Surprisingly good!!

Rating: 6/10 (29 October 2012)

AVP: Alien Vs. Predator Surprisingly Good! 3/4 stars
Never had any interest in seeing this upon it's initial theatrical release as i had already saw another monster vs monster movie and thought it sucked...Freddy Vs. Jason so with that god awful movie in mind i had little and no interest in seeing yet another of my two favourite film franchises once again merge and do battle. Bored out of my mind last night flicking through the channels on my satellite i started watching the cut up movie that AMC had to offer on their Kevin Smith hosted Fear Fest (for those that do not know about what this is ...AMC usually air nothing but horror films on the weeks surrounding Halloween) Anyhoo...saw that a Predator marathon of sorts was showing along with Predator 1-2 AVP was on next so i'm it's not like i was doing anything anyhow...sigh...might as well have a look. Well i was surprised none the less on how quickly i got gripped by this movie (it helped a lot that Lance Henriksen co-starred) Although straying from both of the stories that these monsters who were yet to do battle originally came from in their individual franchises, what we get is a pretty impressive new storyline that has the Predators using an anciently buried pyramid in Antartica underneath the ice shelves. It seems many many years ago the Predators, who all the fans like myself know are hunters used to flock to this ancient site to do battle with the aliens that were grown there and those that did were considered amongst themselves to be the ultimate in warriors.
Now after the pyramid was once again re-discovered as a heat blip on a map by a team of researchers who decide to start an expedition and set up camp to start drilling only once arriving to the mapped out site find that someone/thing has already made a massive tunnel down to the pyramid itself, a hole that ceased to exist not 24 hrs ago according to their maps and calculations. Of coarse our band of scientists have to scale down the already made opening and once touching down at the pyramid itself quickly find out that they are not alone down there.
Great battle sequences between the two. I also found director Paul Anderson's vision of what the Predators uniform and battle helmets looked like as a much needed change form the equipment used in both Predator 1-2. Also we get to learn more and see the crab like creatures that pop out of the eggs that the queen lays, you know the ones that attach themselves to whatever crew member they find, faces and where something slides down the unwilling person's mouth laying an egg in it's stomach that grows quite rapidly, then comes crashing out of it's chosen human's chest? Well we see more of that creature's parts as well. Being a fan of both of these franchises like i had previously said...this was needless to say a cool side piece to have along with them. I enjoyed it and am going to now watch AVP Requiem as i have not seen that either.