Bring back life form. All other priorities rescinded

Rating: Null/10 (3 December 2012)

"You don't understand what you're dealing with, do you? Its a perfect organism. Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility. I admire its purity. A survivor...unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality." - Ash ("Alien")
"What we're dealing with here is a perfect engine, an eating machine. It's really a miracle of evolution. All this machine does is swim and eat and make little sharks, and that's all." - Dr Hopper ("Jaws")
"Even the most minute of them have an instinct, a perfect talent for industry, social organisation, and savagery that makes man look feeble by comparison!" - Dr Medford ("Them!")
"What we're talking about here is an organism that imitates other life forms and imitates them perfectly. It could have imitated a million life forms on a million planets. Now, it wants Earth!" - Dr Blaire ("The Thing")
"If the sales are good, we'll make another." - Ridley Scott
Ridley Scott directs "Alien". A haunted house tale, the film watches as the blue-collar crew of the space-freighter Nostromo are systematically killed by a mysterious alien. This alien, slimy and phallic, functions as a kind of roving penis, a reproductive machine which exists only to rape, inseminate and reproduce.
Much of the film finds an astronaut called Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) being menaced by both the biomechanical horror of the creature, and the cold inhumanity of a certain, very 1970s corporatism (epitomized in the film by scheming computers, duplicitous robots and traitorous companies). Ripley's softer, feminine instincts are repeatedly conspired against in the "Alien" franchise. This has led to Scott's film being labelled "feminist". It's not. Ripley merely reprises your typical damsel-in-distress role, stripping down to her panties, fleeing secreting penises and choking on phallic Playboy magazines, all for the audience. By the franchise's end, she would become the alien queen; the source of the beasts.
As is now well known, the film's sets and creature designs were inspired by both Swiss designer H.R. Giger and "Heavy Metal" artist Mobius. Their visions, coupled to Ridley Scott's own elaborate storyboards, were responsible for "Alien's" budget being graciously tripled by the film's producers. The money men saw a hit on their hands. "Jaws 2" became the highest grossing sequel the year before.
The film's tone mixes cinema verite, classy Kubrickian camera work and B movie peek-a-boos. It was one of several films to bring the venereal horror of Giallo splatter cinema into the mainstream. Despite a strong start, though, "Alien" gets increasingly predictable. The film differs from other slasher movies only in the way it makes overt the sexual undercurrents bed-rocking the violence of its siblings. Dripping with post-coital atmosphere, Scott's set pieces are staged as literal rapes and overt intergalactic sex sessions, making explicit the unconscious of other slasher movies, with their maulings, penetrations and blood orgasms. And as with most slasher movies, Scott's characters exist only to be killed. They behave stupidly throughout and are thinly sketched.
Though the 1960s and 70s were seen as cinema's liberative, post-studio era, the period's permissiveness had the opposite effect and quickly spawned an increasingly rigid film industry. One sees this most clearly with the "horror classics" of the 1970s, most of which were redecorated B movies of the past, only now with A-list budgets, newfandangled gore and modern special effects. These films pandered to the audience's basest instincts, pandered to the audience's most self aggrandising understanding of itself, but they raked in big cash and offered the possibility of incessant sequels, so all was fine; the model works, so it procreates. Today virtually all Hollywood movies are B movies, retro, or exploitation films glossed up in glitz. And as their goal is to tap into increasingly harder highs, and as anything over a pg12 rating is now viewed as being too niche (or "demographically conservative" in producer speak), one eventually ends up with schizophrenic horror movies like Ridley Scott's own "Prometheus", which simultaneously tries to recapture the shocks of the past (Caesarean sections/abortions replacing "chest births") whilst also being bloodless and sanitised. You know. For kids, gore hounds and nostalgic old timers all at once.
Most of the "classics" of 1970s horror "updated" or "dressed up" their predecessors. Spielberg's "Jaws", for example, borrows the score and various scenes/shots from "Creature From The Black Lagoon", whilst Cameron's "Aliens" climaxes with the ending to "Them!". Ridley Scott's predecessors are Ford's "The Lost Patrol", Hawks' "The Thing", and horror schlock like "Fiend Without a Face", and "It! The Terror from Beyond Space". The film's narrative structure, which tricks you into thinking its a tale about men, before turning a female astronaut into its central hero, recalls "Psycho" and Hooper's "Chainsaw Massacre".
Old B movies, though, are Scott's chief inspiration, particularly Mario Bava's underrated "Planet of the Vampires", which also features a space crew responding to a distress signal, landing on an alien planet, exploring a derelict ship, finding giant alien skeletons and coming under attack from monsters. Scott's horse-shoe alien ship is also Bava's, as are his smoky, rocky planet surfaces, shots of helmets next to flight chairs, alien climates, alien interiors and flame thrower guns. Scott's big set piece, in which his crew stumble across the giant skeleton of an ancient alien, even recalls an identical scene in Bava's flick. Elsewhere Scott's face hugging critters recall the creatures of "Fiend Without a Face", and his last act, with air ducts, ventilation shaft encounters and a climax in which the alien is blown out an airlock, recalls "It! The Terror from Beyond Space", another film in which astronauts respond to distress signals and explore alien derelicts. Scott would deny the influence of "Planet of the Vampires" for many years, but seems to have finally admitted it with "Prometheus". In addition to other similarities, Prometheus' crew are unmistakeably wearing the skintight suits of Bava's own astronauts.
8/10 – Worth multiple viewings.