far, including the Aliens.

(01:07:36):
They're just the Xeno more of some some sort of
irritant here more than anything, unless they're being totally fucking disgusting,
which is fine. I don't mind aliens being totally fucking disgusting.
It's just that I want the movie to be better
around it. I can handle a shock moment, I can
handle a revulsion moment. Those are fine, but it has
to be supported by a film and a plot and

(01:07:58):
a point of view and an idea somewhere. This film
had nothing to say at all about anything.

Speaker 2 (01:08:08):
Just it was. It offered cheap thrills. That's all you're
getting with this. This is something that probably would play
pretty well at a drive in if you were of
a certain bent and you just wanted to sit back
and check your mind out and just go all right,
what's gonna happen here? That's fine, and there's a place
for drive in movies, But there's so many corners cut

(01:08:31):
and needless complexity added to what should be a very
straightforward movie of Predator trying to track down these zeno morphs,
humans caught in the crossfire. Let's make something interesting out
of that, And that's not what we got at all.
So really, they're over two in sequels here in Alien.
I'm sorry, they're oh for two in Alien Predator crossovers. Unfortunately.

Speaker 3 (01:08:53):
Yeah, our only hope is Trackton Berg because he's laying
the whaling utany Predator groundwork with Thenandroid with the bad Lands.
But anyway, we'll get to that eventually. I know, we
keep hinting at it as if we have any knowledge,
but we don't. But we're just hope we got hope.
That's what we got. Baby.

Speaker 2 (01:09:07):
It's very difficult to talk about these movies and not
try to bring up the dawn of a new era
and creditor filmmaking, because again, We've already said it in
the last few movies we've talked about, but Tracktenburg is
he's doing so much right, and having going through the

(01:09:28):
exercise of seeing these earlier missteps makes me appreciate these
later movies all the more. Really, this guy figured out
the formula. He figured out how to build a better
mouse trap, so good on him.

Speaker 3 (01:09:41):
He does represent a dawn. It can't get any darker
than this. Quite literally, this is the darkest movie I've
ever seen. You'll be wondering what just happened quite frequently.

Speaker 2 (01:09:51):
I did, I know, I did. Like I said, I
thought the pred alien was killed much earlier in the movie.
I was really surprised to see him pop up later
because I thought he was already.

Speaker 3 (01:09:59):
Dead and in the end with a nuclear warhead following.
What did any of it matter?

Speaker 2 (01:10:06):
I don't know. I guess I'll have to see in
the next movie if they even relate back to this
one at all. I suspect they didn't, because I don't
think this was a very successful movie.

Speaker 3 (01:10:15):
I'm just guessing this movie made like one hundred and
thirty million dollars based on a forty million dollar budget.
I'd say it did pretty good. Actually, it's not good
enough to dissuade them from accepting Ridley Scott's offer to
come back to the franchise. Thus no AVP three, which
I'm sure somebody somewhere was really hoping for. Anyway, that
next movie you're talking about, tune back here to Yahoucha

(01:10:38):
Fest in two weeks if you're on the regular fee.
Otherwise you probably listened to this anyway. If you're on
the Patriot anyway, that movie is Predators, from the mind
of Robert Rodriguez. Back in ninety three ninety four, they
asked him to write a sequel to Predator. He wrote
Predators then, years and years later, this is the movie
we're going to get Until then, HP, Where can people

(01:10:59):
find you if they look for you?

Speaker 2 (01:11:00):
I co host The Night Mister Walters, a taxi podcast
with you Follow them Alone, of course, so please check
that out. I'm an occasional guest on The Culture Cast
with Chris Dashu. I host another podcast called The Noise Junkies.
It's a music podcast. And last but not I have
a band camp site Hpmusicplace dot bandcamp dot com.

Speaker 3 (01:11:22):
As for me midnight viewing, you're here Follow them Alone
weekly round up on Mondays. We got a fest on
a Friday or I don't know, Tayns some the dark
Side or something. Thank you all for joining us here.
We really appreciate your continued patronage, and I mean that
even if you're listen for free, all right, please we

(01:11:45):
can kill it.

Speaker 2 (01:12:00):
Waking the job of.

Speaker 3 (01:12:09):
What n hell are you h

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Yautja Fest - Aliens vs Predator: Requiem (2007)

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Yautja Fest - Aliens vs Predator: Requiem (2007)