Alien (1979)

[sus]

android had to be English!

It's like how C-3PO is a British butler

There's something lodged in the American psyche about British class systems, subservience, adherence to/upholding of social reality

 

[version]

There's a novelisation of Alien by a guy called Alan Dean Foster who's done the same for loads of films as well as writing his own stuff. I remember looking at the cover of my dad's copy long before I ever saw the film.

 

[sus]

England stands for civilization, the place of

polite tablecrystal clothnapkinmannered society

New World stands for Nature, so you get Transcendentalist-Pragmatism, the philosophy of the Woodsman.

 

[version]

Pitch Black's another crew-a-long-way-from-home thing.

 

[sus]

Heart of Darkness is the clothnapkinned colonial governor losing his cloth napkins in the jungle

Apocalypse Now is America turned colonial governor, become its Father Europe to an even further west (the East; it all loops around; in our beginning is our end; in the New World we discover the Old Ways; in the spacefuture we discover our seedorigin)

 

[Murphy]

Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a bit obvious yet still has an iconic ending which hasn’t aged at all

maybe not as ‘spacey’ (not you Kev) being firmly grounded on Earth but its momentum builds wonderfully

the o.g is solid too in a style more akin to post-war Cold War paranoia, as a unifying threat to humanity presences itself and, yes, we still clock on far too late

 

[Murphy]

Outland has elements of scene and set designs v similar to Alien’s ship interiors, just without a Geiger counter alien representation or menace, aka a ropey detective yarn with dodgy space trucker caps (isn’t there a film called Space Truckers? let’s not google check for once)

 

[0bleak]

As weird as it may seem, the 1978 version of Snatchers is almost like a "familiar comfort" to me, having seen it so many times.
and I still can't believe that I went all these years without putting the completely obvious 2-and-2 together that Donald Sutherland is the mullet vampire's father.

 

[Murphy]

fingerless gloved vampires with mullets?

death to America!

nah, I know what you mean, it cropped up at Christmas over the years and it is peak Sutherland (alongside Don’t Look Now)

 

[IdleRich]

Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a bit obvious yet still has an iconic ending which hasn’t aged at all

maybe not as ‘spacey’ (not you Kev) being firmly grounded on Earth but its momentum builds wonderfully

the o.g is solid too in a style more akin to post-war Cold War paranoia, as a unifying threat to humanity presences itself and, yes, we still clock on far too late

View attachment 21768

One of the only films with three decent versions

 

[IdleRich]

As weird as it may seem, the 1978 version of Snatchers is almost like a "familiar comfort" to me, having seen it so many times.
and I still can't believe that I went all these years without putting the completely obvious 2-and-2 together that Donald Sutherland is the mullet vampire's father.

You're eating maggots michael...

Also Wilhelm Reich's father in Cloudbusting

 

[Murphy]

There’s a 3rd version? Gotta drop the knowledge here Rich, night shift is dragging and an underling is our go-to torrent man

 

[version]

There’s a 3rd version? Gotta drop the knowledge here Rich, night shift is dragging and an underling is our go-to torrent man

Ferrara did the third one. It's a bit cheesy and 90s, but it's got Forrest Whittaker in it and some of it's genuinely unsettling. Some great angles and lighting too, lots of Lynchian interiors shot like a noir.

It's set on an army base, so it's got a different slant to it than the other two. It's all about military families. There's a chilling scene where the main family's son's in school and the teacher has them all paint something. They hold them up one by one and every child but him has done the same fluorescent pink, pod-like mass of tendrils. You can see him looking around, not understanding, thinking he's done something wrong. It's really effective.

"Where you gonna go, where you gonna run, where you gonna hide? Nowhere... 'cause there's no one like you left."

 

[Murphy]

Ta! And behold, Archive hosts for free = result:

 

[version]

The way they do the pods in that one's really something.

 

[version]

One of the most frightening things about the alien in the original film, before we found out it was definitely a bioweapon in Prometheus, was the possibility nature had produced something like that. The perfect organism. Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility.

 

[IdleRich]

But it's not that perfect cos don't the predators hunt them for fun?

 

[IdleRich]

In the shameless Alien rip-off Inseminoid the alien wins

Inseminoid (titled Horror Planet in the United States) is a 1981 British science fiction horror film directed by Norman J. Warren and starring Judy Geeson, Robin Clarke and Stephanie Beacham, along with Victoria Tennant in one of her early film roles. The plot concerns a team of archaeologists and scientists who are excavating the ruins of an ancient civilisation on a distant planet. One of the women in the team (Geeson) is impregnated by an alien creature and taken over by a mysterious intelligence, driving her to murder her colleagues one by one and feed on them.

 

[IdleRich]

Also in that thing Life if you've seen that. A film that I found incredibly frustrating cos they waste so many chances to kill the thing.

 

[version]

But it's not that perfect cos don't the predators hunt them for fun?

Not in the first film, also 'perfect' doesn't necessarily mean 'invincible' and the predators are an insane culture who think being brutally killed by things like the xenomorph is the most respectable way to go out. They're not operating according to any human sense of 'fun'.