MOVIE BUZZ: AvP:R

AvP:R? Sounds like a cool new sports coupe. Nope, we're talking about the latest installment of two held-together-with-duct-tape film franchises: Alien and Predator.

Let's look back on our film history and see how Alien (Director Ridley Scott's iconic space-nightmare) and Predator (John McTiernan's not-terrible flick about an invisible alien hunter) culminated in the cinematic clusterf**k that is AvP:R

First we had Alien (1979), one of the best science-fiction/horror films ever made. It established Sigourney Weaver as a leading lady as well as showed us that murderous androids can be scary sons of bitches.

Then we had Aliens (1986), a brilliantly written sequel containing one of Paul Reiser's only great appearances on film, starring as an evil Weyland-Utani space corporation exec. Sigourney returned to the series as one awesomely tough bitch.

Then Ahnold starred in Predator (1987), battling a cloaked extraterrestrial in the darkness of the jungle. It established the Predator as a pussy of a sore loser, blowing himself up instead of accepting his defeat at the hands of a mere human (though I'm not sure we can call the former Mr. Olympia, Mr. Universe, and current governor of California a mere human.)

Then Danny Glover tried his hand at the beast in Predator 2 (1990). Not only did he have better luck in defeating him, but he also got a little bit of our invisible assailant's story here on earth. Reprising his role as the guy who flips out and gets killed was Bill Paxton, who might as well have yelled: "Game over man, Sarge is dead" upon being gutted.

But Sigourney wasn't done with those nasty, acid-bleeding Giger-esque aliens. In Alien 3 (1992) she took her own life, preventing her from giving birth to the Alien Queen embryo that had been growing inside her.

Somewhere along the way, video game designers decided that it wasn't enough to have separate video games about Alien and Predator, so they decided to pit them against each other in Alien vs. Predator (1993, Genesis/SNES). They also pit Robocop against the Terminator, another annoying mash-up that thankfully never hit the big screen.

Speaking of the big screen, we return four years later when the talented writer Joss Whedon (Firefly, Toy Story co-writer) brought the series back in Alien: Ressurection (1997) where Sigourney's character is cloned by those greedy Weyland-Utani folks in order to grow another queen and harvest the eggs of the most deadly weapon in the known universe. Oh yeah, Winona came along for this one, too.

For a while after that, our favorite extraterrestrials took a break, letting the aliens from Independence Day, The Arrival, Species, and Supernova have their proverbial days in the sun.

Seven years later, a bunch of coked up film executives thought that maybe a twelve-year-old video game might make a good premise for a movie. Following the gold-paved road that blockbuster movies like Super Mario Bros., Street Fighter, House of the Dead, and DOOM helped build, Alien vs. Predator (2004)--or as fans affectionately called it: AvP--continued the story of both series all while ignoring the fact that both Alien and Predator had once been respectable franchises. The only saving grace we got was that Lance Henriksen (Aliens, Alien 3) reappeared as Charles Bishop Weyland, the original creator of the BISHOP android.

Add more three years, replace the coke binge with a crack binge, and we have AvP:R (2007). The full title is "Aliens vs. Predator: REQUIEM", and the premise looks as awful as that of its predecessor: pit two E.T. nasties against each other and let the action flow! Featuring the talented Raoul Bova, Sanaa Lathan, and...what's that? You've never heard of them? Never mind. Like its predecessor, the only thing that might redeem this movie is Mr. Henriksen, appearing again as Bishop.

The question is, with the titles going the way they are, what's next? Alien 3 vs. Predator 2: Missa pro defunctis? Maybe they can just slide it by whatever fans they have left by calling it: A3vP2:Mpd. After all, a generation full of STP, DMB and MCR fans can't get enough of those wonderful acronyms.