It’s the classic juvenile debate. In a fight, who would win: 100 ninjas or 100 WWF smackdown champions? In a fight, who would win: Freddy or Jason? In a fight, who would win: two turtledoves or a partridge in a pear tree? Just as long as the filmmakers leave room for a sequel it doesn’t much matter (and yes, Alien Vs. Predator leaves the door open–wide open–for AVP2).

To date there have been four Alien movies and two Predator movies so right there you have some sense of our mortal kombatants (sic.) respective popularity.

That staple of a “rag tag bunch of space derelicts” movies Lance Henriksen (Aliens, Alien³, Alien 49 ⅞) is featured as asthmatic Money magazine cover model Charles Bishop Weyland of Weyland Industries. As the film opens, he’s assembling a crack team of drillers and riggers for a secret mission to the wilds of Antarctica on the icebreaker Piper Perabo led by tough cookie cutter Alexa Woods (Out of Time’s Sanaa Lathan) after Weyland’s trans-global researchers discover a huge pyramid buried some 2,000 feet beneath an abandoned whaling station. The pyramid looks part Aztec, part Cambodian, and part Egyptian. The question is, who built it and why? (Nobody, not even Trainspotting’s Ewen Bremner, seems to notice those rather obvious Alien vs. Predator hieroglyphs cut into the stone.)

Others, it would seem, are also interested in the pyramid. Predatory, outer space others with dreadlocks, cloaking devices, and hand-operated Cuisinarts.

Directed by the chiefly Brit Paul W.S. Anderson (not to be confused with Punch-Drunk Love’s P.T. Anderson) with the same kind of mechanized murk he brought to the likes of Event Horizon and Soldier (with Kurt Russell), Alien Vs. Predator is a superfluous if not entirely boring romp, littered with inanities and inaccuracies and logic loopholes you could drive a Hummer 2 through (if, indeed, people drove through holes). It’s all rather grimy and silly and low-lit and once the pyramid starts closing up every ten minutes, not unlike the Rubic’s cubist house in Thir13en Ghosts, all hell (and reasoning) breaks loose even further.

Sure Alien Vs. Predator is junk, but it’s mindless junk, and I didn’t hate it nearly as much as I ought to have, thought I would, and/or everyone else. I still find H.R. Giger’s alien a rather fascinating creation and it’s all here in its gelatinous, gooey glory–facehuggers, chestbursters, and the big momma queen herself (to which, it would seem to be a series requirement, at least one person calls an ugly S.O.B.). The Predator doesn’t do much for me though: just a guy in an invisible suit. And when it teams up with a Ripley-esque Woods in the final showdown, well… that’s just plain ridiculous.

Face it. Alien Vs. Predator isn’t a film, it’s a marketing ploy, a promotional abbreviation that reiterates the same exact thinking as when Universal first paired Frankenstein with the Wolfman some 60 years ago. Kids love movie monsters–the film is rated PG-13–so why not put their two favorites together in the one film?