31 Days of Horror Reviews Day 17: Xtro

Day 17: Xtro (1983), dir. Harry Bromley Davenport

Streaming Availability: N/A (but you'll find it if you know where to look)

"I'm not the same as before . . . I went to another world. I had to be changed so I could live there."

This is all deeply fucked. Just letting you know up top.

The last six days have all been major studio films with cutting-edge effects. Any return to the grubby world of low-budget B-movies will feel strange. Xtro, however, is a uniquely bizarre thing: nasty, exploitative, hallucinatory. A lot of horror movies have the feeling of a really bad dream, that's a cliche, but I'll use it anyway. Xtro is full of confusing, unpleasant imagery that almost adds up to something like a cogent point, but whatever it is just keeps escaping you. The director, Harry Bromley Davenport, has very little good to say about it, comparing Xtro unfavorably to a similarly surreal horror movie, Phantasm. He describes his movie as having "an atmosphere of complete moronity and incapability, stupidity". I definitely cannot agree there. Xtro is onto something, we might find out just what if we can remember enough of the nightmare to figure it out.

I cannot believe half the month has passed and I have not really delved into the mysticism of UFOs. There has not been an alien abduction yet in any of the movies - until now! A core part of these experience is their vagueness, their unexplainably, their irrationality. Aliens have so often been the extreme end of science, with UFO abductions science has so surpassed human understanding that these abduction narratives have the same chilling feel as any other kind of mystical experience. If you've been taken to see God or see little green men, it is terrifying. Reported cases of abduction will start taking off in the Sixties. These stories will grow as more and more scholarship (and fiction) is dedicated to the events. By the time Xtro comes out there is more and more unreliable techniques being used in the "science" of UFOlogy, such as hypnotism and regression therapies, the exact crap that allowed mass-paranoia about Satanic cults to build up across America. Xtro's narrative does not fit into any of the established mythologies of UFOs, but it does fit well into the surreal nature of these experiences.

Pay attention to this place. I need to get into the Whitley Striebers of this world before this month is out.  Communion is coming up.

Xtro is an extreme abduction case where Sam (Philip Sayer), an English father is suddenly taken while out on holiday with his son, and disappears for three years. This movie is going to be unclear about most of its details, down even to the question whether the original human Sam ever actually returns. Is what comes back Sam, an alien pretending to be Sam, or an alien that thinks it is Sam? Whatever this Sam-thing is, it seems driven by two contradictory, maybe tragically contradictory goals. The human part of "Sam" wants to get his family back. His wife Rachel (Bernice Stegers) has moved in with a bitchy American photographer, Joe (Danny Brainin), and is trying to raise her precocious son, Tony (Simon Nash). Sam wants back into Rachael and Tony's lives, a divorced dad narrative. However, the alien-Sam is following horrifying biological imperatives to procreate. Tony will be central to that process. Any read of this film cannot avoid the chilling implications of child abuse. You just need to confront that, it is part of the horror of Xtro.

We've seen plenty of alien films, but no matter how strange and disturbing the extraterrestrials were, we've mostly understood what they are, what they want. The Thing is awful, but all it wants is to eat the world, simple enough. Whatever is happening in Xtro is much weirder. The life cycle process of these creatures seems to complete itself, but is not purely a biological one either. There is a psychic or spiritual element to it too. The Sam-thing seems to actually "win".

Well, I have to get into the gruesome details eventually so buckle up. Xtro is a cheap creature feature but far from an ineffective one. What effects they have they use brilliantly for awful imagery.

What will become Sam is at first a quadrupedal creature bent-backwards, seemingly crab-walking as it murders and violates people. A young woman has some kind of appendage attached to her mouth, Xtro is one of the dozens of films picking up the rape implications of Ridley Scott's Alien. She then gives birth to a full-grown man, Sam, covered in afterbirth - and since Xtro never shies away from the nasty, we get to see Sam bite through his own umbilical cord. Sam, manages to keep up a human form for most of the remaining film, but his inhuman parts keep coming to the surface. His first attempt to call Rachel causes a phone receiver to melt. He eats snake eggs and sucks on natural gas lines. Tony, meanwhile, awakes covered in blood the night his father is reborn. Later, Sam will infect his son by kissing his flesh, pouring some kind of material into Tony's shoulder. From there, Tony too is increasingly less human, gaining powers to bring his toys to life, murdering some neighbors. All the time, Rachel is trying to hold together what's left of her family. Until by the end, the flesh is melting off her loved ones as they are once again taken up into space.

Also, the Bond Girl au pair (Maryam d'Abo) gets turned into an egg-laying husk as well. The young woman is sexually active, and Rachel is openly sexually active, still something of a social taboo for a mother. Tony is constantly intruding on the adult women in his life having sex. It is hard to read Simon Nash's performance, most of the time he is shot to be the Creepy Little Kid. We see a lot of his imagination come to life, and this is a full-sized plastic soldier marching robotically to kill. This does not really give us much interiority to him though, except that we know he likes creepy clowns. The conflict around Tony seems to be a confrontation with adult sexuality that Tony cannot yet process. Xtro luridly points the camera at Maryam d'Abo's breasts in many scenes but also this movie seems terrified of sex at every turn. No part of it seems pleasant, it is a biological imperative that controls the women in this film into terrible relationships, similar to whatever inhuman instincts are controlling Sam. Maybe what's happening here is Tony confronting adulthood and rejecting it, living instead in an unreal world of play and fog machines.

I cannot help but notice the similarities Xtro has to a Spanish movie also from 1983, Pod People, AKA Extra Terrestrial Visitors. MST3K would feature it years later, and it also a weird mixture of killer aliens and magical children's delight. I cannot imagine MST3K could ever feature Xtro. It is just too extreme and unsettling to riff over.

There have been a lot of bleak movies this month, Xtro beats Alien³ and The Thing for bleakness. This is shot in England, and there is a just a terrible grayness to everything from that Thatcher-era. The skies are full of gloom, the streets are full of urban decay, and the post-Empire misery has really set in. Probably the true heroine of Xtro in the end is Rachel, a woman approaching middle age, bouncing between two awful men and a son whom she is disconnected with. Her hair is always messy. And for no sin of her own, she watches everything in her life melt away into unknowable chaos. She reconnects with her ex-husband and the guy oozes away into a corpse while he's fucking her. And then she too is devoured by it. The End.

So if you want a brutal and deeply disturbingly alien movie, you do not get much worse than Xtro. It's unique, it's unforgettable. A lot of these movies following Alien just wanted to tear off women's shirts and indulge in rape fantasies. Xtro is not any less exploitative but it is surreal and bitter in fascinating ways. 

There are two movies listed as sequels to Xtro, Xtro 2 and Xtro 3 which came out in the Nineties. They are fully in-name-only, just two more movies Bromley Davenport directed about aliens. I have not seen them and nobody ever talks about them, so they're probably not good. I am not going to repeat the mistake of watching Children of the Damned again. But if they're secretly masterpieces, let me know.

Next time! You like musicals, right? You loved Joker 2, right? Well, even if you hate musicals, too damn bad, next movie is Little Shop of Horrors!

31 Days of Horror Reviews Day 16: The Thing

Day 15: The Thing (1981), dir. John Carpenter

Streaming Availability: Peacock

"Do you think that Thing wanted to be an animal? No dog is gonna make it a thousand miles through the cold! You don't understand! That Thing WANTED TO BE US!!"

The Method pays off sometimes. I've seen The Thing a dozen times since it is a Core Text in any horror nerd's education. But until this month, I had never seen the 1951 The Thing from Another World. I never noticed how of that original movie was referenced thirty years later by John Carpenter. Flamethrowers, dogs, mad scientists, it's all here. This is a remake that stages itself like a sequel in interesting ways. The footage of the Norwegians standing in a circle around the crashed ship is a direct reaction of a Christian Nyby and Howard Hawks shot. We see the block of ice which was torn open from the original movie. Only there are no brave men telling the world to watch the skies. In this Thing, the monster won.

This is the third time that John W. Campbell's novella Who Goes There? has been adapted to the screen. I'm not sure if Carpenter was aware of Horror Express, but he also wanted to bring a more Agatha Christie mystery element to his version. The Thing is the most faithful adaptation of the source material, set in the same Antarctic setting. Most character names are right from the text: Blair, Clark, Copper, Garry, McReady. From Campbell he got the ideas for a blood test and the goofy spaceship hidden under Blair's cabin.

Let's put the body horror and special effects aside for now. The Thing is a landmark movie, don't worry, I'll tell you about the juicy and squishy reasons why it is so well-remembered.

The big change Carpenter brings to the material is his vibes. The 1979 film Alien, itself heavily inspired by The Thing from Another World, also has a dirty working class vibe. The Thing is one of the few films with an all-male cast and for good reason. These are not men for romance. They're not handsome, there is not much comradery. They're cast-aways. Nobody mentions a family or anything waiting for them back home, or even much hurry to get there. This station is like a men's club, severely divorced energies. The main concern seems to be the battle against boredom. We see VHS tapes, chess computers, arcade machines, pool tables, dope, and lots and lots of alcohol. McReady (Kurt Russell) either has some Scotch in his hand in every scene or is openly wishing to get back to his cabin to drink more Scotch.

There is a large cast. There are some character actors who stand out, but many guys are just here, without too many quirks. Still most of the guys have their "thing". Nauls (T.K. Carter) roller skates and listens to music too loud, Palmer (David Clennon) smokes a lot of weed and believes alien conspiracy theories, Childs (Keith David) is a hot head, Fuchs (Joel Polis) is bookish, etc. (Btw, Fuchs has no relation to this blogger.) Still, it is very easy to lose track of just who is who and what was where. There are Youtube videos dissecting this film scene for scene to find out who was infected when, ultimately all that precision does not matter. The Agatha Christie mystery breaks down when the killer can be anybody at any time, which is made profound by the ending, but we'll get there in a minute.

One of the big shifts from the '51 movie is how the scientist shifts. Typically, these characters have been the cold, analytical types, the ones whose souls most connect with the aliens. Blair (Wilford Brimley) instead saves the day by causing so much chaos. He's seemingly mild-mannered until the terrible realization hits him of just what has come to their station this winter. His PC magics up some calculation that the Thing will infect the entire world in just weeks. And then Blair explodes in violence, cutting off the crew as systematically as Jack Torrance cuts off Wendy and Andy in The Shining. Blair understands before anybody that he's in an Alien movie, they might all have to die to keep the alien away from the Earth. Brimley is a surprisingly quick for such an older and large gentleman, and his rampage is iconic.

Later though, after Blair is sequestered away in a rather roomy tool shed, he's suddenly meek. "I want to go back inside" he tells McReady. The real Blair had a noose tied up. It is clearly in frame with Brimley's face through the window. Blair knew exactly how little hope there was. Whatever is talking to McReady now about being "alright now" is not the same man.

Okay, so now the gooey parts. Get hype, boys. Rob Bottin does the special effects for The Thing, which are a work of art. The very first creature we see is a sculpt found at the Norwegian base of two human heads merging together, screaming together. It is like a horror painting, something out of Goya or Ilya Repin, these lurid colors and arch twisted gesture frozen in time. Reports say that Bottin drove himself sick over the year he spent working on the effects for The Thing. The more impressive fact is that he was only twenty-one at the time. The Thing imagines a whole new kind of alien: one that does not merely body snatch humans but amalgamates them. These are new fantastic forms of life, fusions of random parts of human, spider, dog, and some kind of flower. The alien from The Quatermass Xperiment had similar abilities but we never saw how "creative" it could be. Summoning jaws out of stomachs or growing legs out of a decapitated head.

The Thing is a new frontier for cosmic horror cinema. Lovecraft could write about these unspeakable things from beyond the void, but The Thing actually does depict nightmares of a universe gone mad. This is an infection, a violation of the flesh. It is one thing to be replaced by an alien, to have your humanity erased, it is something worse to be made into a limb of it, becoming just a part of its vast arsenals of depravities.

Also, the ending is great. For how different and terrible The Thing is depicted, we end with the base destroyed, all the monsters slain, and just two men freezing to death in the snow. Of course, there's a bottle of scotch. McReady and Childs are the last ones left, with Childs' story being untrustworthy, but also, we cannot know what's happened to McReady between cuts. Maybe they're both human, maybe one is an alien, maybe both are aliens and there's no point in transforming anymore. The paranoia and mystery has ended with a bleak detente.

The reception of The Thing in 1981 was not good. The reviews were bad, the audiences did not show up, the movie barely made back its budget. The Thing would gain a cult following, and today calling that fanbase merely a "cult" is to underplay it. This sits with Alien as one of the all-timers of beloved movies in this genre. Today, in a world where our ideas of horror have been so reshapened that The Thing is fundamental to our filmic ideology, we can never take ourselves back to 1981 to understand those audiences. They might as well be Ancient Mesopotamians, those people do not share our culture. 

Carpenter never made a sequel, but the Fangoria crowd must have loved this movie all through the Eighties. Things like From Beyond, The Blob, and Society owe a lot to The Thing for the ground it broke. There was a video game sequel made in 2002 for Xbox and PlayStation 2 which was ambitious failure at least. A prequel was made in 2011 showing the events of the Norwegians before this movie. I've seen it, the effects are not even the problem, the movie is just not interesting. They made The Thing again but worse. That's the worst kind of sequel. The Thing knew how to be a great remake of a classic, and the 2011 version did not.

Next time: Maybe this movie wasn't quite gross enough, you know? We can get so much worse in Xtro.

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.