30 Day Horror Challenge: Day 24

I'm not the biggest fan of director's cuts, but most find a good balance between annoying and helpful. Usually restraint is a good thing for film. The scariest moments tend to be the ones that are left to the imagination. A director's cut usually is either a cash grab by a studio or in some rare cases, it can be used to effectively right a previous wrong. There are some infamous examples of tampering by studios. The most notorious examples are not in the horror genre and have been rectified with new cuts. That's not to say that horror films get glossed over. Friday the 13th films have been known by fans to have a lot left on the cutting room floor. Halloween 6 has a bootleg "Producer's Cut" which saves the movie from itself. Horror films do get the unrated treatment, but those only add alternate scenes or seconds of cut film, here and there. I'm still waiting for Paramount to properly raid their archives and give Jason fans a true unedited cut of each film instead of the teases that pass for Special Editions.

Horror film in which you prefer the edited version over the director’s cut.

Alien Vs. Predator (2004)

I'll start by saying that I'm not a fan of this film. I thought it was poorly executed and the buildup since Predator 2 made almost anything released with this title a sure fire miss. I dislike the director's cut even more.

I figured that the PG-13 rating was the reason that I didn't care for the movie. When the director's cut was announced, I figured that everything that was cut to get the movie a lower rating would be inserted and it would really flesh out the story. I was wrong.

What was put in? Added dialogue and character development scenes. This made the movie longer, but didn't help the story at all. All of it would have made it into a PG-13 film. There was really nothing to see here. What pushed it past a PG-13 rating? Blood.

To be specific, CGI blood. To be crystal clear, the worst CGI blood that I have ever seen. It appears as blurry stains on t-shirts. It appears on knives in such a way that the blood looks like it was on a plastic sheet in front of the knife. It drenches objects in an unconvincing way. It appears as if an editor's five year old found the day-glo red paint and a jar of petroleum jelly and went to town on the master print.