(The famous “Whoever wins…we lose”)

I went to watch AVP:R with George a couple of days ago. Promised him that I won’t watch the film before him (I did actually, in Japan. Shhh, keep it low).

Started with a big splash and ended with a big bang. It was like watching Alien, Aliens, Alien3, Alien Resurrection and Predator all together in one compilation. I am an Alien fan and immediately I discovered there were so many references from the old Aliens/ Predator movies. I felt the director or writer was really desperate and low on ideas and indirectly plagiarised the previous scripts. Acting was stiff, very little exploration of characters (hey, humans are here to die anyways) and the only part I like is the Predator (note the singular) gets more aliens whacking screen time than the prequel. Let’s not forget one of the cliches: the unnecessary motion sensor signals that they try really hard to slot into this movie too.

Prior to the screening, we had a short run of The House of the Dead 4 at the arcade arena and the machine ate my $2. We asked one of the nearby attendant to dig out the coin and guess what, there was about $5-6 bucks stuck in the machine. Presumely he thought those coins were ours, he pushed some override buttons and gave us 6 credits on the game. Lucky us. House of the Dead 4 was slightly different from the others. Reloading and pushing away approaching zombies is by shaking your arcade gun hard. That game session rewarded me a blister on my finger. Apart from that, killing zombies and clearing the stage is relatively easy but defeating a boss is, um, credit costing. We lost after the second boss but heck, it’s five free continues for a price of one.