Extra-TERROR-estrial
September 12th 2006 05:18
Being a bit of a sf nut, I do love my alien horror flicks. There are dozens of them, most of them really silly with cheesy effects and ludicrous plots. You gotta keep it simple!
But that doesn’t mean you can’t keep it intense. That’s where the marriage lies. And here are some examples, which just happen to be my faves of this particular horror sub-genre.
In Don Siegel’s masterpiece of paranoia Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1955) a small town is inexorably taken over by an insidious alien race of highly intelligent, but emotionless plants. Yes, plants. The alien invaders originate as plant-like pods. Any human near the pod falls into a mortal slumber while the plant produces an emotionless clone of that person. The film works as a taut dramatic thriller, and sports many brilliantly executed scenes of horror-suspense. It was actually loosely disguised as a metaphor for the McCarthyism political witch hunting of the time.
In Don Coscarelli’s bizarrely brilliant Phantasm (1978) a curious adolescent boy unwittingly becomes embroiled in the very weird goings-on at the local mausoleum where aliens are stealing bodies for re-animated slave labor on their desolate home planet. The film features many freakish moments, but just as many ingenious sequences, such as the now infamous flying silver sphere. Okay, so this one has a tangled plot like a bad dream, but in its own perverse way it’s more inventive and imaginative than anything being released today.
Then we come to Ridley Scott’s seminal shocker Alien (1979). A film so beautifully constructed and executed it does my head in. One of the things I love about it is the two different aliens featured in the movie’s first quarter. In an enormous derelict spaceship on an inhospitable planet the human crew discovers a giant space jockey dead at its control shaft. Further inside the ship a bed of large eggs are found, which of course is the featured alien. Once the horrific face-hugger creature jumps out of the egg and attaches itself to Brett’s mask the rest is cinema history.
Another strange, yet utterly compelling movie is Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession (1981) starring Sam Neill and Isabelle Adjani. This is one weird little fucker indeed. Neill plays a spy returned home. He discovers his wife (Adjani) has been having an affair. After confronting the culprit it turns out she was even cheating on the lover, but not with another man. She’s been having sex with a large slimy, octopus-like creature she keeps holed up in a rundown building. Worse still, she’s going mad, secreting all manner of disgusting bodily fluids, and is being used by the alien monstrosity to produce a clone of Neill. Hmmm, sounds familiar …
There’s an unintentional running theme here because the next example is John Carpenter’s masterpiece The Thing (1982). An American team at an Antarctic station find themselves at the mercy of one very nasty … er thing, which had crashed in the snow and been buried for possibly thousands of years. The Norwegians thawed it out and now it’s on a rampage. It consumes its victims and then imitates them perfectly, until the next unsuspecting victim. It’s a sensational premise, and one which Carpenter – with the help of some of the finest SFX ever put to celluloid by 23-year-old Rob Bottin – delivers with solid, unnerving skill.
Finally, I gotta indulge my schlock tastes. You’ve had the high art, now here’s the deep trash; Harry Bromley Davenport’s Xtro (1982), a low-budget British production about a family man who is abducted by a rather evil reptilian alien, and then returned to earth a very different dad. And not so nice either. This sports much unintentional hilarity, but also some genuinely icky and unsettling stuff too. Indeed there is cloning to be had within this B-grade vulgarity, so it fits snugly amongst the other flicks. Oooer!
* the images on this page were taken from the following wikipedia pages:
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (movie poster), Phantasm (movie poster) and Xtro (video poster).
They are under license from the GNU Free Document License
But that doesn’t mean you can’t keep it intense. That’s where the marriage lies. And here are some examples, which just happen to be my faves of this particular horror sub-genre.
In Don Siegel’s masterpiece of paranoia Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1955) a small town is inexorably taken over by an insidious alien race of highly intelligent, but emotionless plants. Yes, plants. The alien invaders originate as plant-like pods. Any human near the pod falls into a mortal slumber while the plant produces an emotionless clone of that person. The film works as a taut dramatic thriller, and sports many brilliantly executed scenes of horror-suspense. It was actually loosely disguised as a metaphor for the McCarthyism political witch hunting of the time.
In Don Coscarelli’s bizarrely brilliant Phantasm (1978) a curious adolescent boy unwittingly becomes embroiled in the very weird goings-on at the local mausoleum where aliens are stealing bodies for re-animated slave labor on their desolate home planet. The film features many freakish moments, but just as many ingenious sequences, such as the now infamous flying silver sphere. Okay, so this one has a tangled plot like a bad dream, but in its own perverse way it’s more inventive and imaginative than anything being released today.
Then we come to Ridley Scott’s seminal shocker Alien (1979). A film so beautifully constructed and executed it does my head in. One of the things I love about it is the two different aliens featured in the movie’s first quarter. In an enormous derelict spaceship on an inhospitable planet the human crew discovers a giant space jockey dead at its control shaft. Further inside the ship a bed of large eggs are found, which of course is the featured alien. Once the horrific face-hugger creature jumps out of the egg and attaches itself to Brett’s mask the rest is cinema history.
Another strange, yet utterly compelling movie is Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession (1981) starring Sam Neill and Isabelle Adjani. This is one weird little fucker indeed. Neill plays a spy returned home. He discovers his wife (Adjani) has been having an affair. After confronting the culprit it turns out she was even cheating on the lover, but not with another man. She’s been having sex with a large slimy, octopus-like creature she keeps holed up in a rundown building. Worse still, she’s going mad, secreting all manner of disgusting bodily fluids, and is being used by the alien monstrosity to produce a clone of Neill. Hmmm, sounds familiar …
There’s an unintentional running theme here because the next example is John Carpenter’s masterpiece The Thing (1982). An American team at an Antarctic station find themselves at the mercy of one very nasty … er thing, which had crashed in the snow and been buried for possibly thousands of years. The Norwegians thawed it out and now it’s on a rampage. It consumes its victims and then imitates them perfectly, until the next unsuspecting victim. It’s a sensational premise, and one which Carpenter – with the help of some of the finest SFX ever put to celluloid by 23-year-old Rob Bottin – delivers with solid, unnerving skill.
Finally, I gotta indulge my schlock tastes. You’ve had the high art, now here’s the deep trash; Harry Bromley Davenport’s Xtro (1982), a low-budget British production about a family man who is abducted by a rather evil reptilian alien, and then returned to earth a very different dad. And not so nice either. This sports much unintentional hilarity, but also some genuinely icky and unsettling stuff too. Indeed there is cloning to be had within this B-grade vulgarity, so it fits snugly amongst the other flicks. Oooer!
* the images on this page were taken from the following wikipedia pages:
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (movie poster), Phantasm (movie poster) and Xtro (video poster).
They are under license from the GNU Free Document License
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Comment by JohnDoe
Film & TV on DVD
Totally love all films mentioned here, (yep even Xtro) but where is Day Of The Triffids, talk about screwing me up as a kid. Nightmares for weeks about killer plants from outer space.
How ridiculous is it that you cant get the Siegel version of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers in Oz, its a travesty.
Comment by Bryn
Horrorphile
And yeah, I had to get my Invasion DVD from overseas ... so good to see it in widescreen after only ever seeing it as a chopped 1:1.33 ratio!
Comment by JohnDoe
Film & TV on DVD
Comment by Bryn
Horrorphile