It's Christmas Day and no one has anything better to do after opening Christmas presents than to go to the theater. In my small town that is all everyone did. The theater was jam packed and I was stuck between a little old lady and a young couple. That should give you a good idea of how broad of an audience I really sat through this film with. It literally felt like it was summer time again and I was strapping myself in for a popcorn summer film and that is exactly what I got.

I'm no super big fan of the Alien and Predator franchise. I thought  the first AVP was a little ridiculous and had a lot of unneeded shaky cam which went a little overboard during the fight scenes. Before that I never really got into the Alien films and I have only seen the first Predator once maybe twice and it never made a huge impact on me. Now oddly I really enjoyed Predator 2 because it took him to the inner city where he had an urban playground. Luckily this one gives us a little of both. Some forest action and  a little bit of the big explosions in the city.

Now the plot for this film is not really important but I will give you something to get an idea of what they were going for. Basically this film picks up right where AVP left off with the Predalien baby hatching on board the Predator space ship. The hatchling causes enough havoc that the ship loses track of where it is going and crashes into a small town. Once there the predalien becomes full grown and some of the facehuggers that were being kept captive are set free to begin infecting hunters in the woods. A Predator on their home planet recognizes this mess and decides to head to Earth to clean up the mess.

Soon a rag tag clan of some of the most cliche characters in town are assembled to figure out what they most do to save the town. Soon they find themselves being torn apart about what to do. As time goes on their party dwindles. Who makes it out alive and who does the dumb ass shit to get themselves killed? Do we even care?

The characters in the town are so god damned cliche you would be throwing popcorn at the screen if this was any other movie. But for some reason in this film we know we are gonna be in for some bad ass kills after one man is actually skinned alive! Yes! Nobody is safe from the wrath of these bad ass mofo's. Seriously though this is gonna be one great unrated flick on DVD when it hits. You can expect a lot of blood, gore and tons of Alien goo.

Something I should point out and what I am sure some of you will be wanting to know is how do all the Aliens, Predators and Predaliens look? Well they look pretty damn good. The Strause Brothers were smart in this area and stuck with mostly prosthetic creatures which absolutely pleased me. Of course there has to be some CGI work to get them to move as fast as they do but for the most part everything is very effective. They also managed to make the fight scenes so that we knew what the hell we were watching unlike AVP.

I'm gonna say that at the end of the day this movie is gonna probably get slammed by most "serious" critics because they can't just sit back and eat the popcorn. They need solid characters they can connect with. This movie definitely does not have that but it does have some of the coolest death scenes I've ever seen in an Alien or Predator movie. Head down to your local theater, buy some popcorn and let the Alien goo fly.

- Luke Franklin