Alien Covenant

I saw the very first Alien film at the old Capitol Theater during its premiere run.  Back then the theaters didn’t do matinée showings all the time, so Mom had to take me to downtown Charleston in the evening to see the film.  It was a haunted house on a spaceship with an alien in place of a ghost.

I really didn’t know what I was in for, but I was excited.  There were several points in the film where I remember being acutely aware of my heart beating a little faster than normal.  There were some genuine scares in the film.

When Aliens came along I was looking for more of the same.  What I got was a war film in space with a large dose of action movie heroics in the final act.  I found the early part of the film to be slow and it took me a couple of re-watches to warm to the film.  It wasn’t like Ridley Scott’s original.

Aliens 3 had a great trailer, but I missed it during its theatrical run.  When I finally did catch it, most likely on HBO, I really disliked it.  I really didn’t like the bald Ripley.  I also disliked the fact that they chose to kill her off at the end of the film.  I haven’t revisited the film, so my opinion could very well have changed.

Alien Resurrection was a little more to my taste.  I caught it at a theater in Beckley after work one Saturday.  For most people this was the nadir of the franchise, but I found it much more entertaining than Alien 3.  Once again this is a film that I have not revisited since my original viewing.

After this film the series shifted gears and did a couple of crossover films with the Predator franchise.  The xenomorphs most recently poked their heads out in Ridley Scott’s return to the world of the Weyland Corporation, Prometheus.  We watched and reviewed Prometheus on the Cinema Toast Crunch podcast (available on iTunes, Stitcher and at http://www.cinematoastcrunch.libsyn.com ).  The film was enjoyable enough, but it wasn’t Alien.

When word got out that Scott was working on a new film actually in the Alien world, I was intrigued.  The trailers looked great.  I was stoked to see this movie and to see it in 3D at the theater.  Unfortunately I wasn’t able to make it during the film’s theatrical run.  Thank God for home video!

The box art they used was eye-catching, and unlike many recent releases, they used the same art across all forms of home media.  The image, also seen in the trailer, is of a xenomorph clutching the outside of a ship and staring into the glass at the human within.  The human is omitted from the box art, but the look, the body language of the alien, tells you it has someone in its sights.  The amazing thing about this art is the use of white.  All of the previous Alien films as well as Prometheus have had very dark colors, usually the black of space spread across their box covers.

I bought the Target exclusive Blu-ray/DVD combo that came packed inside a limited edition book.  I love book packaging for discs and Target, Fox, and Titan really hit a home run with this one.  The design they came up with for holding the discs in place is the absolute best I have ever seen.  The book itself is also a thing of beauty, apparently borrowing content from Titan’s Alien Covenant art book.  I was especially drawn to the cover of the book with its simple line drawing.

Popping open my Sony Blu-ray player, I dropped in the disc and prepared myself for the Alien experience I missed in the theater.  About a week ago my podcast co-host watched Alien Covenant and had told me it was fantastic.  He said it had everything you want from an Alien movie.  I was stoked.  The film starts off slowly.  David the android from Prometheus is having a discussion with his creator.  From there we finally get introduced to the crew of the Covenant, a colonizing ship headed for a new world to settle down.  They also have an android (this one named Walter and also played by Michael Fassbender) who handles the day-to-day activities while the crew waits out the 7 year plus trip in cryo-sleep.

When a freak energy storm damages the ship, the crew is awakened early only to find their captain’s pod is malfunctioning and he bursts into flames.  While making the repairs, the ship picks up a transmission from an unknown planet.  Their scans show that the planet is perfect for colonization and is much closer than their planned destination.  They decide to check it out.

On the planet they find a perfect world with running water and free growing wheat.  There appears to be no animal life, but they know someone sent out the signal they received.  In the course of their search two of the crew inadvertently get infected by a biological agent that quickly gestates inside their bodies and soon produce a white skinned creature similar to the alien xenomorph.  The creature was referred to by fans and filmmakers as the neomorph.  These creatures don’t appear to have the extendable inner teeth of the original xenomorph, but they are still incredibly deadly with a mouth full of razor-sharp teeth.

For the most part this film does the cat and mouse game that the first film did so well.  Instead of trapping the “mice” inside a spaceship, this time they are stuck on a strange world with the creatures and David, the originator of the mysterious transmission.

I enjoyed Alien Covenant, but I had one huge problem with it before the first shot was hitting my TV screen.  We know that this is a prequel to Alien.  This means that the crew cannot survive.  If they survive, they would have warned Earth about the creatures.  Since this never happened, the crew cannot have survived.  At this point it just becomes a question of how they will die and in what order will their deaths occur.  Technically I guess you could argue that Daniels and Tennessee didn’t actually die on-screen.  They were shut inside their pods as the villainous David is revealed to have been masquerading as Walter.  He claims in his log that they died, but there is a chance they survived.  Survived to be killed at a later date by David, I would suggest.  This took away much of the suspense for me.  When someone was in danger I didn’t really feel any sense of hope that they would survive, because even if they did make it out of that peril, their fates were still sealed.  Nothing they could do was going to alter the fact that they were all going to die.

Despite this issue the film has much to recommend.  The effects look great.  The acting is top-notch with Danny McBride turning in a performance that truly surprised me.  Ridley Scott’s direction was good, but not nearly as sharp as his original turn.  All in all not a bad film, and one that I am sure I will like much better on future viewings where the fate of the crew will not be an issue for me.  Obviously on a second viewing I am expected to know who will survive.  I shouldn’t feel that way on a first viewing however.

I give Alien Covenant a 7.5 out of 10.  I feel certain that will rise to an 8 or higher upon a second viewing.  It safely falls in at #3 in my rankings of the Alien franchise, coming in behind Alien (#1) and Aliens (#2).  It is miles ahead of the other films in the series.

 

The Ice Pirates

I saw The Ice Pirates at the Plaza East Cinemas when it first came out.  I didn’t really care for it.  It seemed silly and actually a little boring.  26 years later I’m browsing the DVDs at Big Lots and I find a copy of The Ice Pirates.  Surely it can’t be as bad as I remembered.  Maybe I didn’t get the jokes.  I decided that for $3 I would take a chance and check it out again. 

I am sad to report that even upon a second viewing and 26 years in between them, I still didn’t care for the movie.  I think there might be a half-way decent movie buried inside of this one, but it’s like digging through a pile of dog crap to retrieve a quarter the pooch swallowed.  Is it really worth it?

The Ice Pirates is set in the future in another galaxy where the only valuable commodity left is water.  Blocks of ice are worth their weight in gold.  Of course with anything this valuable there are bound to be people who try to hijack it.  In this case it would be Robert Urich’s band of ice pirates.  His crew consists of a very young Ron Perlman, Michael Roberts, John Matuszak, and Angelica Huston.  In the midst of one particular heist, Urich also kidnaps a princess played by Mary Crosby.

From that point on we’re taken on a cross galaxy quest to find the princess’ missing father and the mysterious 10th planet which is covered with water.  Along the way we get a robotic Bruce Vilanch, space prairie dogs, a pirate bar, and in a nod to Alien, a space herpes.  Of course the princess falls in love with Urich’s pirate and they have a passionate tryst while heading for the mysterious planet. 

The movie is definitely campy and not meant to be taken too seriously, but I still found myself rather bored by the whole ordeal.  If it wasn’t for the nostalgia factor, I don’t know if this would rate above 1/2 a star.  As it is, I give it 1 star.

AVH: Alien Vs. Hunter

Despite two subpar films, I decided to go full speed ahead and finish out the Asylum DVD triple feature.  AVH: Alien Vs. Hunter is The Asylum’s take on Aliens Vs. Predator.  The alien here is a whacked out spider creature.  The hunter looks like a robot ninja with a metal coolie hat.  It’s CGI vs. a left over Power Rangers costume.

AVH features former Greatest American Hero, William Katt as Lee Cussler, a small town newspaper editor/publisher/writer who dreams of being an acclaimed novelist.  He and the sheriff go out to check on a disturbance and find a crashed alien spaceship.  The alien did not arrive alone, however.  Another being is hunting the alien, but willing to kill anything else that gets in its way as well.

AVH is just as silly as I Am Omega and Monster, and the logic seems to have escaped this film as well.  People seem to travel from place to place almost magically at times.  At other times it seems to take hours to make it across the backyard.  One character spends the whole movie worrying about his wife and wanting to get back to her, but then allows himself to get separated from the group and lost inside the alien ship.  The movie is truly baffling in its complete lack of logic and common sense.

I will say that AVH was probably the most fun of the three films, but I still couldn’t get over the stupidity of it.  The alien looks neat.  The hunter not so much.  The movie gets 1 3/4 stars from me.

Dark Star

Dark Star is a film that I can’t remember when I first heard about it, where I first heard about it, who first told me how great it was, and when I finally got to see it for the first time.  I recall seeing a few stills from the film in Starlog and I remember a couple of my friends carrying on about how funny the scenes were with Pinback feeding the alien.  Despite being made in 1974, I am certain I didn’t see Dark Star until high school.  I know it was definitely post Star Wars and Alien both of which were Junior High film going experiences.  My best recollection is that Pat Murphy and Steve Bates were the ones telling me (and fellow Unicorps member Kurt Kleiner) about the film during my sophomore year of high school.  I know I bought the Alan Dean Foster novelization and the edition I bought had a 1979 printing date as well as a blurb promoting Foster as the author of Splinter of the Mind’s Eye.  The greater mystery is when did I actually get to see the film.  My best guess is that it was probably one of the films I rented from Tronix or Captain Video when I first got my VCR.  What ever the official time, place and circumstances were, one thing I know for sure is that I went nuts for it.  

In high school, I went to a lot of movies and ran around with the S.C. Chorale.  But there was one other activity that ate up a bunch of my waking hours and that was playing D&D.  Dungeons & Dragons was my generations XBox 360.  Several of us played at least once a week, usually more.  One of the guys named his characters after characters from Lord of the Rings.  My characters were for the most part named after Dark Star.  I had a Pinback and a Boiler, but the character I loved to play was an Elven thief named Darsktar.  The name came to me while staring at the spine of the paperback on my book shelf.  Dark Star had inspired me.

It had been several years since I had last watched Dark Star and I had forgotten it was a John Carpenter film until I was watching the bonus features on Cigarette Burns.  I started thinking back on Dark Star and decided to revisit it.  The DVD I have features both the Special Edition and the uncut theatrical edition.  It seems that Dark Star stared as a student film that ran 68 minutes long.   Producer Jack H. Harris had the crew shoot an additional 15 minutes and then released that cut theatrically.  Later the filmmakers were given the chance to edit a Special Edition cut.  They did this by excising most of those 15 minutes.  I opted for the longer 83 minute cut for my viewing pleasure.

Dark Star is the story of five men in space blowing up unstable planets.  The captain ends up getting killed during a freak mishap, which was bad enough, but then an asteroid storm damages the communications systems and Bomb #20 starts getting false signals to detonate.  As if that wasn’t bad enough, another malfunction is preventing the crew from being able to actually eject the bomb.  Eventually it’s up to Lt. Doolittle to teach the bomb the concept of phenomenology to keep it from detonating and blowing up the ship.

Dark Star is a simple film with some amazing concepts.  Dan O’Bannon would take inspiration from parts of Dark Star when writing Alien.  Many of Carpenter’s musical cues are eerily similar to his later work on Halloween.  It is amazing to look at this film and remember that it was made by film students before Star Wars.

One other thing that I can’t forget when discussing Dark Star is the faux country western song Benson, Arizona.  I actually special ordered the vinyl soundtrack album from Varese Saraband while I was in high school.  I ordered it as well as Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead.  I listened to Dawn’s soundtrack incessantly, but I also became hooked on Benson, Arizona.  To this day I can not get that song out of my mind, and why would I want to? 

Dark Star is a 3 1/2 star guilty pleasure.

The Chubbchubbs!

Forgive me father for I have sinned, sort of.  On Friday morning my wife, my daughter and I all packed up and drove 500-600 miles to visit my sister and her family.  We stayed for the Memorial Day weekend and drove back on Monday.  For those 4 days I didn’t watch any DVDs.  I love my DVDs, and I have been enjoying this little project, but when I have to choose between watching a DVD or spending a couple of extra hours visiting with family that I’m lucky to get to see once or twice a year, family wins out hands down.  So for 4 days, I didn’t watch a DVD.  Today I’m playing catch up.  I have watched 4 DVDs for the days I skipped and after my eyes rest a little, I’m going back to watch today’s disc.  All four of the DVDs I watched today came from the great Illinois vacation.

First up is The Chubbchubbs!.  When I decided to catch up by watching five discs today, I began looking for some short films.  The Chubbchubbs! was a DVD I found at the Big Lots near my sister’s house.  I remembered The Chubbchubbs! being nominated for an Oscar a few years ago.  Turns out it won the Short Film (Animated) Oscar in 2002 and that the DVD was only 5 minutes and 27 seconds long.  It’s short, but boy does it pack a lot into those 5 and a half minutes. 

The CGI animation is fantastic; some of the best I have seen.  The story is cute as well.  A loser alien who works as a janitor at a popular bar called the Ale E Inn is mopping the floor while a female alien singing Aretha Franklin performs on stage.  One tipped mop bucket later, the poor little guy has nearly fried the singer.  He is fired and thrown out of the bar where a dying alien crawls up to warn him that the Chubbchubbs are coming.  When the little alien looks over the horizon, he notices a dust cloud with these armoured marauders quickly approaching.  The alien makes several attempts to warn the patrons of the bar, but they all turn out the same.  He ends up injuring the singer, stopping the show and getting tossed back out.  When someone else shows up and delivers the warning, the place clears out in an instant.  The little alien tries to leave too, but now he notices four little fluffy baby chicks.  He rushes back to save them and in the process is unable to leave before the marauders arrive.

The Chubbchubbs features a plethora of science fiction cameos in the animation.  The alien from Alien is sipping a drink, Yoda and Darth Vader are arm wrestling, Robbie the robot and the Lost In Space robot are dancing (what else) the robot.   Even ET and Jar Jar Binks manage to pop in for a quick gag.  The short was so good I had to call the wife back in to watch it.  She loved it as well.

The DVD is extremely bare bones.  Some trailers and the short and that’s it, but I’m still very happy with it.  The Chubbchubbs! gets a perfect 10 on the Night Flight scale.  If you don’t want to run out to Big Lots and pay $3 for a 5 minute DVD, I understand it is also available on the Surf’s Up DVD.

I Married A Monster From Outer Space

When you see a title like I Married a Monster from Outer Space, you figure that you’re getting a cheesy sci-fi flick.  I Married a Monster is definitely sci-fi, but the cheese factor is extremely low.  The film plays out like a close relative of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.  Aliens land on Earth and slowly start taking over the menfolk of this small town.  The first person taken over is a young man who has just gotten married.  His new wife notices that he has changed and tries to figure out why.  Once she finds out, however, it may be too late.  More of the town’s men have been changed and the ones that haven’t aren’t likely to believe her story.

I had seen pictures from this film since I was a kid, and the title was one of those jokey sounding titles like Mars Needs Women that you hear and either laugh or roll your eyes.  Like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the plot line is as much an allegory as it is a simple science fiction story.  The force taking over your friends and neighbors might not be aliens, but it could be communism or some other insidious force changing who they are.  It may look like your husband or wife, but they don’t behave the same.

The aliens are glimpsed mostly in double exposure shots where the alien face flickers across the face of the replaced human, but they can be seen in a few shots.  They’re not the most creative looking monsters, but their design is functional for the movie’s plot and certainly better than the design of Robot Monster’s gorilla in a diving helmet.  I’m surprised I never saw this one on Chiller Theater as a kid, but any subtext would have been lost on me then if I had seen it. 

The DVD is lacking any features to explain the making or marketing of this film.  Even the original trailer is absent from the disc.  I would love to see a nice box set of the 50s sci-fi/horror films with a nice documentary explaining their relationship to cold war hysteria and fear of technology.  Every atom age, nuclear powered device always seemed to go bonkers and unleash some sort of monster.  Space was filled with intelligent aliens bent on world domination or instinct driven killers like the blob.

As for the movie, I give it 2 1/2 stars.

The Hidden

I remember when The Hidden first came out thinking it looked pretty decent.  Through the years I saw the trailer on numerous VHS tapes, but I never got around to watching the film.  I think I actually may have bought a copy of the VHS that I never viewed.  I picked up the DVD in Wal-Mart one time and promptly added it to the collection without watching it.  I decided tonight might be a good tie to break the shrink-wrap and give it a view.

The Hidden was a low-budget science fiction/horror/crime/mystery.  Average law-abiding citizens start robbing banks, stealing cars and killing people, all while listening to loud rock music.  The cops try to shoot them, but they keep on coming.  A FBI agent, Kyle MacLachlan, shows up tracking one of these average citizens.  He seems to know more about the case than he lets on and the officer assigned to assist him, Michael Nouri, wants some answers.  It’s a fairly simple plot, but the cast and director Jack Sholder manage to give it some style. 

The DVD has a commentary track as well as the theatrical trailer, special effects tests, and a cast and crew filmography with hidden trailers for some other films.  For a film that has developed a cult following, the bonuses are a little light.  I would have loved to have seen a featurette doc talking about the making and marketing of the film as well as the cult status.  Maybe the commentary covers some of that, but I don’t have time to watch the film and then re-watch it with commentary.  I might watch it that way at a later date, but not at the moment.

The good news is that the movie is fun and certainly worth a second viewing.  I give it 3 stars.  The trailer gives away quite a bit of the film.  We see the gunfight in the police station as well as the shot of Kyle MacLachlan using the flame thrower.  I give the trailer a 9 on the Quarantine scale.  One quick note about the scene in the prison area of the police station.  I noticed a criminal with a familiar voice in the scene.  I checked the credits and sure enough it is a young Danny Trejo from most of Robert Rodriguez’s films.