8. Alien vs. Predator (2004)

AvP isn’t a cinematic masterpiece. It’s fan service pretending to be a movie and designed solely to give fans what they had wanted for years: A live-action fight between Xenos and Yautja, something we had only previously seen in comic books and video games. And the movie does that. The fights between the Aliens and Predators are great and feel ripped out of some silly comic book from the ‘90s.

However, AvP is quietly a really solid, well-paced, and fun sci-fi action film, too. That’s the secret to why so many people give this film a pass. Though its sequel, as mentioned, was a hard-to-watch, overly gory, and canon-destroying mess of a movie that nobody should suffer through.

But AvP is a mostly self-contained adventure that ends up doing something impressive, considering this is more fan service than a movie. By the end of AvP, I was actually invested in a friendship between a large lizard alien with dreads who doesn’t talk and a human woman using parts of a Xenomorph as weapons. Huh? Weird! Yeah, it’s not nearly as good as even the “bad” Alien sequels, but it’s a tad bit better than you might expect. Which is a big improvement over Requiem. — Zack Zwiezen