Alien

This Friday I returned from work to find Boyfriend spooning his alien quadrilogy box set as, after a full week of waiting each day for the postman, the blu-ray box set had finally arrived. Que weekend of film watching (in which I am included) and extra-features-watching (in which, thankfully I’m not).

It’s not like I’ve not seen this film before, but apparently now it will be a whole new experience… Touched up, cleaned up…beautified…Boyfriend is particularly excited by a piece of footage of chains hanging form the ceiling in which apparently you can see the alien itself hanging in wait, which was indiscernible in the original movie.

I’ve always enjoyed a good haunted house movie and there’s something truly haunting about Alien, it’s basically just Sigourney Weaver wandering around in the dark and, inexplicably steamy, corridors of an ikea-built spaceship with a Tupperware containing a ginger cat. Daunted? Me too.

The first 30 minutes of Alien could be about anything. A group of 7, two women and five men, on the towing ship ‘The Nostromo’ heading for earth. Where they’ve come from; forgettable. What they’re towing; irrelevant. The film begins in eery silence panning through empty silent space, and then round empty silent corridors of spaceship. I almost expected to see a white net curtain blowing in the breeze and hear a clock striking thirteen. The crew are woken from hypersleep by the ships computer (the aptly named ‘Mother’) as they receive what is probably a distress signal from an unmapped planet. After arguing about it for a bit they head down to the planet (all of them, apparently it’s ok to leave ones super pricey spaceship drifting aimlessly in orbit) some of them head into the alien ship and faff about a bit before they discover some eggs…now this is where it gets interesting!

John Hurts unfortunately is the first to go, as a spider like creature begins to hug his face and stick it’s thingy down his throat to lay eggs inside him. They take him back to the ship and it turns out it’s impossible to remove the face-hugging thing. Now if this isn’t some kind of metaphor for rape I don’t know what is. Dan O’Bannon retreats to his ping pong ball decorated room and sits in silence. Err Dark Star anyone? Later the thing detaches itself and dies, but sadly folks, all IS lost for poor John Hurts. The alien creature pushes its way out of his chest thereby killing him, it looks suspiciously like some kind of phallus drenched in blood, which is exactly what I want to see before bed time…

Fast forward 24hours and this creature has about quadrupled it’s size and killed the entire crew apart from Sigourney, who weaves her way about, going back for engine coolant, to set the self destruct systems and for her cat. How disorganized. The best part of Alien is the fact that you hardly see a thing. The death of Veronica Cartwright is interesting as all we actually see is the alien wrapping it’s tail around her leg. This is followed by more shots of Jonathon Creek, oh no sorry I mean Sigourney, running around looking terrified while the sound of her friend and crewmate being aliened to death is heard over the intercom. We then see just a leg dripping in blood and Sigourney screaming. Fantastic. No gore. Barely any blood. I’m loving it. Alien is the perfect horror movie. It contains the unknown and underestimated threat, a few jumps and deaths that we don’t have to watch. Down with Saw …bring me Aliens.