I have been resisting the urge to write mini-reviews, instead entertaining the idea of one day writing reviews of every DVD movie in my collection and possibly in the collections of friends and family, but Fox has cumulatively annoyed me out of my procrastination with the DVD release of “AVP: Alien vs. Predator”.
You might think that forcing advertising on viewers by disabling the disc menu button during automatically-played pre-menu advertising on a DVD that sells for the standard new DVD price (read: paid for with money, not a pledge to watch advertising every single fucking time you spin it even if you already have the movies that are being advertised) would result in plenty of money for Fox and thus, a high-quality production in anticipation of the revenue from the immediate sale of copies of AVP and from future sales of the advertised movies and you might be right . . . about the revenue . . . but not about high-quality production because the AVP DVD looks like it was thrown together under the direction of sleazy marketing people who don’t know the first thing about producing a high-quality DVD.
AVP is plagued by a distracting amount of artifacts in dark scenes while its special features include still images of comic book covers that are obviously out of order—obvious not just to movie or comic book fans, but to anyone possessing the ability to read—while the “INSIDE LOOK” touted on the main menu merely played two more trailers for Fox movies with the closest thing to an inside look at anything being scenes that happened to take place inside of buildings. The ‘”MAKING-OF” FEATURETTE’ listed on both the case and its slip-cover does not appear to be on the DVD.
The movie itself was okay, but the AVP DVD’s low production values and annoying advertising make me glad that somebody else paid for it.
UPDATE (2005-03-04): Upon reinserting the DVD, I discovered that our DVD player’s “TRACK +” button enables us to skip the pre-menu advertising rather than fast-forwarding through it; perhaps the sleazy fucker at Fox who decreed that the disc menu button should be disabled was unaware of the existence of track buttons or at least unable to disable them. Either way, a different main menu than before then appeared—with the options on a predator arm device rather than as slanted text in the sacrificial chamber—but the options all appeared to be the same as on the other main menu, the “INSIDE LOOK” option still just played two movie trailers, and the special features menu appeared to be the same as before.
(Note: The backward quotation mark in the third paragraph of this mini-review—the one that curls left when it should curl right—is the fault of the system WordPress uses to replace straight quotation marks with curly quotation marks. I will probably look into it a bit more—or at least report it to the developers—after I have had a chance to see how many of the things I disliked about WordPress 1.2.1 still exist in version 1.5.)