Monster mash

Freddy Krueger has battled Jason, Frankenstein has met the Wolf Man and today Predator starts another dust-up with the Aliens. Donald Clarkelooks at the chaos that ensues when characters from different films meet.

TAKE a careful look at Stephen Hopkins's underrated Predator 2 and, in one corner of the bellicose humanoid's vessel, you will spot the lifeless head of a member of the toothy species that spawned the Alien franchise. In 1989, a year before Predator 2 hit cinemas, the reliably imaginative Dark Horse Comics published a story entitled, yes, Alien vs Predator.

But the sly reference in Hopkins's flick - suggesting that the Predator hunts the so-called Xenomorphs for sport - is generally perceived to have inspired the inevitable release of an Alien vs Predator movie in 2004. You could, therefore, regard this week's Aliens vs Predator: Requiem as a sequel to a spin-off from two earlier sequels.

But hang on. The first film (that's to say the first film in the crossover franchise) did not place an "s" after its Alien, so the new picture is, rather, a sequel to a spin-off from a sequel and an original film that now brings in influences from the sequel to that original film.

Erm? If the pellet with the poison's in the vessel with the pestle does the chalice from the palace have the brew that is true?

Such confusion inevitably results from a collision of franchises. The creation of any fiction, whether it be high- or low-brow, requires the invention of a new universe with its own rules. This applies to even the most austere exercises in realism and the blandest of potboilers. The London through which, say, Brenda Blethyn moves in a Mike Leigh film may look like the real city, but her character will never walk past a DVD retailer displaying a poster for one of Brenda's other films. Nobody in The Da Vinci Code seems to have read The Da Vinci Code.

The alternative universes that contain fantastic adventures are, of course, considerably more radically re-imagined than those in kitchen-sink dramas or conspiracy romps. As a result, the bringing together of those cosmoses can, sometimes, lead to contradictions and confusions of quite mind-bending proportions.

"But if Zelkos the Magnificent is all powerful in Rizla Warriors of Bumring, then how come the giant slug rules the universe in Rizla Warriors versus the Mollusc People?," Gollum1096 might write on the internet.

Such problems are lessened when the combining franchises emerge from the same creative engine and, before their amalgamation, already inhabit similar worlds. In 1942, Universal Pictures, whose classic horror films had torn the box-office apart over the previous decade, came up with the inspired notion of bringing two of their monsters together. The Wolf Man (1941) may have been set in Wales and Frankenstein (1931) may have taken place in Germany, but both pictures really inhabited a fantastic Transylvanian Nowhere dreamed up by European exiles in Universal's art department.

Viewers of Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man may have complained that, though the film featured the Frankenstein Monster, it conspicuously failed to deliver on its title and resurrect Frankenstein himself. They may also have pointed out that Lon Chaney Jr, the Monster in the preceding Ghost of Frankenstein, now appeared opposite Victor's creation as the tubby werewolf.

But Universal's horror cosmos was so consistent that few found the amalgamation of franchises particularly jarring. Indeed, the product was regarded as sufficiently successful for Universal to invite Dracula to join the other two monsters in the succeeding House of Frankenstein and House of Dracula.

In the decades that followed, a promiscuous free-for-all developed in which, copyrights allowing, anything that had fangs could find itself in the ring with anything large, carnivorous or vampiric. Jesse James met Frankenstein's Daughter. Abbot and Costello met Frankenstein. Billy the Kid went up against Dracula. And Godzilla was pitted against everything from King Kong to Bambi.

These pictures tended, however, to be low-budget affairs from (very) independent studios. The major studios have, over the past few years, been cautious about diluting their franchises by exposing them to each other. It took, for example, 20 years for Freddy Krueger finally to get his claws into Friday the 13th's Jason Voorhees in 2003's Freddy vs. Jason.

Meanwhile, in the comic universes of Marvel, DC and their rivals, the crossover has become commonplace. The Hulk happily bounces from his own book into The Fantastic Four and onwards towards Spider-Man. Alan Moore, long addicted to the post-modern character mesh, brought the Invisible Man, Allan Quartermain, Captain Nemo and others together for his mighty The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comic (ignore the terrible film).

In fiction, Kim Newman, supreme critic and latterday dandy, went further and dragged everyone from Biggles to Jack the Ripper into the peerless series of novels that began with Anno Dracula.

So, why are studios still so cautious about combining their own franchises? Well, it can't be denied that bringing two heroes or villains together implies that neither retains the appeal to stand alone. Ridley Scott, director of the first Alien, recently announced, with apparent regret, that Alien vs Predator had killed any hopes an Alien 5 stone dead. The story had, he implied, been hi-jacked by the amalgamators.

Yet it need not be so. In the world of comics and television, fans make a clear distinction between those works that are "canonical" and those that aren't. For example, the late Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek, once declared that the animated series, made in the mid-1970s, was non-canonical and, though Trekkers were permitted to enjoy it, they should not regard those adventures as part of the official Trek universe.

Relax Sir Ridley. Get you to your blog, declare Alien vs Predator outside the canon, and drag Ripley out of retirement. The cinema can accommodate any number of parallel universes.