Episode 40 – Classic Movie Club Alien/Aliens

In this episode, Liz and Heather introduce their very first Classic Movie Club: Alien/Aliens in preparation for the upcoming 30th anniversary Aliens cast reunion at Comicpalooza 2016 June 17 – 19. Classic Movie Club Alien Aliens

We are combining both Alien and Aliens in this review. We are looking forward to other Classic Movie Clubs in the future.

Classic Movie Club Alien Aliens

Alien

Released in 1979. This movie was pretty tense, and we can see this at the time being scary as shit. There was so much tension and claustrophobia in this movie – It’s a capsule in space…nowhere to go. The feeling of being trapped is probably the deepest human fear. These movies force you to face the fear since there is no escape.

We watched the two movies back-to-back and it was very interesting to see the difference both the Director and script can make.

One of the main antagonists in Alien is the computer – Mother. Also, Ian Holm’s character turns out to be a robot, and they didn’t know he was a robot (and the robot goes nuts). The robot has a directive that the main goal is to get the alien – crew expendable. “Holy blinking lights!” – Heather. They had a pretty awesome light bulb budget. If you have photo epileptic seizures, you may want to skip this one.

The Alien – that shit escalated quickly! It went from Face Hugger to penis with teeth to massive monster in a matter of hours. It was also ONE monster, rather than a bunch. It almost makes it scarier, because you just don’t know where it is.

Self destruct sequence – This is the most complex self-destruction sequence we have ever seen. And then, there is no way to cancel it. They should change that. This has inspired some of the favorite things that pop up in other movies – like the self-destruct sequence in Spaceballs.

Cryo – Why does Ripley have to get in with only porn panties? Can you not go into deep sleep in a jumpsuit? Also, she is the only one to make it out of the first movie, which is tragic. At the end of the second movie, she will be the only one to get out. From an HR perspective, they are going to start thinking it’s her.

None of this would have happened if John Hurt could have kept his damn balance.

Classic Movie Club Alien Aliens

Aliens

Released 1986 – The premise here is that Ripley’s escape pod has been found 58 years after the fact. The cat is also still alive, so probably the oldest cat on record. Now, Ripley has been found by “the company” and has been asked to go back to this planet as a consultant under the agreement that they would NOT be trying to get any of the aliens off the planet, but to rescue the 70 families that were now living on the teraformed planet. The company has a giant military presence in order to make this happen.

James Cameron tends to use the same actors in all of his movies, so we recognize these people, but they don’t have enough personality to form a connection with. We were kind of rooting for the aliens over the humans, since the humans were just annoying stereotypes. We are talking to you, Bill Paxton. We LOVE you, but for all of the 1980s, you played nothing but whiny bitch characters.

We thought originally that Paul Reisser’s character was going to be the romantic interest, but fortunately that didn’t happen. More so, he turned out to be a rapist. Then, there is the character of Newt. We really like this, but it’s almost like they couldn’t get Ripley into action unless she had a child to mother, and then she would start lactating, and save the day. It felt manipulative. They also trained her on a 2-minute instruction on how to shoot a gun, but when Newt goes missing, she duct tapes two guns together and goes hunting. They could have made her a badass, but it just didn’t have enough build up.

We didn’t find either of the movies scary. Maybe if we watched it back in the day it would have been, but we now see things that are so much more graphic that this didn’t hold up in the scary-genre. Aliens was a decent action movie, but there were a lot of things that could have been different.

Classic Movie Club Alien Aliens

Come find us at Comicpalooza June 17 – 19! We will be at the Aliens panel for sure, and will also be participating in a Women in Podcasting panel on Friday, the 17th.

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ElizabethBlessitt Written by:

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