#4 - Alien

Alien (1979)
Directed by: Ridley Scott. Written by: Dan O'Bannon.

Plot: A group of people on a mining vessel or something answer a distress call and pick up a hostile, man-eating life form.

Review: This movie is really fucked up. It has entered the collective consciousness now I guess so that the thought of an alien exploding from a dude's chest, though gory and disgusting, barely makes people bat an eyelash, but when you actually think about it... it's pretty sick.

And it scared the fucking crap out of me when I saw it (I am easily scared). I knew exactly what was coming in the dinner scene and yet it got me. It still gets me. And the movie always makes me a little bit sad.

For me, Alien is all about the characters. Without them, it would just be a generic slasher movie (albeit with one of the freakiest monsters ever, barring the thing from The Thing). But it's not.

Unlike the generic slasher movie, where I can't wait to see the whiny little skanks die nasty deaths, I really don't want the characters in this movie to get killed, and it brings me down when, inevitably, they do. They're not bad people. Sure, Lambert is a little shrill, Ripley is a frigid bitch-monster and Ash.... let's not even go there, and they're all friggin money grubbers but they're all kind of likeable (except Ash. Dude is a creep and an asshole).

They manage to do that with the sequel, but not to the same extent as in this movie.

I know a lot of people think that Aliens is better than this movie, and I can sort of see where they're coming from, but they're wrong. It's easy to write this one off due to general lack of splosions (I think there is one splosion in this movie, right at the very end) but for me, good acting and writing goes farther (not that the acting and writing was bad in Aliens, it's just... ugh. If you don't know what I'm talking about I'm not going to explain it to you).

Oh yeah, then there's the monster. I know I mentioned it before, but holy fuck that thing is freaky. I mean, honest to god. It traumatized the hell out of me as a kid despite the fact that all the weird sexual stuff went totally over my head, and when I think about the worst possible horror movie death, death by Alien is right up there. I occasionally have dreams about it actually.

Anyway. Yeah. Woo.

Favourite Part: I had a sort of funny conversation about the scene where Ash tries to kill Ripley by sticking a rolled up magazine down her throat. I was saying, "how exactly is he killing her? I mean, she can just breathe through her nose, right? Stupid robot." Mr. Red thought about it for a moment, then said, "Well, if it went far enough it wouldblock all air from passing to her lungs", to which I replied, "Holy shit, I never thought of that. I would totally get killed by that guy". Mr. Green joined the conversation at this point saying, "Yeah, you would be all like 'stupid robot, you can't kill me' and then you'd die"

In other words, I don't really have a specific part I really like more than anything else.

Other versions: None.

Sequels: Aliens, Alien 3, Alien: Resurrection, Alien vs. Predator and Alien vs. Predator: Requiem

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