After an unidentified craft crashes in the middle of the jungle, a group of soldiers must venture into the unknown to save their recon team and discover what truly has landed in front of them.
The Asylum is up to its usual tricks again – taking an established property and cashing in on it with a low budget easily-made botch job. Sometimes their efforts are admirable; however, in the case of Alien Predator, that is definitely not the case.
From the get go, audiences get a taste of what’s to come. The opening sequence is overlit, uninspiring and hard to follow at times due to the poor camerawork. That continues on as most of the dialogue throughout the film is inaudible because of either the overbearing score (which sounds a lot like generic royalty-free music you can find on YouTube) or the fact that most of the lines are mumbled by the “characters”. Speaking of the characters, you can bet your bottom dollar that every single military action movie stereotype is accounted for in Alien Predator – from the cigar wielding commanding officer to the geeky tech guy who is responsible for spewing all the technobabble in an attempt to give the film legitimacy (although we’ll give a huge shout out to the tech expert’s modified Game Boy Color that he carries around).
One of the major problems with Alien Predator, aside from the technical aspects, is the fact that the titular character(s) don’t appear on screen until 53 minutes into the film’s 87 minute runtime. Before the extraterrestrials show their faces, we are given scene after scene of the soldiers ‘playing guns’ as they traverse the jungle to find the crashed ship. Every inch of the film lacks any suspense or dread, or even any ounce of entertainment (bar the moment when the aliens finally decided to show up).
Ultimately, Alien Predator is messy, uninteresting, and at its core, boring. The camerawork will give more people motion sickness than the likes of Cloverfield or Blair Witch, and its lack of entertaining set pieces will have you looking at your watch begging for it to be finally over.
ALIEN PREDATOR / CERT: UNRATED / DIRECTOR: JARED COHN / SCREENPLAY: BILL HANSTOCK / STARRING: XAVI ISRAEL, DUTCH HOFSTETTER, ALEX WEST / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
