31 Days, 31 Screams: Resurrection- Day 16 (Alien Resurrection)

It's time once again to play the personal memory game. So. It's 1998. I feel like it must have been the end of winter, beginning of spring. Still cold, but not the hellish depths of winter. The previous holiday season of 1997 saw me, high on the inspirations of Star Wars and the Star Trek movies, take my first true delve into the horror genre. I watched the Alien trilogy, and even though they scared the hell out of me I still really liked them. Hey wow! There's a new one out! I lived in the middle of nowhere, so it wasn't like I could pop into the cinema. Therefore I had to wait for VHS so I could rent it. As I recall, my cousin found it in a video store a few towns over. It was a hell of a search, a treasure hunt that yielded fruit. So, here we both were, at his place in the cold of 1998, Alien Resurrection in the VCR. How would they follow up from Alien 3, considering the definitive final end? Well, we both watched Alien Resurrection. It was not very good. I didn't care for it, and that's the opinion I held for 20 years. I didn't care enough to go back in all that time, despite the fact that I must have seen those first three Alien movies a good 10 times each in those intervening years. Maybe even more. Then I revisited it, a few years back, and I thought it was the funniest goddamned thing. Like, so bad it's good glorious. Now we've gone for the hat trick of revisits, and I've come back from my third viewing of it in 22 years. How'd that go? I think I took a bit of both of my opinions this time. Let's dig in, I guess.



So genetic engineering fuckery brings a human/alien hybrid clone of Ripley into our story to get Sigourney Weaver back, and that somehow also clones the Alien Queen from 3 so these scientist assholes can harvest it. Weyland-Yutani they are not, but the United Systems Military. As our new Ripley (I'll just call her Ripley from now on but you get the deal) puts it, it doesn't matter who's fucking around with the aliens or why. They're all going to die. Nevertheless, I find it interesting that it's straight up just the military who wants them this time. The scientists mention being able to invent new alloys and serums and shit using alien cells, but the main use is, as they put it, "urban pacification." So the military wants to drop a murderous monster on the people it doesn't like and rip them to fucking shreds. They also deal with a bunch of space pirates and pay them off in exchange for fresh bodies to facehugger. Oh yeah, and when one of the space pirates turns out to be a spy, like... all of them get summarily sentenced to death? On the spot? What the fuck kind of guilt by association shit is this? Either way, shit goes south and... here are our protagonists, I guess. Ripley and a bunch of space pirates. I don't like them. Ripley's fine, sure, but these space pirates are just a bunch of space bastards. It's hard to care about them being picked off. Even the macho marines from Aliens got all but massacred within minutes, leaving some actually pretty likeable ones among the survivors. From here, we have an odd survival movie situation. There's 12 aliens, but we have weapons. It's a strange compromise between Alien and Alien 3's "one alien but no weapons" and Aliens with "weapons but all of the fucking aliens" approaches.


Then comes the dumb shit. I actually feel the same way about this movie as I do a similar sci-fi film: Star Trek Nemesis. Nemesis is probably a better movie than this, but it has the same issue. It has a handful of moments that are gloriously stupid in an over-the-top HAHAHAHA HOLY FUCK way, but the rest of the movie is not very good and there are too few of those moments to truly call it "so bad it's good" or anything. We have dumb over the top nonsense like Ron Perlman dual wielding lasers to blow up an alien's head before getting spooked by a spider, or a dude with a chestburster grabbing another asshole and putting his head in front of his chest so the chestburster also blasts through his head. If there's any resonance, it's the eventual parallels between Ripley and Call, the android character played by Winona Ryder. Both of them are human-looking but not quite human, and they each get to bond over that a little. The climax is some gonzo nonsense where the Alien Queen has a human womb and gives birth to this creepy-looking hybrid that imprints on Ripley? And then gets decompressed to death in a gruesome fashion? This movie's a bit of a mess. Unfortunate, but that's how I felt, even 22 years on. Christ, has it been that long?