Walkies!

One Singular Serration…

One maximum security prison planet. One xenomorph extra-terrestrial alien. Let the screaming begin. That no one can hear you doing in space…

And well I should bastardize the original slogan for the original ALIEN (1979). After the shotgun-sequel ass-klownery of James Cameron’s ALIENS (1986), with hundreds of hissing, cavorting aliens cluttering the frame, the filmmakers of ALIEN 3 pull back on the reins and again give us just one. A choice that would prove to be brave, smart and suspenseful, artfully cancelling out the devaluing nature of Cameron’s bombastic creature-palooza.

Sigourney Weaver: good head.

Before SE7EN (1995) and FIGHT CLUB (1997), video director David Fincher made his bones with this impactful third entry in ALIEN canon. And – like the two male directors before him – brings out the raunchy femininity of his star Sigourney Weaver, not by getting her down to her panties, but this time, by shaving her head! (Something about keeping the lice down, but only succeeding at keeping flies down…)

ALIEN 3 is a back-to-basics thriller, more concerned with tone than bone; more intent on eerie claustrophobia than popcorn spectacle. Rust-choked passageways and slime-soaked crawlspaces; an abandoned lead refinery morphed into a prison, populated with an all-male contingent of rapists, murderers and religious fanatics. As with all the ALIEN films, production design is visually stunning; characters come fully formed and madly maladjusted, and performances are stellar from the mostly British cast. Mostly.

Weaver returns as Ripley, following the events of ALIENS, crash-landing on this planet in her escape module. In the decimated module, the bodies of marine Hicks, android Bishop and youngster Newt, all dead or deactivated. Only hibernating Ripley survived. Unwittingly bringing with her something more dangerous than rapists, murderers and religious fanatics (well, maybe not more dangerous than religious fanatics) – an Alien.

Into this XY-chromosome den of iniquity, mysterious murders start apace. Only Ripley suspects it is something more than repressed man-rage or the word of Christ.

Amongst the paranoid lifers and repressed death-dealers who have forgotten the scent of a woman, Ripley finds an almost well-adjusted ally in prison doctor Clemens (Charles Dance), and butts heads with the warden (Brian Glover, who loves his “rumor control” announcements) and his squirrelly first mate (Ralph Brown), trying to alert them to an alien infiltrator on their outpost. She finds out soon enough that not only did an adult xenomorph hitch a ride in her module – a babymorph is growing where no one can hear you scream…

Still based on H.R. Giger’s core design, the new Alien creature’s physical makeup reflects the organism it was birthed from – a prisoner’s Rottweiler dog; sleeker, faster, more bestial than its predecessors. Amongst the ochre corridors, it races like a canine beast, up and around the walls without stressing gravity. Victims are taken reminiscent of the beasts of Africa, plucked off one by one from the herd, struck at from blackness, dragged through hatchways, while seething acid blood scars through floors and panels.

Prisoners are hilariously British: there’s Pete Postlethwaite, as usual, eternally 50; there’s Chalky from QUADROPHENIA (Phil Davis); Danny Webb, crazy-eyed sole survivor… American Charles S. Dutton becomes informal leader of the prisoners once the warden becomes lunch.

In this simple yet effective story, the prisoners band together under Ripley’s stewardship to coax the creature into a liquid metal hell, using themselves as bait.

Lance Henriksen: cagey.

Meanwhile, The Company is sending an envoy to extract Ripley from the planet because, once again, their prime objective is the babymorph, with zero survival considerations for the human host. And they send – android Bishop! Hooray! (He prefers the term “artificial person” himself.) But it’s not another Bishop android – he says he’s The Real Thing. Lance Henriksen as Bishop employs his most velvety brogue to tempt Ripley into giving up the contents of her womb. He tells her he’s here to help, he’s here to “take it out of you” (replete with iconic hand gesture) and that he is the man whom the Bishop android was modeled on. The company thought to send a friendly face… But we know the truth. Lance Henriksen is an android. Hooray!

During the finale’s grand sacrifice, the majestic orchestral score of Eliot Goldenthal sweeps our senses to a bittersweet conclusion.

Like most franchises, ALIEN 3 truly was the conclusion of a trilogy. Even though it barely made its production budget back and was considered a financial flop, like most franchises that continue past their point of diminishing returns, its established audience worked towards its – ahem – “resurrection” five years later. All those fans and critics that couldn’t appreciate this more sober outing, were mostly those desensitized by the headrush of the previous film. Mostly.

END

Rise of the Machine (i.e. Arnold).

The Poffynator

Arnold Schwarzenegger as a killing machine with no emotions, big guns belching, outlandish feats of body strength, delivering his lines in a sinister, robotic monotone – hang on, that could be any of his movies. But this movie made him what he is today. What, the Governor of California?…

When THE TERMINATOR was released in 1984, Schwarzenegger was already a superstar – seven Mr. Olympia titles, five-time Mr. Universe, with the CONAN franchise under his belt – this movie made him a million-dollar megastar, a household name, an archetype for stunted elocution.

In this James Cameron actioner, Schwarzenegger is the eponymous Terminator, a cyborg from the future (2029), sent back in time by the machines to 1984 Los Angeles, to “terminate” Sarah Connor (big-haired, man-faced Linda Hamilton), who will be the mother of John Connor, the man who would lead the human resistance against the machines when they have taken over society in 2029.

The humans of the future have also sent someone back through time – Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) – to stop the Terminator, save Sarah Connor, and find a decent pair of pants.

Excellent concept. One major flaw. No, not that Sarah Connor lives in the painful New Wave 1980s with her brainless, bighair girlfriend, not that the Terminator has no eyebrows, not even that lame Brad Fiedel soundtrack that sounds like Oingo without the Boingo. The flaw is in the time-paradox (as usual, with most, if not all, time-travel stories) created simply by sending the Terminator back through time in the first place. Yet writer-director Cameron artfully dodges any explanation of it by keeping the action brain-dead high.

You see, if the Terminator succeeds in killing Sarah, she will not birth the leader of the revolution, therefore the Terminator would have no reason to come back and kill her. Ergo, Terminator ceases to exist in 1984. On the other hand, if the Terminator fails to kill Sarah, it must mean the Terminator itself was terminated (for nothing else could make it fail). Either way, the Terminator ceases to exist. Good thing he’s just a killing machine with no emotions, i.e. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

And how effective was John Connor’s resistance anyway? From Reese’s apocalyptic flashbacks, human extermination seems to be going quite well for the machines, with Reese and his pals living like rats in sewers. But it seems the machines were really trembling in their little metal panties, feeling threatened enough to go to all the trouble of inventing time travel to send someone back to kill Connor’s mother. That’s a whole lotta scared!

And has anyone stopped to consider that in 2029, they have Time Machines?! – that actually work!! So why didn’t humans send someone back even further in time to pull the plug on the machines taking over in the first place? These anomalies are explained feverishly by Reese to policemen Paul Winfield and Lance Henriksen. But nobody’s buying it. Especially not the fey police psychiatrist who looks like he took time off from molesting children to question Reese.

Reese came through the time portal naked – as did the Terminator. The Terminator wrenches his clothes from a group of punks (watch for Bill Paxton as the blue-haired punk), and Reese steals his pants from a bum. They both must stink like a Japanese fish market!

Terminator and Reese both track Sarah Connor to an embarrassing dance club called Tech Noir, spewing the lamest disco possible to represent – ironically – its hipness, the female vocals seemingly stuck on the lyric, “You’ve got me burnin’!,” pony-stepping whitebread patrons looking like honky refugees from a Pat Benatar video.

After the shooting starts, Reese utters one of Terminator-dom’s magic lines to Sarah, “Come with me if you want to live!”

This is also the movie where Schwarzenegger coins, “I’ll be back!” In this perfect role for someone with no command of the English language, of his seventeen lines of dialogue, these three words would become Arnold’s catchcry forever. And, though uttered with the most ominous portent, they have also become the most funn-nnee.

And he does come back – again and again, in mighty action sequences where he is gunned down, run over, exploded, yet relentlessly recovering and pursuing Sarah, unstoppable, Reese forever warding off the attacks. Reese tells Sarah: “…it doesn’t feel pity or remorse or fear” (he’s right – seen PUMPING IRON?) “It absolutely will not stop until you are dead.”

This bludgeoning simplicity makes THE TERMINATOR the chase-movie classic it is. To add even more to its pedigree, Harlan Ellison (god of literary fantasists) sued Cameron for plagiarizing ideas from his OUTER LIMITS episodes “Soldier” and “Demon with a Glass Hand.” Later editions of the movie would feature credits acknowledging Ellison’s work.

While they hide out in a roach motel, Reese puts his future-moves on Sarah, calling her a Legend and strong and brave and anything else guaranteed to moisten her man-jeans. And a pick-up line almost as good as the HIGHLANDER‘s move of stabbing himself to bed Roxanne Hart: Reese gravel-whispers, “I’ve memorized every line on your face. I came across time for you, Sarah. I love you. I always have.” Cue porn music, nakedness, future sperm… and Linda Hamilton getting her banana teats out for The ’80s Love Scene, while looking like a man who’s having a hard time turning a socket wrench. The thought surely must have crossed Reese’s mind as he saw them bananas, “Boy, Legends are easy. Keeping it hard with this man-face is hard.”

And then Cameron makes an excellent character move – something which no one would dream of making in later Arnold movies after his star had risen to major box-office draw – he terminates Arnold! The flesh is seared off the Terminator in the last act and we see only the steel machine-man endoskeleton (created by legendary Stan Winston) pursue Sarah. This plot development, though robbing Arnold of screentime, drove home the Terminator’s relentlessness; how it would literally stop at nothing, not even its flesh coming off, to complete its deadly mission. These are some of the most terrifying sequences of this modern technological horror tale, clinical, un-human; as Reese’s warnings come to metal stop-motion fruition: “…It can’t be bargained with, can’t be reasoned with…”

The dicey closeups of Arnold’s prosthetic head nearly land this movie in the B-Movie crap heap, though – but we forgive Cameron and Winston; best anyone could do pre-CGI, without selling their soul to George Lucas.

And has anyone considered that the Terminator’s mission may have actually been the touchstone that set off the war between the machines and humans? Like incarcerating people at Guantanamo – if they weren’t terrorists before, well… If humans were not suspicious and hateful of machines before, you can bet your TiVo they are now!

Though the Terminator failed in its mission – leaving the future of mankind in the hands of a big-haired, man-faced eighties chick – with the box office grosses nearly hitting the movie’s filming budget on its opening weekend, we can be sure of at least one thing:

He’ll be back.

END

The Warrior/Goddess Dichotomy and the Eternal Feminine.

ALIENS!

Leaping, screeching, hissing, grabbing – hellish armies of H.R. Giger’s inscrutable extra-terrestrial life forms, swarming killing machines going elongated-head to jar-head with the United States Marines (Roger Ramjet Space Division, Glib Company).

The unholy marriage of alien and cucumber

Writer-Director James Cameron helms this sequel to one of the landmark space/horror films of our time, ALIEN (1979). And it shows. Not one for subtlety, Cameron creates a script (with David Giler and Walter Hill) that bluntly screams “More is Better” – more aliens, more victims, more explosions and incredible amounts of more mucus. Surprisingly – he gets away with it.

A colony of humans on a remote planet has lost contact with Earth. [Director’s Cut scenes show the crashed “horseshoe” spaceship from ALIEN and a local family that goes to investigate. Bad idea. We see the father overcome by a “face-hugger” at the base of the horseshoe. We would realize later that the little daughter is Newt – the lone survivor that the Marines discover.] The military sends a reconnoiter mission, along with Ripley (Sigourney Weaver, recently rescued from suspended animation in a drifting escape pod some sixty years after blowing up the Nostromo in ALIEN). She is more than miffed that the planet she is forced to return to is the one she just escaped from.

Sho’ nuff, send the Marines in anywhere and everything gets pear-shaped. After aliens en masse peel from the mucused walls of the space colony corridors and decimate the grunts, the remaining Marines (under Ripley’s ad hoc supervision) must find a way to leave the planet and nuke it.

There are so many factors that make the ALIEN series so much more than just Running-and-Screaming debacles. A major factor was Swiss surrealist, H.R. Giger’s alien design, overseen in this movie by legendary creature-creator Stan Winston. The life-cycle of the aliens was also well thought out, which gave them an organic depth that simple zombies or big-eyed beige beings lacked. Like some interesting insect species here on Earth, the alien warriors do not simply eat or kill all their captives, but cocoon them to serve as host bodies for their hatchling stage (the face-huggers), which impregnate the captive with the seed that grows into the chest-burster (which John Hurt will never forget).

Cameron, who is renowned for his Wham-Bam, actually cleverly inserts major Thank-You-Ma’am into this movie. At first blush, ALIENS looks like any summer Boy’s Movie, but look closer and you’ll notice that it is actually a homage to the Eternal Feminine! All the males are either emasculated or ineffectual: Apone the Marine captain (Al Mathews) is dispatched in the first battle, Gorman the coordinator (William Hope) is bitchslapped by Ripley when he crumbles during a skirmish, Hudson the grunt (Bill Paxton, in an immortal sissy role which will haunt him for life) takes girlie whining to a truly vaginal level (“Game over, man! Game over!”) and Paul Reiser is perfectly cast as a corporate weasel. The most masculine Marine is Vasquez (Jenette Goldstein), a dirt-talkin’ hussy who has bigger guns on her arms and around her neck than any actual male Marine.

The only male worth his cahonnes is Hicks (Michael Biehn) – and even he ended up taking orders from Ripley. The other male of any note is Bishop the cyborg (Lance Henriksen, as a “synthetic person” who is ironically the most empathetic of the group) – and he gets torn in half. All the other male Marines were like those nameless Star Trek crewmen who beamed down to a planet with a different-colored titty-shirt than the principals…

Cameron boldly brings us Sexy Dangerous with Ripley: whereas in ALIEN she was an innocent youth who grew into her formidable anti-alien role (with a wink-wink end-scene that stripped her down to panties to remind us of her femininity), here she is the vetted warrior, tougher than Marines, yet maternal enough to dote on a surrogate child; she may slam the corporate weasel against the wall, but when Hicks gives her a location bracelet (“Doesn’t mean we’re engaged or nothing”) her alluring smile is radiant. Cameron has brilliantly created what every man craves – a woman powerful enough to stand on her own feet, yet beautiful enough to attract you into sweeping her off them. The Warrior/Goddess dichotomy. (If it weren’t for that soccer mom ‘do, she’d be perfect!) And he does it in such an artful way that we don’t feel threatened or repulsed by it.

Even the final battle is between Ripley and the alien queen, as the queen chases Newt (young Carrie Henn, who never made another movie; although I really wish she would stop that insufferable, high-pitched screaming). Ripley interjects with the now-famous, “Get away from her, you BITCH!” – a female going after a female, being stopped by a female.

ALIENS is a thunderous movie, fulfilling our every craving to see bigger, badder, madder aliens and see them in full action, in full view. Boldly directed and edited, with incredible detail paid to the species that spawned so many inferior copycats. The egg-laying scene, in the cavern with the queen alien, is still a disturbing piece of icky cinema.

And in the film’s final minutes – even WITH all the female empowerment flying at our testicles – Our Man James Cameron somehow manages to get Ripley down to her panties again!…

END

AVP: Audience Versus Padding.

The question is not whether an “Alien” can overcome a “Predator” (ignorant semantics, as the two non-human species in this film are both “aliens” and “predators”); the real battle is pitting the movie’s Audience against its interminable Padding scenes. Can – we – survive? With my leg bloodied from the onslaught and a gaping wound in my side, I struggled out the theater exit, leaving two friends gurgling in the seventh row – hey, I’m no jarhead – I make no empty promises to “leave no one behind”… If the subterranean walking scenes didn’t finish them off, the inane talking scenes did.

Padding: 2. Audience: 1.

AVP: ALIEN VS PREDATOR is a nippled Batsuit – a franchise gone too far. It fulfills its purpose of keeping 14-year-old boys off the street and thereby less likely to shoot up a school or get your daughter pregnant, which is small respite; all we can hope for – until the next over-breasted Lara Croft video game release or somnolent Harry Potter movie. But as adult entertainment – and let’s face it: present-day adults, not kids, are the demographic weaned on the ALIEN and PREDATOR movies – it is diversionary, but not involving; good but not great, glittering but no prize.

Predapoff

An ancient pyramid is discovered beneath the snows of some snowy country, where Aliens are kept imprisoned in labyrinths, for Predators to send their teen warriors in and achieve predatorhood via slaughter. Sounds great on paper.

Both ALIEN (1979) and PREDATOR (1987) were sui generis movies, the former, through canny screenwriting and an uncompromising lead heroine, spawned three above-average sequels while the latter spawned an adequate-bordering-on-lame sequel (Danny in lieu of Arnold?!). Now, like the HIGHLANDER franchise, the mythos of both creations is sullied to the level of soap opera and with the Marketeers wielding their pimp-witted power, no longer will any successive ALIEN or PREDATOR movies exude the mystery or excitement of their progenitors, but rather, bombastic, overblown CGI and gratuitously-tweaked explosions for the action-figure teenboy market.

As a stand-alone movie – forget it! AVP’s existence is predicated on our cognizance of the last 25 years of these iconic monsters. Without that foreknowledge the very existence of these creatures and their interaction will appear contrived. The plot seems cobbled together from drafts made by 14-year-olds playing with their action figures (much like George Lucas writes his plots). The concept of the battling races at first seems mildly plausible, but then we realize the whole backstory is shoving square storyline into round plot holes and demystifying not one, but two rapacious extra-terrestrial cultures. Casting one’s senses back to those heady days of the original movies, our enjoyment was piqued precisely because their antagonists were inexplicable; they were truly… “alien.” Now they’re just Philo Beddoe in a barroom.

Except for Lance Henriksen (renowned B-movie “That Guy”), all human characters are instantly forgettable, except for a guy whose cultured locution could easily get him mistaken for a black James Bond (Colin Salmon, who actually had a small recurring role in the three Brosnan Bond films) and the young female expedition leader (Sanaa Lathan), i.e. Black Ripley; in essence, humans are this movie’s McGuffin, for any agent could have unearthed the battle-pyramid and a text crawl could have explained the backstory of the Alien-Predator symbiosis. Only reason we meet humans at all in this film is to mayhap invest a modicum of interest in this tale which, literally, has nothing to do with our species.

It’s a B-Actor hoedown: Sanaa Lathan and a cast of glorified extras.

Henriksen’s role is anomalous: his character is familiar with Aliens (from ALIEN 3), yet when confronted by one, instead of becoming Mr. Corporation (as would be his character’s wont), he burbles incoherently with the rest of the B-Actors. Then when confronted by a Predator, instead of dollar signs cha-chinging in his eyes at the discovery of yet another alien species, he goes Rambo on it and gets, subsequently, dead. But I will leave that trite conundrum to the fanboys to clarify.

Terming one species Alien and one Predator is a point of irritating contention for me; these terms only exist in our viewer-reality, for in the movie, the creatures are only superficially identified as “serpents” (Aliens) and “hunters” (Predators). The substitute terms are a dead giveaway: hunters are “noble”; serpents, well… do we need to extemporize on a well-trodden metaphor? From the outset, we are led a merry road by the film-makers to perceive the Predators as “good guys.” No surprise, for in being prejudicially human, we are prone to siding with the more anthropoid of the two aliens and ironically, the Predators assume the Arnold role in this movie – the musclebound “heroes,” as it were. The movie rationalizes, sensibly, that the Predators only try to kill our human B-actors to re-acquire what the B-actors stole – their weapons. Which puts paid to the movie’s tag-line, “Whoever wins – we lose.” Well, not exactly, for the Predators are portrayed as sentinels keeping the roistering Aliens at bay… So only if the Predators lose, we lose.

Battle scenes ensue – with the predictably close-cut action and blurred whiz-banging – but the fights are only adequately directed and rather short, and it is just too incongruous viewing these two iconic monsters on screen together. Something just don’t click. Either this would be a good Alien movie (for the Aliens are animated excellently, combining live puppetry with CGI) or a good Predator movie (the rugged masculinity of those 7-foot behemoths was enough super-cruel to power a small township), but – as Offspring advised – “you gotta keep ’em separated.”

And for the record, the “AVP” acronym is so IGNINTLY “skoolyard-bitchin” that it reeks of Marketeers grappling with the long-dead spirits of their nerd youth in pathetically trying to ramp up the street-cool of this geek-square movie.

Now gimme that spear – after witnessing those man-tastic pecs on the Predators, I’m going in – I’ve got two friends to save in the seventh row…

END