Before we had Lt. Hudson exclaiming “Game over man! Game over!”; before Alien Queens; Aliens with the hots for a cloned Ripley; before Predators (long story); and even before ‘Predaliens’ (ugh... sigh), there was just one... alien, in a movie called... er... Alien.

Let’s get a few things straight early. Alien does not hold up well, technology-wise. All the characters chain-smoke throughout the movie, staring intently at their 70’s style monochrome monitor computers (so wait, this movie isn’t set in the future? Star Wars at least had some holograms), surrounded by a multitude of console lights that make clunky dot matrix sounds and take hours just to come to the conclusion ‘Does Not Compute’.

The movie does, however, hold up incredibly well as a sci-fi horror movie. Why? Because from the moment Kane stumbles (literally) onto that alien egg, even though we just know how it’s going to turn out for everyone bar one (badly), it is the great twists and turns the story goes through getting there that make it worth it… as well as scare the crap out of us along the way.

This inevitable demise couldn’t happen to a nicer crew. We have a pissweak captain, a clumsy second officer, a nefarious Science officer (giving future movie science officers an undeserved bad reputation), a crew member whose sole responsibility appears to be to cry and scream a lot (well, it is a horror movie) and two low-life deckhands who are just in it for the money (so… how’d that turn out for you?). Oh, and a cat, who manages to get half the crew killed. (Bad kitty!)

Above all of this is our (eventual) heroine, Ripley, played by a young Sigourney Weaver. But let’s face it, if she had just thrown the Alien-impregnated Kane back out the airlock like ALL good quarantine-enforcing officers should do, and then kneed Ash in the balls for opening the door, she would have (a) found out that (spoiler alert!) Ash did not actually have said balls and was in fact an android working for ‘The Man’, and (b) we wouldn’t have then had some of the “best” special-effects a mid-sized budget in the 70’s could get you.

Like baby aliens ripping out of your stomach over dinner (the rehydrated deviled eggs were no doubt tainted) then ‘running’ across the table (in a fixed position?)! And heads of androids getting knocked clean off their shoulders, spurting white bodily ‘fluid’ everywhere (um, I might pass on that one). And what was up with that ship design? Surely some of those thousands of colored buttons could be used to just seal the alien off from the safe confines of the bridge, instead of just giving it free license to pick the crew off one by one as you wander around the ship. And even worse, why was it designed in such a way that requires crawling around in dank tubes to manually seal areas off, with only a lighter and cattle prod to protect against whatever may lurk in the dark. (Hint: the Alien!)

So, yes, perhaps this movie does hold up better as horror than sci-fi. It even has one of the most vital of horror movie clichés: the heroine getting changed in her underwear (not that I’m complaining—Sigourney was hot back then, even with all that hair), blissfully unaware that the big baddy is far from dead and is in fact in the room (shock!). Still, Alien did give us more of a ‘doom and gloom’ view of the cold harsh realities of space, and so at least for that, it should be remembered fondly.

The subsequent movies went in for more action than horror (one can only imagine that production meeting: “So, how are you going to top Alien?”; “Picture this... more Aliens!”; “I think you’re on to something, James!”), but the sci-fi was still there at its heart. That, and Sigourney.

And a stuntman in a black rubber suit.

  -- William Cashin