50: The Alien Within (1990, Ted Newsom [and Kenneth J. Hall & Fred Olen Ray])

Owned version: The Retromedia/Bayview Entertainment DVD released in 2013.

Acquired: October 18th, 2016 from Amazon. (I also own a copy of the VHS which I bought on eBay before I found out this got a DVD release. I will likely never watch that tape as a result.)

Seen before?: No.

After the last couple longer pieces, it feels nice to get something I can basically blow off.

According to the back cover of the DVD, The Alien Within is "[...] a project undertaken by writer/director Ted Newsom... in which he would construct a new movie from the bones of an earlier film, Evil Spawn. In doing so, Newsom created a new universe of characters..."

Now allow me to translate this from box-copy hype to reality: The Alien Within is literally just Evil Spawn with twenty minutes of extra bullshit added into it. This extra bullshit is shot with an entirely different cast, so none of this interacts with the older film in any meaningful way. In fact, one of the rare times the story requires that the new cast actually come into contact with the old is when two investigators discover the body of John Carradine; while Carradine surely would have reprised his role had he not been dead for two years already, Newsom achieves the desired effect by cutting to a freeze-frame of Carradine with his head bowed into his chest. As a further twist of the knife, the new footage is video-shot where the original was film. Whatever, this is a garbage cash-grab of a film, akin to the old grindhouse trick of creating a new title and ad campaign for an old film in order to wring a few extra dollars out of it, and I'm not wasting any more time on it. I'll write a proper review when I get to Evil Spawn (which, hilariously, is included on this disc as a "special feature").

One small point of amusement: The cast in the new footage is expectedly terrible, and how could they not be? The majority of the new stuff is static scenes of people waiting in cars or in office buildings, observing things happening in another film or talking about the things that have happened and are going to happen. I did think it might be amusing to build a film like this, centered on and constructed around another film, and then never cut in the older film, just scene after scene of people talking about stuff that happened offscreen somewhere else. But I digress - the reason I brought up the cast is to offer praise to the one member who makes something of his role, the inexhaustible Richard Harrison. He alone seems comfortable with the assignment, finding ways to ham it up even when responding to nothing. Because of course he'd be good at this - as Godfrey Ho's favorite white guy, he spent much of the '80s emoting to material from other films, material where most times he didn't even know what the context would be. Now that's a damn professional. I feel like he would have killed in the modern greenscreen blockbuster era.

49: Alien: Resurrection (1997, Jean-Pierre Jeunet)

Owned version: The Fox Blu-ray released in 2010 as part of the Alien Anthology set.

Acquired: January 4th, 2016 from Amazon.

Seen before?: A few times in the late '90s - I estimate once from the VHS release and at least two more times via pay cable. I don't think that I've seen it at all in the 21st century, so definitely never from this disc.

What strange beast is Alien: Resurrection, anyway? If you're going to follow up an unrelentingly grim experience like Alien³, I can understand the impulse to course-correct into something a touch lighter. And, on the face of it, Jean-Pierre Jeunet seems like a good guy for that - Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children both achieve a tricky balance, indulging in fierce grotesquerie whilst maintaining a puckish, joyful spirit. But then, his subsequent career doubles down on the whimsy to rapidly diminishing ends, so maybe Marc Caro was the balancing influence he needed. And here, working with a Joss Whedon script that exhibits all the typical hallmarks of Whedonism, Jeunet gets garish. No, scratch that - he made a full-on goddamn cartoon.

Complementing the smartass personality of the script with a similarly outsized visual and performative lunacy seems interesting in theory. In other situations, it could work wonders. Here, though, the overblown comic-book mania, all tight sweaty bug-eyed closeups and odd canted angles, exists at odds with the studied writerly cool. (Not that I'm letting Whedon off the hook here - as usual, nothing bad in the film is his fault according to him, despite the presence of clumsy, possibly undeliverable, unmistakably Whedon dialogue like, "I am not the man with whom to fuck!") This turns Alien: Resurrection into a distended thing that works only in brief moments and flights of loopy inspiration, bits where the Venn diagrams of the disparate parts find a sliver of overlap.

Take, for instance, the bit with where Dan Hedaya, as hirsute human cartoon General Perez, straight-up eats a damn lemon. It's an interesting bit and instructive for the film. It occurs during an otherwise-dull dialogue exchange; Hedaya and Michael Wincott are dancing around the details of some illegal deal they've arranged, being kept vague for the purposes of silly late-film revelations. Meanwhile, there's the bright yellow of that lemon peel beaming a visual contrast to the silver, orange, khaki-brown and rust-brown that comprise the rest of the scene. The look of the film in general deserves comment - while it presages the orange/teal obsession of modern desaturated blockbusters, this practically blazes with light, with every surface rendered shiny, hot and reflective. All the better to illuminate small details, like that lemon - a sore thumb attached to a broken hand - and most of what is memorable in Alien: Resurrection is similar bits of little business amid the miasma: Dominique Pinon tearing his wheelchair apart to build a gun, Sigourney Weaver casually tossing up a basketball to make a behind-the-back basket, the spectacularly goofy acts of hypergore, a full-body cotton surgical dressing being pierced and shed like an amniotic sac, Brad Dourif pontificating in front of imprisoned Xenomorphs with his chin jutted out in a burlesque of delirious weirdness.

The casting is crucial (aside from poor miscast Winona Ryder) and a key reason why, for all its deficits, Alien: Resurrection is oddly, compulsively watchable. The cast is stacked with memorable, visually distinctive character actors - beyond Wincott, Hedaya and Dourif, there's also Ron Perlman, J.E. Freeman, Leland Orser; as the Easter-Island profile of Perlman, the sunken malicious grin of Freeman or the hyperventilating panic of Orser seem like they should be framed as splash panels anyway, they help the comic-book feel of the direction slide down a bit easier. Then, of course, there's Weaver. As in Alien³, she's the glue that keeps the film from crumbling into its component parts. Her Ripley here, cloned from a sample salvaged off Fiorina 161, is stranger, more ambiguous, a hybrid creature who is unsure of her purpose or capabilities but knows she's dangerous and relishes that. This allows Weaver to play much of this with a delicious sinister bemusement, a note she throws her lean, towering frame into with gusto. While some of the hardass stuff in the script doesn't come off, everything Weaver gets is delivered with aplomb, whether calmly sizing up a knife-wielding Ryder or threatening to rip out Perlman's tongue. Yet, as before, there is left room for other emotional beats, here expressed through the Ripley clone's uncertainty about herself and confusion over foggy memories. This culminates in the film's best scene and maybe only one where the screenplay and direction truly mesh, the discovery of the clone room; the sequence shows off Jeunet's kitsch-as-surrealism ethos at its most productively nasty, with its jarred mystery fetuses, grotesque warped mutations and suicidal quasi-Ripley with approximately a thousand tubes leading in and out of it. It also gets Weaver's best work, a heady mixture of betrayal, heartache and bewilderment. That the scene culminates in a frenzied explosion of violence is no surprise; that it turns out to be a mass act of angry mercy is.

Ripley's hybrid status is ultimately mirrored by the new Alien Queen extracted from her at the beginning and its offspring, a genuine human-Xenomorph crossbreed. But the new live-birth reproductive system granted the Queen neuters all the dangerous aspects of the Xenomorph - about the only good thing to come from that idea is a cocooned Dourif yelling marvelously ripe dialogue about, "HER WOMB." And the offspring is.... well, I'm not sure where the best place to go with this would have been, but a furious dewy-eyed infant with Marfan syndrome seems like not the best option. The object lesson, I think, is: Some hybrids are better than others. I wonder if the divided makers of Alien: Resurrection intended that.

48: Alien³ (1992, David Fincher)

Owned version: The Fox Blu-ray released in 2010 as part of the Alien Anthology set.

Acquired: January 4th, 2016 from Amazon.

Seen before?: Twice before these two most recent viewings - once probably in December of 1992 on VHS, at which point I thought very highly of it, and once on May 16th, 2017, at which point I questioned that previously high opinion and wrote it off as me being a know-nothing 12-year-old. This also happened with The Abyss, and I guess there's a potential pattern emerging... or maybe not.

 Alien³ is an open wound of a film and also an openly wounded film. It's a nihilistic howl of a film that follows up its adrenaline-fueled crowd-rouser of a predecessor by stripping away the triumph of Aliens, then stripping and cutting further until Ripley has nothing left to lose except herself and arranges it so she welcomes such an oblivion. It's also a film where the studio responded to this nihilism by taking it into the editing room and feeding its soul into a shredder. In an attempt to carve it into a certain running time and certain summer-movie shape, Fox ironically destroyed its actual shape.

Watching the "assembly cut" available on the Blu-ray drives home what a fascinating film this was set up to be and also illuminates why the theatrical cut, though better than my 2017 viewing would have it, is still something of a misfire. The version released to theaters in 1992 cruises along at a decent clip, devoting the majority of its time to Ripley's paranoia about a potential facehugger infestation aboard her wrecked escape vessel and the burgeoning relationship between Ripley and medical officer Clemens (played with great pursed-lip gravity by Charles Dance)... right up to the point roughly halfway through where Clemens has his brain unceremoniously ventilated by the latest Xenomorph-on-the-loose, after which it collapses into a series of scenes where anonymous bald men in sackcloth are picked off one after another. (To its credit, the film itself seems to realize this - witness the late scene where assistant warden Aaron tries to give an order to an inmate only to realize he doesn't know his name.)

The problem, made very clear by the longer cut, is that the Ripley/Clemens relationship gets emphasized at the expense of every other character - much of what was removed gives dimension to many of the prisoners, both in terms of individual personality and as pieces of a whole in the society on Fiorina 161. Whereas in the theatrical we're merely told about the religion practiced by the monastic inmates, the assembly gives a deeper look at the day-to-day faith that gets most of these guys through, especially Charles S. Dutton's fervent Dillon and Paul McGann's holy-fool Golic. Golic's presence doesn't even make sense in the theatrical - he witnesses a couple other inmates get kacked, goes assumedly bonkers and then gets tied to a bed in the infirmary, left and forgotten after Clemens's death, which hardly justifies McGann's fourth billing.

Turns out McGann had a whole subplot, one the film damn near hinged on - his witnessing of the slaughter, complete with baptism-by-blood, turns him from a believer in the apocalyptic religion of Fiorina 161 to one who believes the apocalypse has arrived and it's his job to see it through. Hacking that inelegantly out of the film not only loses the point of the character and not only loses at least one of the film's most extraordinary images (Golic's eyes framed in light as he releases the Xenomorph and, in a way, achieves a transcendent release), it castrates the whole reason behind giving these guys a belief system at all. Ripley's journey towards martyrdom and savior of humanity carries a lot more heft when her final stop on the way there is damn near literally her fighting the Devil escaped out of Hell and onto this planet of fire and steel and forgotten men who believe the End had been nigh for some time because they don't fit into society's plan any other way. Her final act of sacrifice makes sense on its own, but it's even more potent when made the climactic act of a film with a fanatical concentration on acts of sacrifice... at least two of which didn't survive into the theatrical cut.

But while the studio cut is significantly weakened, Alien³ is a difficult film to fully dismiss, because even its compromised form houses a significant amount of exciting work. Fincher has every reason to disown this film, but it's undeniable that his impressive visual sense gets a full workout - the dominant decaying metal-and-rust scheme, the ghost of industrial progress leeched of life and color on a dying corporate waste planet, follows logically from the collapsing systems depicted in both Alien and Aliens, so much so that the occasional splash of color (e.g. amid the chilled slate-gray of the mortuary lockers, the sorrowful scarlet of the flowers attached to Newt's locker) sears the eye. But the presence of the foundry, filled with hot oranges and overripe flesh tones, gives an early contrast that slowly bleeds out into the tunnels and ducts of Fiorina, lit only by torches as they are, until the moribund colony appears to have been overwhelmed by cleansing fire by the final chase. This is accentuated by the constant layer of sweat and grime that appear to be a constant feature of life on Fiorina; the heat becomes panic, and the panic becomes overwhelming, inescapable. (The famed shot of the Xenomorph confronting Ripley in extreme closeup works in no small part because Ripley is almost as moist and drippy as her adversary.) Fincher also favors low-angle shots that emphasize the notion that the Xenomorph could drop into any scene at any time, keeping the tension high even through the voluminous dialogue scenes. It's deliciously satisfying when one of those low-angle shots pays off, i.e. the death of Warden Andrews.

And then there's Weaver. The best justification for the studio gutting the religious angle is that they wanted the film to concentrate almost exclusively on Ripley and her relationship to the creature that she sighs at one point has been in her life so long she's doesn't remember what it's like not to fear it. Weaver's performance here is on the level of her Oscar-nominated turn in Aliens, if not a bit better. The autopsy scene, for instance, is a grueling watch; a lot of that work is done by Weaver's flinches and choked-back sobs, which cut harder and deeper than any bonesaw. I can't think of any other actress, for instance, who could deliver the line, "It's a metaphor, wanna come?" with the exact amount of wry, weary wit that keeps it from sounding too writerly. Nor could many, if any, make Ripley's quick jump into bed with Clemens work as an expression of sexual desire, a parallel desire for something like normalcy, a reaction to extreme stress and an outcropping of grieving all in one loaded look like Weaver does. The relationship with Clemens is as crucial as the previous film's relationship with Newt, as it allows Weaver a chance to access the full rainbow of emotions available to her rather than merely the panic and distress that the situation would demand; that this relationship is viciously severed at the midpoint should rend the film in two and nearly does. If it holds together at all, it's because Weaver's forceful turn, agonized in its despair and overwhelming in its ultimate catharsis, wills it to hold. By the end, even the one ally she was allowed, however briefly, to hold on to from Aliens has been torn away from her, turned into "a friendly face" meant to motivate her into cooperation with Weyland-Yutani. Her own body has been turned against her, a vessel for the death of humanity. Everything about her has finally been colonized, stolen, perverted, ruined. But her mind and will remain hers. To the end, that remains hers.