Horror movie review by Jeff Thomson – ALIEN – The Last Movie that Scared Me

The Last Movie that Scared Me

I just turned sixty-one a couple days ago, and in all those years, I’ve seen one hell of a lot of horror movies. Most of them haven’t been very good. Some of them, however, have been awesome.
I grew up in Chicago at a time when there were only (at most) seven channels: ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, WGN, and two channels on the UHF end of the dial, 32 and 44 – the benefits of being raised in a major market city. Universal Pictures had recently sold their classic Monsters (Dracula, Frankenstein, the Mummy, the Wolfman, etc, etc.), and the various channels were getting their money’s worth. Naturally, all the other studios got in on the action and our airwaves were chock full of reasons to be scared. Alfred Hitchcock presented his delightfully twisted suspense stories, Rod Serling gave us the Twilight Zone, and somebody else added the Outer Limits. The original Star Trek offered new episodes every week. It was, all-in-all, a glorious time to be a kid.
For some reason, the Powers That Be in the TV Universe decided it would be a good idea to periodically broadcast the 1933 classic, King Kong, always at 10:30pm, and always on a Friday or Saturday. My father would make my brother and I go to bed early, just so he could wake us up to watch it with him. I couldn’t have been more than five or six.

This might explain a lot.

Or it could be sheer coincidence that I grew up to tell stories of zombies and demons and gratuitously naked and bloody screaming cheerleaders. Anything is possible, I suppose.
I did not, however, share this bit of autobiographical fluff in an effort to demonstrate how well-versed in horror movies I am. As it happens, I kind of am, almost by default, but let us veer away from such self-aggrandizement and head directly to the meat of my point: At sixty-one years old, I’m pretty jaded when it comes to things going bump in the night.

The last movie to truly scare the crap out of me debuted in 1979. I was home on leave from boot camp, after having the US Coast Guard scramble my brains for nine weeks. Myself and ten or eleven of my friends went to see a ten pm showing of the movie everybody was talking about. And why shouldn’t they? It came with what may very well be the greatest tag line ever: In Space No One Can Hear You Scream.

We were in line waiting to go in when the previous showing let out, and all the people who’d just seen this horror masterpiece came filing past us. The expressions on their faces were a mixture of terror and wicked glee. Many of them were saying “Oh my God!” in frightened whispers.

We were pumped.

The movie began slowly. Nothing really happened for the first twenty minutes, but we didn’t care. We’d been suitably warned by our predecessors.
For those few who’ve been living on a remote Pacific island, where Japanese soldiers think WW2 is still going on, here’s the basic synopsis of the story: A towing vessel, the Nostromo, is hauling a cargo of mineral ore through the vastness of space, with its crew sound asleep in their suspended animation chambers. The ship’s computer (Mother) wakes them up when they’re only halfway home, to investigate a transmission of unknown origin.

They land on planet LV-426 and find a derelict spacecraft, at the bottom of which are thousands of three-foot- tall eggs. One of the crew members, Kane, begins to examine these eggs and one of them opens.
Naturally, he takes a closer look, at which point some strange creature flies out, smashes through the visor of his helmet and attaches itself to his face. Things go downhill from there. I won’t spoil the surprise of what comes next, for those one or two people who haven’t yet seen it.

With a few exceptions (as, for example, the above helmet smashing) the entire story plays out slowly, and the director, Ridley Scott, does an astounding job of ratcheting up the tension. By the time the ship’s captain, Dallas, is hunting the alien through the ventilation shafts, everyone in the audience is ready to jump right straight out of their own skins.

I distinctly remember turning to my friend about halfway through that scene, as he turned to me and both of us uttered a single syllable word that started with an F, ended with a CK and had forty-seven letter Us in between.

That scared me.
But nothing has since. Not really.

Don’t get me wrong – a whole bunch of fantastic horror movies have been released since Alien, including my favorite of all time, John Carpenter’s The Thing. But none of them have really scared me since then. I kind of liken it to basketball. I saw Michael Jordan play.
Everything else pales in comparison.
I still love horror every bit as much as I used to, although I must confess to finding most of the new stuff tedious, at best. I blame Friday, the 13 th . What are there, a dozen Jason movies now? Final Destination was a good idea. Six movies on, just go away, already! And Saw and Hostel and whatever other example of torture porn you might mention. And yes, the Alien franchise is just as guilty.

Alien was groundbreaking. Aliens was in many ways a better movie, though more action and less pure horror. Alien 3 gets a bad rap because of its title. It’s not a bad movie, on its own.

It’s just not a very good Alien movie. And as for Resurrection, well . . . Nice try, but no. I won’t waste any time with Prometheus or Covenant. If it don’t have Ripley, it ain’t an Alien movie.
And don’t get me started on the Predator crossovers. If you really want to know, take a look at last week’s review. (link in my author box)

In any case, that’s enough for this week, except to formally announce the obvious:
I give the original Alien Five Skulls.