31 Days of Horror Reviews Day 15: Alien Resurrection

Day 15: Alien Resurrection (1997), dir. Jean-Pierre Jeunet

Streaming Availability: Hulu

"There's a monster in your chest. These guys hijacked your ship, and they sold your Cryo Tube to this... human. And he put an alien inside of you. It's a really nasty one. And in a few hours it's gonna burst through your ribcage, and you're gonna die. Any questions?"

So yeah... they brought Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) back... Somehow. This does not make sense. 

Much like Alien³, you have to accept this or there is no movie. Way in the future, in an increasingly unclear timeline, the US military decides to continue Weyland-Yutani's experiments with xenomorphs. (Weyland-Yutani we're told has been "bought out by Walmart".) In order to get the Queen inside Ripley, the military had to clone them both - somehow or another rescuing genetic material out of the vat of 10,000 degrees Farhenheit lava that Ripley swam in at the end of Alien³. So right before the fourth movie even begins, everything Ripley has worked towards has failed, a whole new crew of bozos have xenomorphs and even dumber about their illusions of control than the guys who built Jurassic Park. Also, Ripley herself has become a superhero, with her reborn body is mentally and genetically merged with the xenomorph DNA.

Alien Resurrection is not the most serious movie ever made, you might be able to tell. Every one of these Alien movies have been wild and unique spins on the material: Aliens goes for heroics, Alien³ goes for a kind of desperate hope during intense bleakness. Meanwhile, Alien Resurrection decides to be just goofy as all fuck. Jean-Pierre Jeunet is not Ridley Scott, he is not clinical or subtle, he goes for big-ness. Resurrection is shot in English with an all-American cast but it has all the wacky French stylings of a Citroën 2CV. It even has a similarly color pallet to Jeunet's post-apocalypse slapstick movie, Delicatessen.

At one point the military commander, hilariously played by Dan Hedaya, tosses a grenade into an escape pod that has been taken over by xenomorphs. And when I say tosses: he bowls it like he's trying to beat a 7-10 split. Then he takes a moment to give a somber salute to his lost men, just as another alien gets him from behind. We cut to Hedaya's eyes-crossing as he holds up a bit of his skull. All this sequence needed was some Hanna-Barbara sound effects.

Alien³ is a movie that has won back its place in film history over the years. Alien Resurrection is not. Screenwriter Joss Whedon has disowned the thing, which was a more powerful dismissmal a few years ago. In 2024, Whedon is the epitome of cheese, with his dialog Exhibit A for the cringiest aspects of the MCU. (Probably an over-correction, my called-shot is that his work will rebound eventually, even if Whedon himself is not a good person.) Jeunet fired back in 2022: "I know if Joss Whedon had made the film himself, it probably would have been a big success. He’s very good at making films for American geeks – something for morons. Because he’s very good at making Marvel films. I hate this kind of movie. It’s so silly, so stupid." He also told his negative critics "fuck you", and god bless him. Every director has that right. Jeunet made the movie he wanted to make, and it is silly in a way the Avengers movies are just not. 20th Century Fox never made a true "Alien 5" because nobody could come up with an idea to get Sigourney Weaver interested again. So maybe there is something to Resurrection.

In terms of raw plot and events, Resurrection is the most "safe" Alien sequel. We again have a cast of wonderful character actors trapped in that same future landscape of dark metal corridors and spooky lighting. If Alien is about anything, it is getting some Choice Guys to fill out the body count, be them Bill Paxton or Pete Postlethwaite. Resurrections continues the tradition with Ron Perlman, Brad Dourif, Leland Orser, Michael Wincott, and more. Most of the cast is an expendable band of mercenaries delivering victims to the military to grow twelve xenomorphs within. Call (Winona Ryder) stands alone on the team as the one actually trying to take the military down, but her plan is interrupted when the xenomorphs predictably get out. That leaves the scumbags, a surviving soldier, a surviving mad scientist, a rebel, and Ripley to team up into a dwindling party to get back to the merc ship, The Betty. 

We have a full Poseidon Adventure swimming scene, where the xenomorphs get to be killer sharks. This is the most this franchise feels to be exactly in line with the millions of SciFi Channel creature features it inspired. It's Pythons II with a good budget. Or Deep Rising with a worse script but better effects. Which is fine, you just need to know what kind of genre movie you're watching. Leland Orser screaming his face off adds a lot of production value that say, Lake Placid 3, was never going to have.

Four movies in, the aesthetic surprisingly has not grown stale. That's one of the great things about the first four Alien movies. Yes, dark metal corridors are to this franchise what Crystal Lake is to Friday the 13th, but unlike those movies, you can actually tell them apart. Show me the yellow-green ultra-slick Nineties shine to the dark metal corridors in Resurrection, and I can clearly see how it does not match the colder, slightly dusty texture of the dark metal corridors in Aliens.

Alien Resurrection has two big cards to play. The first is Ripley herself. Sigourney Weaver is playing the role completely differently now, she's become the sexually-dominant mature woman hamming up every scene. She can flirt-fight with Ron Perlman on a basketball court (being six-feet-tall helps Weaver a lot here), and slither around to remind the cast how dead they soon will be. Her relationship with Call might have been written as a replay of Ripley and Newt, but comes off much more like a lesbian dom-sub. Ripley is a wicked witch here to chew on the good little princess. Later we discover that Call is a robot after she survives a bullet wound through her chest - oh boy does Ripley ever jam two fingers down that hole. (That orifice will get fingered again in the movie, btw.)

The other card Resurrection has is just being gross and weird as shit. There are choices made. Brad Dourif tries to make out with a xenomorph, kissing the glass outside its pen when nobody is looking. I'm obsessed with the frozen cube of future whiskey that the commander drinks. We see seven failed Ripley copies all in various stages of fusion with the xenomorphs. The most human one is begging for death, and Resurrection relishes all the gruesome detail of these failed things. 

Then there's the other big queer theme of this movie: Ripley and the xenomorph queen have a baby together. It's single-gender procreation, the future truly has everything. Brad Dourif sunken in a cocoon seems to have been kept alive so he could be a creepy pervert as he gives us exposition for us to explain what is happening. The queen has human DNA just as Ripley has alien DNA, and she's built a human womb. And then she painfully births a full alien-hybrid baby for Ripley.

This is where I cannot agree with any of the criticisms of Alien Resurrection. Never dismiss this merely a bad sequel dragging this franchise's corpse into an unnecessary extra outing. (Wait for Romulus for that.) The ending this to movie is unforgettable. The Newborn is a nasty, awful thing, not sleek and beautiful like the xenomorph designs have been until now. It's gloopy, it's sticky, it's unpleasant. It has a very expressive face looks that looks disturbingly like Sigourney Weaver without a nose. It also looks to Ripley as its mother. Jeunet wanted this thing to have male and female genitialia but in the end compromised and so it only has a jagged slit between its legs. Yeah, much more tasteful! This is another masterpiece of puppeteering and practical effects. The end for this creature is heartbreaking, as its face gives so much fear and betrayal once Ripley shoots it out the airlock. All the previous airlock endings have been easy mode, the Newborn gets the worst possible ending for explosive decompression. This is as disturbing as the psycho-sexual imagery ever gets in any Alien movie. You'll never forget the creature's awful painful, much too slow death.

Bravo, filmmakers, you made something really special with this kind of body horror. I'm still freaked out now.

Maybe Alien Resurrection should be the true ending for this franchise. We drop Ripley off on Earth, finally home after four movies, several centuries, and one reincarnation. She's lost yet another daughter-figure but found a partner of sorts in Call. We cut away just as the Betty's doors open and the golden sunlight pours in leaving Ripley finally at home. There probably won't ever be a proper "Alien 5", but let these women relax. Haven't they been through enough?

But the franchise will continue. There's no stopping it now, not even removing its protagonist can stop it. Only a few years later Fox finally gave the xenomorphs a true rival. And this time they did not bring in any Frenchmen to direct.

Next time! We're rewinding back to 1982. Body horror fans, I know you're excited, it's The Thing!

31 Days of Horror Reviews Day 14: Alien³

Day 14: Alien³ (1990), dir. David Fincher

Streaming Availability: Hulu

"When they first heard about this thing, it was 'crew expendable'. The next time they sent in marines - they were expendable too. What makes you think they're gonna care about a bunch of lifers who found God at the ass-end of space?"

For all the positive fascination around Alien and Aliens, there is just as much hatred around, Alien³. I'm surprised nobody has made a documentary yet about the making of this thing, considering just how troubled the production was. And most of that trouble was in pre-production, usually it is when the cameras roll that things fall apart. The third Alien movie almost never got started. I think Fox lost count of how many full scripts were written, besides many more versions of those scripts. William Gibson was involved at some point. David Twohy's 2000 movie Pitch Black was born from his unused script for the third alien movie. Ultimately, they started shooting without a finished script in hand. The final director, David Fincher, would basically disown this movie. The Assembly Cut version is not a director's cut, Fincher wanted nothing to do with any DVD releases. Nobody behind the scenes has warm feelings about this thing. 

Making this just seems like a bad time all-around. There's ground-breaking energy and excitement you can feel in the productions of Alien and Aliens - not in the third one. This is just a movie that had to get made. That 'bad time' filters down into the movie.

You'd think with all that uncertainty and studio meddling that you'd end up with something generic and safe. Alien³ is not the movie you make if you just want to keep things chugging for an "Alien 4" and then an "Alien 5". The soulless obvious thing is to bring back Ripley, Hicks, and Newt, have them shoot more aliens, maybe bigger aliens, and go home heroes again. Basically that is the Terminator 3 strategy - do the same thing again, but worse. Instead, Alien³ goes back to the horror roots of the '79 Alien and then goes much further. Extreme horror art films are rarely this cruel. Alien³ is consciously an act of franchise suicide.

And I respect the Hell out of that.

We have to start with the controversial choice: killing off Newt and Hicks off-camera between movies, already fan favorites. Killing Newt in particular is brutal, beyond the fact you slaughtered a little girl, breaking a core taboo of cinema. This also destroys everything Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) gained in Aliens, any sense of a new home or new future. Bishop (Lance Henriksen) has been reduced to a gurgling pile of half-melted scraps, and he chooses death after his one scene. Ripley discovers she's the carrier for an Alien Queen, meaning she only has days remaining before the end. Even the cute doggie in this movie gets taken by a Facehugger and dies birthing a dog-xenomorph hybrid. (It never ends well for the dogs this month...)

Now you might ask yourself: wait, when did that happen? The ending of Aliens is pretty dang clear that the good guys won, unmistakably. Alien³ never explains how another egg got on board, causing a fire and causing the computer on the ship to jettison the survivors from the second movie, killing everybody except Ripley. You can further Cinema Sins this by noting that Ripley's tube is untouched so when did a Facehugger get to her? You gotta roll with this or there is no movie. The first time I saw Alien³ I was annoyed for five minutes. Then the rest of the movie happened. I was fascinated. I didn't grow up with Aliens, I first saw Alien³ the night after I saw the second movie. "Franchise betrayal" is not an interesting place to begin criticism in any respect.

The first two movies have a clinical cool color temperature. Alien³ is all yellow. It's the same dark metal corridors but now older, rotting, unclean. Alien³ takes place on the planet Fury 161, an abandoned foundry in the garbage heap of space. It's a dead world full of rotten bastards, surrounded by ten square miles of maze-like tunnels full of high technology but none it works. This was a maximum-security prison with a population of 5,000, now reduced to a cult of twenty-five prisoner cultists and a few grouchy Company men with the unpleasant assignment of watching over them. You can tell whoever gets this assignment are not the best or brightest the Weyland-Yutani as to offer. This is still a prison but there need be no bars, no weapons, since there is no escape off this world. If the inmates ever rise up, the Company can just write off the facility and leave them all to die. Ripley is in good company down here, since nobody has hope of a future. Since xenomorphs are not the only thing eating people, there's also lice, Ripley shaves her head to match the shorn male cast. She's one of the "brothers", just another lost soul in the heap.

There is the ever-present threat of sexual violence, one that nearly comes to pass. Ripley barely escapes a gang rape. Even the most heroic prisoner, Dillon (Charles S. Dutton), the true leader of Fury 161, is a rapist and a murderer by his own confession. There's this curious plot detail wherein we're told that the prisoners are "double-Y chromos". That is a real genetic condition, mostly harmless, most who have the syndrome don't even notice it. In the Alien universe this is treated as a dangerous overflow of testosterone and violence. Soon enough, with a creature the prisoners nickname "the Beast" taking down a lot of characters through long alien-POV shots, gender is the least of anybody's problems.

Andrews (Brian Glover) is the thug-like Company warden, blaming everything that will go wrong on Ripley's feminine presence. Andrews is lot of bluster and bullying, since what other powers does he have? Aaron (Ralph Brown) his second, is just a weak-little toady, nicknamed "85" after his IQ score. Dillon and Ripley take command once Andrews gets devoured - if anything the alien does everybody a favor getting him out of the way. Fortunately, Dillon, who is a magnificent character, full of power and charisma. He's a big man and rules a room. Charles S. Dutton might give a series-best performance in Alien³.

Interestingly we have a consensual, most un-romantic hook-up between Ripley and the "medical officer", Clemens (the future Tywin Lannister, Charles Dance). Charles Dance is not an actor who overwhelms any performance with affection, but it is purely adult interaction, two people who have been floating through space for decades (or maybe centuries at this point for Ripley) who have a need to be served. Clemens does not last long, only barely getting the time to give his tragic backstory before he's one of the first victims. Dillon takes his place as the main company for Ripley.

Alien³ is as hopeless as this series ever gets. The only way off Fury is worse than the alien. Once again the Weyland-Yutani Company has become this faceless, distant, terrifying force. The "rescue" team they're sending is not here for Ripley or the prisoners, they're here for 'Ripley's daughter'. The military team coming down will probably slaughter all the witnesses and take the creature in, finally achieving their goals. That gives a ticking clock to the plot, the prisoners have to kill the quadrupedal monster before the Company gets here. They have no weapons, just a few old drums of explosives which fails in terrible fashion, then there's baiting the creature into the forge. What's bait? Well, there's a couple dozen of bipedal snacks, only one will make it to the credits.

Alien³ is not a movie I need to defend anymore, the discourse around this one has changed rapidly. I'm far from alone in loving this thing. On the right day I'll tell you that Alien³ is better than Aliens. As bleak as this movie is - there's not a lot of jokes, there's no big fight scenes, no "get away from her, you bitch" - Alien³ is never depressing. It could so easily be miserable yet here's a powerful hope at the center of Alien³, represented by Dillon. He is triumphant against the oblivion represented by the Beast and the Company. He demands Ripley live every single second she has left. He sacrifices himself to save her for just a few more minutes. And there's something powerful to that. Ripley dies for the sins of the universe, but not in defeat. Death is her last chance to say "fuck you" to the powers that be, capitalism and science lose out to faith and brotherhood.

There's a final appearance of a human(?) Lance Henricksen working for the Company as a high-level scientist (this is just confusing, one of several elements of Alien³ that feel unfinished). He gives a last  desperate plea to let the Company have it. He might as well have saved his breath. Ripley goes out Terminator 2-style, diving into lava, just as a xenomorph bursts out of her, making her both the Christ and Madonna at the same time. This fiery late-term abortion is the second child she's lost this movie, but at least, it concludes her story. "You've been in my life so long, I can't remember anything else.", says Ripley, as her life has been completely consumed by this beast she has been fighting over and over. In the end, she never lets them win.

I mean, there's no way you're coming back from full incineration. Right? It would make no sense for Sigourney Weaver to come back after this. Right? If Ripley were to be reborn that might just over due the Christ metaphor, I think.

Next time! Sigourney Weaver comes back. What are we, some kind of Alien Resurrection?

31 Days of Horror Reviews Day 13: Aliens

Day 13: Aliens (1986), dir. James Cameron

Streaming Availability: Hulu

I don't think I even can open this with a quote like I've been doing. Every single line of Aliens has been so endlessly repeated and mutated that they're all just memes now. Any profoundity they might have had has been bleached dry after forty years of online bullshit. The obsession around Aliens is unique amongst every movie we will cover. There are whole movies, entire films, that rip this one off practically scene for scene, just replacing the xenomorphs with dinosaurs (Carnosaur 2) or tentacle monsters (Deep Rising) or giant spiders (Spiders 2). Not to diminish any of those films, I happen to like Deep Rising better than Aliens. Alien create a its own subgenre in 1979, uniquely amongst film genres, it's sequel basically did the same. Every creature feature to star a group of smart-talking soldiers owes something to Aliens, even Predator. There's entire archetypes of characters in genre stories whose origin can traced right back here: the Vasquez, the Hudson, even Ripley as we know her truly starts in Aliens. Every movie full of nonsense military technobabble which you can just make up on the fly ("I want a a clean Triple Delta formation, make sure Oscar Yee-Haw-76 is covered on the flanks!") comes back right here.

There is an enormous shift in tone from Alien to Aliens, right down to the inspiration. James Cameron was so taken with Robert A. Heinlein's book Starship Troopers, he made much of the cast read it. Starship Troopers would get its own adaptation a decade later from Paul Verhoeven, one that wisely chose to satirize the material versus playing the militarism straight. (And was depressingly accurate with the course 21th century America would go.) Cameron is mostly borrowing Heinlein for aesthetics, he does not believe in a Roman Republic military-citizen society either. We wants the cool mechs, the drop ships, and the waves and waves of bug aliens for his version of the Roughnecks to tango with.

Until now, these alien invasion movies have been reactions to WWII. Aliens is a reaction to the next generation's conflict: Vietnam. The Colonial Marines, these horny, undisciplined, and woefully unprepared grunts would not be too out of place in Kubrick's Fullmetal Jacket, releasing only a year later. There's more sexual harassment in the dialog, fewer slurs. Cut all out all the SciFi and Aliens is about marines on a search and destroy mission for Victor Charlie that goes horrendously wrong. The jungle is now the dark metal corridors of  a space colony filled with the goo of a xenomorph nests. The point is you're always open to ambush. The military has awesome technology that Cameron goes to great lengths to show off, but all this tech in the hands of frat boys and an officer, Lt. Gorman (William Hope) who is an empty uniform. If anything the gizmos and gadgets get in the way, since Gorman cannot follow the action using his video feed, and his confusing radio messages only add to the panic. The mission is to make a galaxy safe for corrupt corporations - and nobody is pretending otherwise. There's no pride, there's little morale, the moment their mechanisms are insufficient to the task, that they lose their air support, the marines collapse.

In contrast to all this ultimately toothless machismo, we have Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), who Cameron transforms into the ur-example of the female action star. In this movie she's a predecessor for Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2, the Mama Bear protecting her cubs. The theatrical cut actually limits the theme a bit. We open with Ripley (and the kitty Jonesy) having drifted through space for 57 years after the events of the first film. There are deleted scenes focusing more on Ripley's horror that she's lost so much time, including a chance to live with her daughter. But she a surrogate daughter out in space. That's Newt (Carrie Henn), the only survivor of planet LV-146, the abandoned scary world of the first film, and the place that the Company very foolishly chose to colonize.

Even the xenomorphs have been recast in a more feminine, more organic light. We never really knew much about the alien in that first film. There's a whole sequence where Ripley finds a nest, discovering that the creature kept her crew alive, transforming them into eggs - this is all cut making room for the new concept. In Aliens the creature that so scared us in the first film was just part of an entire hive of insect-like creatures, hundreds of soldiers protecting a massive queen. To make them more insectoid, Aliens redesigns the xenomorphs, so the smooth head is now ridged, losing that machine-aspect. H.R. Geiger was not invited back, by the way, the Alien Queen is all Cameron. And of course, we have to celebrate the Queen as a masterpiece of puppetry and design. I had of toy her growing up, she's really damn cool.

Cameron stages things so have two mother figures at war, Ripley protecting Newt, the Queen protecting her eggs. This is why "Stay away from her, YOU BITCH!" is not just an Eighties action catch-phrase, but like a statement of the entire theme of Aliens. Ripley imagines that going out with the marines might fix her PTSD, I do not recommend this course of action for anybody in real life. And she does find an answer to her problems by basically adopting Newt, who also is terrified of her nightmares. Textually the movie ends with them both drifting off to sleep, imagining good dreams. Cameron is not subtle here. That is not his thing. His thing is big fuck-off warships, Batmobile-looking ATV props, and an awesome power loader suit. Even if you don't care about parenthood, you can just nerd-out at the technology.

And as for happy endings... don't worry about Alien³ just yet, we'll get there. That is not this movie.

We need to talk about the other villain of this franchise, the Company. I think the Company was scarier in Alien when we could not see them, they were just a faceless distant terror of capitalism. Now they have a name "Weyland-Yutani", tossing just a dash of Eighties Japanophobia in there. Now we meet them up close, and maybe it is true to life that they're not some brilliant calculating computer. They just suck. Their representation is a little shit of a man, Burke (Paul Reiser), unmistakably an Eighties business cretin in that skinny red tie. He's cowardly, double-dealing, and shoot small. In all the other films the Company is this calculating monolith, here it seems they colonized LV-146 without even remembering its importance. Burke's plan to smuggle a couple xenomorphs comes off like he's trying to get cocaine past the border up his colon. It's small-time, petty shit. Extremely human failings.

Meanwhile, Aliens rehabilitates the android - sorry, "artificial person". They do some tension with Bishop (Lance Henrickson) maybe turning on Ripley, but he never does. There is no evil computer, the mechanization is not the problem, is it the weasels operating them. Of course, James Cameron would be a booster of technology, his entire career has been about pushing effects and filmmaking gizmos. He's all in on the AI fad right now. The warmaking machinery is not at fault. With all the gear the Colonial Marines had and if anybody had bothered to listen to Ripley's reports, LV-146 should have been easy rollover of mindless beasts. Ripley on her own demolishes the alien nest, since she is the only soldier with anything to fight for.

Aliens is great, of course, I will never doubt that. But I will never believe that it is a better movie than Alien. Not for lack of trying, Cameron did everything he could to emulate the original Alien just bigger. What is the final mech fight but the surprise final jump scare of the xenomorph on the escape pod, made into a whole fight sequence? There's a bigger alien, there's a bigger kaboom, there's more effects, there's more action, there's more comedy. And yet, there's a mood lost. There was a grim fatalism of the working class left to die by their bosses in Ridley Scott's film. Cameron replaces it with big heroics and the family unit bringing us all back together, which is fine, it's nice. It is a matter of preference ultimately. Even in a broken universe, maybe family can be save you. I can't say Aliens is doing anything wrong. But it is a lot more crowd-pleasing and a lot simpler.

Even the franchise had to admit that things were not so easy. Because... man... strap yourself in.

Next time! Plural aliens? What's next? Exponential aliens? Uhh... yeah, cubic filmmaking in Alien³.

31 Days of Horror Reviews Day 12: Alien

Day 12: Alien (1979), dir. Ridley Scott

Streaming Availability: Hulu

"PRIORITY ONE

INSURE RETURN OF ORGANISM FOR ANALYSIS.

ALL OTHER CONSIDERATIONS SECONDARY.

CREW EXPENDABLE."

The late-Seventies, early-Eighties are the most glorious years for horror fans. This was a revolutionary period in special effects, in gore, in storytelling. Importantly, this is the time that sees the birth of the blockbuster film. These movies will end up defining the canon of the male nerd for another forty years. Poll any horror fan, any horror filmmaker too, and their personal top 10 will almost certainly include two or three movies from this period, if not ten for ten. Just to name a few: Halloween, The Shining, Jaws, The Evil Dead, Suspira, Dawn of the Dead, Carrie, The Thing (just you wait), and of course... today's movie, Ridley Scott's Alien. This is where the modern monster movie begins, this is where slashers begin, this is where Cronenberg and Carpenter and dozens others get going. This is where horror franchises really get moving in their modern assembly line processes, with sequel after sequel. Alien uniquely being up there as an all-time great horror and blockbuster franchise.

If I were to tell you that the first Alien is one of the greatest movies ever made, I would be wasting my breath. I might as well be writing an essay about how fire is hot. What else is there to add? There is nothing I could say that would increase this film's reputation. It's influence is unmistakable across films, there will an entire subgenre of rip-offs to follow. It's influence is massive in video games as well, the entire Metroid franchise is born here, along with a thousand other NES games stealing their enemy design from this film.

20th Century Fox put a considerable budget behind Alien, which is a stark difference from what we've been seeing all month so far. This is no indie film, this is no skin of your teeth production, it was a big deal. Fox invested somewhere between $11 and $14 million, which was not a lot today, but went a lot further back in 1979. That's roughly equal to the movie that made this all possible: Star Wars. After Lucas showed the world Jedis and Death Stars, genre pictures were not the embarrassing crap your studio made on the side, they were the centerpiece of your business. Plus Jaws was only a few years earlier, creature features were in vogue too. A lot of doors could open for you if you had a script that promised to be "Star Jaws". Well, one guy did.

The development of Alien is legendary, everything about this movie is. There is much more interest in this movie than everything that's come before. Nobody will write whole books about Horror Express like they have for the Alien franchise. People such as H.R. Geiger and Dan O'Bannon are still known primarily for their relationship to this very movie. O'Bannon, the original screenplay writer, had previously written and starred in Dark Star, a bad joke of a movie, directed by John Carpenter right out of film school. The guy had a ton of interest in space SciFi. You can clearly see inspiration from The Thing from Another World in the concepts, also the 1965 Mario Bava movie Planet of the Vampires. (Which I probably should have covered for this series, but... it looked bad and cheesy.) O'Bannon and Geiger had been connected to Alejandro Jodorowsky's hallucinatory Dune film, which never was shot and probably never could have been. Well-known director Walter Hill was involved with the production everywhere, writing more of the actual shooting script than O'Bannon did. Hill will remain involved all the way to Alien³. Yet the final director's chair went to a mostly-unknown forty-something advertising director named Ridley Scott. Surely he won't amount to anything.

The thing about Alien is that it is a monster movie, a haunted house in space, a SciFi thriller, but also, this is a patient movie. This was part of the thing back in the Seventies, we were so impressed by and proud of our ability to finally film spaceships with such detail and clarity that we would luxuriate in it. Personally, I love this. The best part of any Star Trek movie is the ten minutes in The Motion Picture we spend watching Kirk almost cry while approaching the Enterprise in dry dock. And it works great for establishing a mood in Alien, the slow builds are as impressive as Kubrick's work building the Overlook. Honestly the best part of Alien might happen in these first shots, before the crew even wakes up.

The title character (Bolaji Badejo) does not appear until an hour in. Jonesy the Cat does not appear for an hour in either. Our heroine, Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) is not the central character until almost ninety minutes in. We do not land on the alien planet to start the plot rolling for quite awhile. We spend the first few minutes just floating around the spaceship, staring at set design. The only moving piece is a little drinking bird toy on the kitchen table, and then a computer humming to life. The toy is a great detail, this one bit of homeliness tossed in around all this endless confounding machinery, rows and rows and rows of blinking lights, dozens of beeps and bloops running without its human masters, like the dead Midwich at the beginning of Village of the Damned.

Alien and Star Wars share very similar energies in their ship concepts. I could see Han Solo stepping out of his cockpit and then walking into the kitchen of The Nostromo. Today when films are trying to emulate Seventies SciFi, they cannot match the lived-in working class qualities of this vision of the future. The first rift in the crew is "the bonus situation", and who gets how much of a share. The details are not clear, nor do they matter, just these guys on a job, not clean professionals or brilliant scientists. This is a shift. Han Solo and Ellen Ripley share one thing: they're space truckers.

The thing that breaks up this normal every day drive across space comes once the crew are forced by their Company (not ever named yet) into a side mission. That takes them to an alien world to investigate the abandoned gothic castle that is a crashed ship. That's where you see the Geiger designs in every ribbed wall and oily black texture. The alien itself - not yet called a "xenomorph" - looks like a living, walking part of this castle. It also blends in with the random ductwork and mechanisms of the human ship. 

In Alien the titular villain is just an animal. It's big, it's hungry, it goes "boo!" once to Dallas (Tom Skerrit) before eating him. However, it's movements in this film are strange, kabuki-like at times. In all the sequels the xenomorphs will be much more bestial and direct. The art design tells a lot though: the creature is machinery in the shape of a man. Humanoid only so far with its long head, with pipework in its shoulders and metallic skin. Continuing that metaphor is the science officer Ash (Ian Holm), a more literal machine man since we discover he's a robot built by the Company to collect the specimen. He's a remake of Dr. Carrington from The Thing from Another World, even repeating a similar love for the monster's "simplicity". Once revealed to be a construct, Ash's own movements and gestures become exaggerated and operatic. Holm's expressions while trying to murder Ripley are remorseful, maybe sad, but who can say what he's thinking? If he's thinking.

The attempts to humanize the ship computer by calling it "Mother" ends up merely creating a hateful traitorous parent for the crew. At every turn, Mother fails the heroes, even not stopping the self-destruct sequence in a final act of spiteful cruelty. At all turns, our technology has betrayed us. It desires a species to replace us, one more suited to its worldview.

We must also discuss the sexual element. Alien is one of the great Mpreg movies, in the most terrible way possible. Kane (John Hurt) is violated by the Facehugger creature and births the creature out of his chest. The Alien franchise never becomes explicitly about sexual violence until Alien³, but a lot of its cheaper imitators like Galaxy of Terror were a lot less tasteful. Roger Corman and Italian filmmakers got a lot of mileage out of making Alien rip-offs, including one shamelessly calling itself Alien 2: On Earth. There was a movie called Inseminoid in 1980 for god's sake. I'm going to avoid as many of these as I can in this series, I don't need to talk about rape for a week. But the body horror is core to this franchise, so is a theme of motherhood as perverted as that sounds. Kane's chest exploding is up there as one of the greatest horror moments ever.

My family has a legend that my little uncle at nine-years-old ran out of the theater once the baby alien popped out. I think there's a million similar stories for audiences everywhere.

Alien is simply a masterpiece, forty years later I do not think Ridley Scott ever shot a better movie. The script is great too. Rewatching this movie and watching Ash is fascinating since every move he makes is always in service of the creature, and he's not a good liar either. Ripley becomes the hero mainly due to her strength in daring to question him. Sigourney Weaver does not have a lot early on, but when she's on camera, she's great. You can see her struggle not to sob when Mother reveals how doomed the crew had been the whole time. There's a great cast all-around: Veronica Cartwright, John Hurt, Harry Dean Stanton, Yaphet Kotto, these are people I celebrate seeing in any movie. Even the effects hold up great. They wisely keep the alien off-camera as much possible, so what angles we get are iconic. The close-ups of it smiling as fluid pours down from its two sets of teeth are as iconic as the shark's mouth biting down in Jaws. The scene where Stanton gets eaten is something every filmmaker should study that wants to shoot a monster movie.

This will be very hard to top. Maybe the production designer for Galaxy of Terror has some ideas for a sequel...

Next Time! I thought one Alien was scary enough, now its plural?? Aliens!

31 Days of Horror Reviews Day 11: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)

Day 11: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), dir. Philip Kaufman

Streaming Availability: Amazon Prime

"I've lived in this city all my life. But somehow today I felt everything had changed. People were different - not just Geoffrey - but everybody. Yesterday it all seemed normal. Today, everything seemed the same, but it wasn't. It was a nightmare."

We're now in the second generation of alien invasion movies! Congratulations everybody, we made it. I've been waiting a long time to get here. We have great goddamn movies to get to. The next three days will feature three of the most beloved horror movies of all time.

All throughout the Fifties filmmakers were making fun B-movies on limited budgets with intriguing concepts. But the limitations are manifest, and I don't mean just in terms of effects or budgets. I love me a cheesy guy in a suit, Godzilla is my personal hero. No, it's also the craft, it's the style, it's the cultural mindset that. Even as late as Horror Express, these movies have been very stage-y, with theatrical performances on sound stages. There have not been too many close-ups, in general our movies have not been too interested in the psychology of our heroes. Most of our protagonists have been scientists, rationally explaining what is happening, often sexless or very chaste. The well-groomed professional representing social order must be the hero, because ultimately, everything about Western Civilization was correct. By the Seventies though, that assumption was heavily in question. Now the style was about individuals suffering under irrational systems. In 1956 the aliens cut off the phone lines to the authorities, in 1978, maybe it does not matter, will the authorities bother to help at all?

In fairness, the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers was the movie with the most interest in its hero's humanity. There were a lot of crooked shots as slowly the normal world became utterly unreal. The 1978 version has even more Dutch Angles, even more delirium. There's a whole montage of Donald Sutherland on the phone in his office, then on a public payphone as he gets more and more unsure of his safety, surrounded by suspicious faces passes by, as nobody on the phone will help. Paranoia was so core to that original Invasion that it fits perfectly in the Seventies post-Vietnam, post-Nixon state of social unease.

There is a ton added by shifting locations from the Anytown, USA location of the '56 version to late-Seventies San Francisco. Philip Kaufman lived in the Bay Area for a time, he was part of the counterculture in the Sixties, and most importantly, he seems to deeply love the place. A lot of Seventies urban filmmaking is about the grit and misery of the space, see the dead-eyed NYC of Taxi Driver or the bleak SF of The Conversation. Kaufman's vision of the San Francisco is warm, celebrating its diversity. He cherishes moments like our protagonist cooking Asian cuisine with a wok, a homeless man street busking with his dog, men with wild accents soaking in mud at a bath house, frustrated poets getting into literary arguments with pop psychiatrists at a book store. The whole movie was shot on location, an increasing lost art when Atlanta fills in half the time these days. I think even the interiors are on-location.

All of it has a terrifying quality when San Francisco suddenly dies. Nobody realizes it until it is too late. One night everything is normal, the Warriors are gonna make the playoffs, there's some crooked French cuisine to investigate. Then the next night so much of the city is drained dry that the porn theater owners are begging for customers, the grit and humanity wiped clean. A kind of instant intergalactic gentrification.

Quite literally the aliens are always cleaning up, since they we see garbage trucks in the background of most scenes. In the back are these huge stacks of ashes, which we learn are bodies being disposed of at an industrial, Holocaust-like scale.

A few days ago with Beware! The Blob, I had very little good to say about the Seventies, especially that movie's sour beer-stains-in-shag-carpeting vision of it. Body Snatchers '78 is a movie that something on its mind about the post-Counter Culture era, a more positive vision of the period. It is interesting that the voice of the alien collective is a celebrity self-help guru, Dr. David Kibner (Spock himself, Leonard Nimoy). It is not clear when Kibner has been taken by the aliens, but even in his first scene he's a very conservative voice, moaning about too much free love and failed relationships, blaming that for the "mass delusion" of believing your spouse is a Pod Person. Meanwhile, Jack (Jeff Goldblum), a more leftist failed writer is disgusted by Kibner's work. He's furious even if he cannot really say why, struggling to find the exact buzzwords (for example "post-industrialist"). When a husband turns into an emotionless alien, there is a suggestion he might have turned into a Republican. San Francisco is this place where people can live happily unmarried and have too much wine while out at their co-worker's house, flirting. Then suddenly, the alien virus comes in, and all the vibrancy and difference just ends. Nobody wants to see the Warriors play. It is like the Squares turning back the clock to 1956.

Obviously, I need to talk about the effects, and uniquely for a SciFi horror movie, I'm actually more intrigued by the city and how gorgeous it looks in Kaufman's filmmaking. But yeah, let's talk genre movie stuff. We open on some very B-movie footage of alien worlds with goo floating upward towards the Earth, a kind of final send-off to the cheesy era we're leaving behind. Eventually this moves to a montage of plants in the city and pods growing on them. There's great special effect of a pod in the middle of a leaf suddenly grow tendrils and expand outward. Unlike the 1958 movie, we do not shy away from the goop. There's even full-frontal nudity. Kaufman stages a scene where we see the pods open up, and we get a full birthing of the Pod People, as they grow from slimy babies to near-replicas of our cast. When our heroine, Elizabeth (Brooke Adams) finally fades away and dies, we see her face collapse into just a husk.

And I can't not mention this: there's a man-faced dog at one point, a SciFi play on a classic Japanese demon. That's just weird for weirdness's own sake. You'll never forget it once you see it. Speaking of odd: why is there a cameo of Robert Duvall dressed as a priest on a swing set. What is with that??

Much of Body Snatchers '78 plays out very similarly to how the original movie went. Our main character this time is Matthew Bennell (Sutherland, RIP), a great health inspector but not the city's most popular man, as seen by his shattered windscreen. His best friend and unanswered crush is Elizabeth, whose boyfriend, Geoffrey (Art Hindle) one day goes from a fun-loving sports fan to a cold, uncaring automaton. Eventually we find pod replicas trying to replace Elizabeth and Jack. Matthew's good friend, Dr. Kibner, turns out to be no help at all. Also, Veronica Cartwright is here, who will go on to be in Alien in just a year. She's a great screamer, which is a talent that will come in handy with the ending.

One major improvement on the original comes when Kaufman corrects the 1956 version's ending. While Matthew and Elizabeth are driving in the city, a crazed man ranting about aliens rushes at them in the car. It is none other than Kevin McCarthy, the original star of the first movie, repeating his same dialog. Where the '56 movie then cuts to McCarthy in safety, this one sees him run over, and a silent crowd gathers around without emotion. No deus ex machina of good authorities stepping in will save the day. Matthew cannot even get the police to care over the phone. Is it due to interstellar infection, or is it due to the very human failure of this institution? We never know.

Speaking of without emotion, Sutherland actually underplays many of his scenes. Most shots of him walking around the city show him as fairly cold. Which works great for the finale when the language of cinema implants in the footage all this interiority in him. You see him quietly walk around a city overrun by the Pods, with reaction close-ups. You think you see sadness of what has become of Elizabeth, what has become of the world. Only there is no interiority, not anymore. The rules of the medium are tricking you. Matthew is one of them. We then have an all-timer great ending of horror movies, a jumpscare to equal Carrie from 1976, with goddamn terrifying sound design on that monster scream. The '56 aliens did not point and scream like banshees, from now on Pod People will. That's too iconic to ever leave out.

There will be more versions of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but I'm not sure if we'll cover them. (31 Days sounds like a lot until you realize how many friggin' alien movies there are.) The next swing at the material will be Body Snatchers, the 1993 remake, directed by Abel Ferrara. That is not as good as this but does have its moments, namely any scene with Meg Tilly. There's also a 2007 version, The Invasion starring Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig. I'm really curious but it seems like nobody enjoyed it. The 1978 version remains the iconic one. Trying to remake this is as thankless a task as trying to make a prequel to The Thing thirty years later and with CG effects. You're doomed from the start.

Next Time! The alien movie, the one so important they simply called it Alien