Monster Bash
‘Alien vs. Predator’ provides monstrous genre fun

IMAGINE AN INTERGALACTIC WWE showdown to the death. In one corner, it’s those nasty, acid-dripping aliens with penis-shaped heads and lethal tails that can rip an opponent’s insides to shreds. In the other corner are the prey-hunting predators, seven-foot tall beasts who wear suits that render them invisible, armed with laser-sighted weapons and carrying a sophisticated spear that looks especially deadly with an alien head skewered on it like a hotdog at a wiener roast.
All that’s missing are the helpless humans caught in the middle — oh yes, homo sapiens are in the house, acting as alien embryo hosts to get the smackdown started.
Alien vs. Predator delivers all the mindless genre thrills you’d expect from a movie with such a title. Beyond the monsters, the only human connection to the excellent horror/sci-fi flicks that spawned this silly pseudo sequel is Lance Henriksen as billionaire Charles Bishop Weyland. Henriksen played the android Bishop in Aliens, allowing us to assume that Weyland’s progeny in the future will be at the forefront of android engineering.
How do the monsters hook up in this mortal combat from the director of Mortal Kombat, Paul W.S. Anderson? One of Weyland’s satellites spots a heat source 2,000 feet below the surface of Antarctica. It turns out to be a pyramid. The team of scientific experts and guides assembled by Weyland to investigate the discovery include the fetching Sanaa Lathan as the guide, with Raoul Bova as the pyramid expert and Ewen Bremner as the geologist. The pyramid expert explains that the structure features Egyptian, Aztec and Cambodian influences. The geology expert says it’s really, really old, providing a chariot-of-the-gods slant. An alien culture came to earth and built this structure, perhaps influencing three earth cultures in the process.
All the scientific speculation goes out the window, of course, when the predators arrive and the purpose of the pyramid becomes clear. The predators are having another hunt on earth, but this time, instead of depending on puny humans as the prey, they stock their own private game preserve with an alien queen. When she starts laying eggs, all that’s needed are hosts for the incubation of the little chest bursters. Now we understand why the humans have been invited to the party.
One human will survive the preliminaries and prove to be an ally to the predators. The fact that this human appears to now be immune to the cold of an Antarctic winter is a little glitch in the plot. An adrenaline rush can only go so far, after all, but anyone looking for logic in a movie titled Alien vs. Predator should have his or her head examined.
I chilled out, and now count AVP as a guilty pleasure.