Review: Aliens vs. Predator – Requiem

Welcome to Make It Yourself!, the super-fun rainy-day activity guide. This week, we’ll be showing you how to make Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem. You will need: a blender; cellulose tape; VHS copies of the original Alien and Predator movies.

Using a screwdriver (get an adult to help), take apart the cassettes. Unthread the tape, and place it in the blender. Activate the blender so that the tape becomes a mess of variously-sized bits of movie, and stick them back together using the cellulose tape. Doesn’t matter what goes where!

Give your movie a name! You can go with Requiem if you like, but as this word has absolutely zero relevance to the goings-on in the picture, any word in the English language will do equally well.

Thread the reassembled melange of scenes, shots and sounds back onto a videocassette. Placing the cassette in your VCR machine, enjoy your handiwork. Play some CDs of the soundtracks from the original movies in the background as you watch.

If your cutting-and-pasting isn’t perfect, you may find the picture somewhat jarring, the edits incomprehensible, the screen sometimes filled with ugly, nauseating noise. We in the film business refer to this as stylishness.

You may also notice that some scenes, while pretty much shot-for-shot as they appeared in the original movies, now make no sense out of context, and appear to have been placed within the movie solely to remind you of what it’s like to watch an Alien or Predator movie. This dull, soulless sense that your nostalgia is being cynically preyed on – together with an ugly awareness that the only real innovation in your new Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem movie is that some torture-porn has slipped into the mix – is a sensation commonly referred to by psychiatrists as “living in the 21st century”.