Growing up ALIEN: PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES, THE TERROR WITHIN

I was a young kid when ALIEN(1979) came out, too young to see it in theaters and VHS didn't exist, and we knew it would be edited to death when it finally cam to the ABC Movie of the Week, so it was all but lost to us, except through the blanched faces of the adults who'd seen it, and "survived." We could try to read the novelization, maybe, but we weren't up to that level of reader comprehension. When we were finally able to rent it on VHS a few years later, we were still terrified every step of the way. We watched it together, two families, as an army, rented along with COAL MINER'S DAUGHTER back in the early days of VHS. And yet, the whole thing with the robot gurgling white liquid and being reactivated took me out of the suspense-generating, all-consuming dread, as if that dread was so rare and delicious I resented Ian Holm taking me out of the zone--I'd forgotten all about the alien threat while he was doing his whole milk spew thing, and noticing the alien patiently waited until that whole scene had played out to resume its attacks.

And what was the deal with going back for Jones, the damn cat? They didn't even have that cat in the film until they wandered out in the loading dock. Still The stomach burster was unforgettable, but especially on the pan and scan, a lot of the great composition was lost. We were used to that, of course and if we didn't see it in the theater we didn't know what we were missing.

Then: the summer of ALIENS (1986), and I had just finished my freshman year at Syracuse. My girl and I still had to kind of get our courage up-- the whole point of the gore and trauma was to get us scared of seeing more of it, scared every moment and around every corner. The first stretch involving space soldiers investigating the complex kept the theater I saw it in on pins and needles.

Alien: Resurrection (Extended Cut)

But by the end of ALIENS our collective fear of the boogeyman had been stretched once too often, and as a result had militarized us. Now when I see Ripley running terrified down Nostromo corridors I feel nothing as far as suspense, instead I'm thinking about Ridley Scott's commentary track, wherein he notes that Sigourney Weaver's running down the same corridor, over and over again, spray-painted different colors of gold and silver to give the illusion of difference. Not having to worry about the physical threats awaiting the final girl is a relief; repetition-compulsion disorder had proven its worth. Ripley was weaponized -- "Let her alone, you bitch!!" got every ALIENS audience to its feet. By the time of ALIEN: RESURRECTION in 1997, just trying to generate suspense from aliens stalking humans seemed pointless, and Ripley being super tough was just par for the course. She was now half-alien herself, like Sil in SPECIES, but any declaration of 'you bitch' could now be only directed at herself, and there was no longer any recognizable human in the cast, replaced by French director Jean Pierre-Jeunet's METAL HURLANT-style cartoonish bizarro world exaggeration, so that the only cool scene at all is of the always welcome and super-cool Michael Wincott discussing payments and acquisition of sleeping cargo for hosts while having a cigar and drink with military commander Dan Hedaya (below). But even there, Jean-Pierre Jeunet makes sure Hedaya's eyebrows are even more disturbing than usual. There's no shred of identifiable normal to latch onto - just layers of exaggerated CITY OF LOST CHILDREN-style over-artsiness.


Then there's the alien itself. In the first film it was truly other -- there was nothing remotely like it, nothing we'd seen before - not even remotely close to any of our species except in the most preliminary or advanced of stages. But by RESURRECTION it was just another smart mammal, making noises that sounded like pitch shifted lions, barking dogs and braying donkeys all at once-- the stages in the original design by now so familiar as to be more nostalgic than uncanny.

Galaxy of Terror

That's just human culture though, ALIEN's over-exposure-disseminated fear level drainage was inevitable. Throughout its long gestation there have been imitators and films that it in turn imitated, to the point John Hurt even shows up in SPACEBALLS (1987), less than ten years later, and gives birth to a Vaudeville-kicking alien, a kids' movie by all accounts -- so an alien bursting out of a stomach goes from R-rated shock to PG-rated joke in under ten years.

Hurt at the diner - SPACEBALLS (1987)

Copy cats abounded too, James Cameron even got the job for ALIENS partially based on his success with turning out a lot of atmosphere on minimal dollars as art designer for Corman's ALIEN-imitating GALAXY OF TERROR (1981). Which makes sense, as a lot of the baroque majesty and sheer alienness of Ridley Scott's original is gone for Cameron's sequel, replaced by an erector set military gun locker aesthetic and cool feminist weaponization ala TERMINATOR. But not all films in the ALIEN imitation canon lost the Ridley Scott look, and ALIEN itself is just a very strong central link in a vast web of motifs that have been simmering for 60 years. Time enough for a space pod to carry your frozen body across the vast expanse between 1965 and 1989 for example, and with that...


This New World Alien rip smartly moves the Nostromo  underground in the Mojave desert on a post-plague Earth, where only snakes and wandering mutant gargoyles still roam. Aside from some terribly duck-like rows of teeth, the gargoyles aren't quite as ridiculous as most monsters in big rubber suits shambling around after suicidally slow-witted prey, and their craftiness and invulnerability make them formidable as hell, able to jump out of small spaces while being seven feet tall, as if inheriting all the DNA of both The Terminator and Michael Myers. Uniforms are very similar to ALIEN and there’s even a Yaphet Kotto-Harry Dean Stanton-esque pair of shiftless ensigns, drinking homemade ‘shine and grumbling about pay raises for “this kind of duty” which by now scans as merely quaint as opposed to appalling. But this is a Corman production, and that means when a surviving human is found running through the Mojave brush, she's sexy, terrified, and pregnant, and thanks to the reticent scalpel of the doctor, her abortion arrives too late and the baby gargoyle comes out and even runs across the room like he's freshly de-Kaned.

Monster rapes were all but signaling a feminist backlash in Corman productions, and with good reason but they gave him R-rating guarantees and allowed for a two-for-one shock--1) the pre-PC lurid pulp cover fetishizing of sexy girls having their clothes ripped off by all sorts of claws, ghost hands, or centipede legs; 2) the inevitable ALIEN-esque cesarian. And somehow it's less disturbing that monsters are doing it, largely for a kind of pro-creation similar to the ALIEN gestation, rather than my fellow man for frat boy-style misogyny kicks.

Star Andreef vs. Wade

That aside, I admire the ballsy pro-choice angle when Sue (Star Andreeff) demands an abortion while the lady doctor refuses and we're allowed to wonder if it's because she's got designs on Sue's man, the 80s coiffed hero David (Andrew "Kirk Douglas’s telekinetic son in The Fury" Stevens); she says the reason is that Sue's too weak to undergo such a surgery, and that there's plenty of time to do it tomorrow, and that it's probably Andrew "Kirk" Douglas's baby. Oh man for an alternate future with ultrasound. At any rate, David's the sort who
thinks lugging a crossbow around in tight quarters is going to do shit against an invincible giant heavily toothed, clawed, armored, and muscled foe. But his hair is perfect.


Most of the cast dies in their Darwinian order: including George "Endless Fords" Kennedy and Sue herself, who thinks that--if her man's in trouble battling an invincible stealthy and rabidly horny monster three floors below--the best thing to do is hop in an elevator, unarmed, and come to his rescue while screaming at the top of her lungs. But the rapid cast disappearance is only the start of the greatness, because we end up with a wounded terrified under-armed couple who communicate mainly one a two-way intercom as they try to obliterate a monster mutant whose only weakness is his painful sensitivity to Steven's dog whistle--and the last stretch is just the three of them locked in endless tussle like THE TERMINATOR meets CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON.

And there’s a dog in the film who ably helps out in cool ways (he’s their tracker and early warning system and fearlessly distracts and attacks the 'gargoyles') and even survives at the end. I'm not spoiler alerting for that, because dogs get a notorious bad break in horror films. When one survives, it's a cause for celebration.


So... skewed pro-choice compassion, a reasonably clear idea of where each person is in relation to one another at any given time in the deep compound, and the usual quick rush Corman-brand momentum all conspire to make TERROR off-worlds better than most ALIEN rip-offs. If only they hired Thierry Notz to make ALIEN 3 the way they hired Cameron for ALIENS, someone with a knack for doing a lot with a little instead of that cold misanthropic clinician David Fincher who does so very little with so much. If I didn't mention ALIEN 3 at all in the introduction, it's because Fincher gutted everything that was great about the first two films, setting the film entirely on a dismal mud planet prison that could be anywhere in any closed-down prison anywhere in shit-field England, so he can hire a bunch of Brit thespians, shave everyone's heads, and roll around in the mud, so instead of a sexy Ripley or a weaponized Ripley we get an almost gang-raped Ripley who needs to be rescued by a self-righteous Muslim, and the dog, oh goddamned you, Fincher... and for what? So another CGI shape gets thrown in another dumb cauldron of liquid metal?


I remember renting this from Blockbuster while visiting my brother in Arizona 20 years ago-ish, and not being able to understand what the hell was going on half the time thanks to bad pan and scanning, and seeing double thanks a 1.75 liter of Seagram's gin, one hits, and constantly being interrupted by Fred's dumbass buddies--But hey, that's what it's all about: the dry desert, shooting the empties in the backyard with an air rifle, picking on the dumbass friends of your little brother, and always on the look-out for monsters, to give us just one excuse to bring out the heavy ordinance. Leave us alone, you bitches! We said. And they did. And god damn them.


FARTHER:

The Evolver Virus: PROMETHEUS, The Dead Files (10-21-12)