24 – Distress Call (Supernova)

Wandering through the woods, moving towards this new town of Llort, you begin to wonder what you’ve got yourself into on this island of horrors. As soon as you make it back to your room you’re packing your bags and getting the hell out of here.

“Help me!”

You stop in your tracks, a voice, asking for help…ordinarily you’d call back, try to find them, but your experiences so far have taught you to be…cautious…

Fuck it they’ve taught you to stay as far away as possible from, well, anything.

“Please…”

Telling yourself that you’re making a big mistake you creep cautiously towards the voice. You see a faint glow through the trees and eventually make out a clearing. A young boy is laying prone, a small tree lays fallen across his legs, beside him is brightly glowing object, an eerie, yet enticing aura surrounds it.

“Is somebody there? Please…my leg…”

Never taking your eyes off the object, you step from the trees.

A pleasant surprise this time, I get to review a film which I haven’t seen for so long it felt almost new…almost. One of the films I owned before I started collecting films for this project and one which, as far as I’m aware, is fairly unknown, or at the very least forgotten.

It’s a Sci-fi horror where a ship responds to a distress call, it’s not Alien, it’s not Event Horizon, it’s 2000’s Supernova, directed by Walter Hill…or is that Thomas Lee? Either way, it’s time to review it.

The film follows the crew of the Nightingale, a medical ship with a complement of 6. After a brief introduction to the ship and crew they receive a distress call from a distant star system and go to investigate. As you would expect things don’t go well and the crew find themselves fighting for their lives. So yeah, sounds a bit like Event Horizon…

I should point out now that the pleasant surprise was for seeing a film that felt new, not at the quality of the film. This film was handled very badly. The director himself, Walter Hill, didn’t even want to put his name to it so the pseudonym Thomas Lee was used. Hill’s work was screened to test audiences without special effects, which Hill said would go very badly, and it was badly received. MGM got a second director in to change things, this also didn’t go well and ultimately they asked Francis Ford Coppola of all people to edit the film. So yeah it was all a bit of a shit show. Apparently Hill wanted to do something that sounded more akin to Event Horizon with grim effects and creature makeup whilst MGM wanted it to be sexy and fun. I’d love to have seen Hill’s original vision for the film but instead we got this mishmash.

Talking of sexy and fun it’s certainly quite a horny film. Most of the cast get it on at some point, in fact everyone except for the captain and the Navigator and he’s constantly flirting with the ship’s computer called ‘Sweetie’. It’s not super graphic but it’s prominent enough that it feels a bit Red Shoe Diaries. It’s very of its time and something that would probably have been less of a focus 10 years earlier or later.

The story, as we’ve already noted, is fairly generic, the space mission gone wrong, mysterious alien artefacts, explosions and time limits. There’s very little to make this stand out from a myriad of other films of this sub-genre. I didn’t find myself being too invested in what was going on with the plot, its sort of a film of two halves, the first half being a pure science fiction film, albeit a fairly grim one, whilst the second half it becomes a slasher film…wait…isn’t that Alien? You see?

I have to say, with how badly this film did and how much it seemingly disappeared into the ether, I had some fun with it. I think maybe something is wired in me where a sci fi horror is always enjoyable to me on some level even if it’s not that great. Just the fact that I’m taken to another place, and in this other place is also a horror film. I love films that take me out of my own reality and this film does do that.

Something else I love in my Sci fi is James Spader, ever since watching Stargate at the cinema back in 1994 and more recently hearing him as Ultron in Avengers: Age of Ultron. He’s good in this film and so is everyone else, as far as the actors go they did a good job, they just got put into a sub-par film.

The effects in the film are pretty good, you can tell that they had a decent budget, we are unfortunately at a CGI heavy era but at DVD quality at least they hold up pretty well having been done by Digital Domain, a company responsible for the special effects in an enormous number of films including many of the recent Marvel films. In terms of more contemporary films they handled the effects in Titanic, Armageddon and Lake Placid.

As is often the case I’ve really found myself torn between a couple of scores for this on. Let’s start by saying I easily took a 4 or 5 out of the equation, it’s also not a 1 so that leaves a 2 or a 3. It’s very middle of the road, but it should have been more than that, there’s a better film in here, it was…disappointing and disappointing films get 2 Pears out of 5. If this happens to be on TV sometime, or pops up on your streaming service, it’s got some entertainment value, but I wouldn’t go out of your way to see it.

**WARNING** SPOILERS BELOW **WARNING**

Welcome to the spoiler section. This is the part where I can bring up some specific parts of the film which I’d like to talk about more, whether they be good, or bad.

As I watched this film there was at least one scene where I was like “Oh yeah, I remember this scene” so the film obviously had some stand out moments, but only stand out enough to bury themselves in my subconscious. The one where I really got that sudden recollection was when the crew wake up from their naked warp sleep thing, they had to be naked, it was very important to the plot…but yes they wake up and the captain’s pod has malfunctioned. This was one of the cooler scenes in the film, the captain has become fused to his pod, like the warp jump tried to combine the two of them. The effects and the tension in this scene are great and it really shows how much potential the film had, we really needed more of this. Body horror and sci-fi go so well together and we really don’t get any more of it in the rest of the film unless you count the character Karl Larson’s ‘Vampire from an episode of Buffy’ face later in the film.

Another scene which stood out, and again one that I remembered once I’d seen it again was when Ben, the aforementioned Navigator, is trapped in a room, dying, whilst a mutated Karl tries to break his way in. Ben tries to get Sweetie to remove all of the oxygen from the room, his override code being “I Love You”, to which Sweetie responds “I’ve always known that Benjamin” and her subsequent tone of loss when Ben dies and she can no longer hear him. It’s a surprisingly moving moment between Man and Computer.

Honestly this is a struggle, there is VERY little that really stood out to me in this film or worth talking about in any great detail. These two examples make me sad more than anything, sad at what this could have been.

In the words of Dr Evers…it’s a bomb.

5 – A New Friend (Alien from the Darkness)

Stepping from the Inn you find yourself on a wide cobbled square surrounded by thatch roofed buildings. At the centre of the square is a tall pole. Different coloured ribbons hang from the top and flutter lazily in the breeze. Your hand brushes the scrap of paper in your pocket…the map, perhaps later, there’s a whole island to explore.

Hullo there friend!

A cheery voice rings out. You look over to a quaint little shop with a multipaned bay window where a jolly looking man with white mutton chops is beckoning you over.

My name is Albert, I heard we had a new visitor to the island. I’m the town chemist, can I interest you in anything?

You glance into the shop through the open door behind the man. Various jars line the shelves, full of things you’ve never seen in any other chemist shop, is that a tentacle?

No? How about some advice then? Not everyone is as they seem. Beware false friends. But most of all, enjoy yourself!

OK…so this is a review I was both amused by and dreading to some degree. Little did I know when I purchased this film in a ‘Wow Anime!’ period I was going through back in the early 2000s, when it was becoming available over here in the UK, that I would be reviewing it 20 years later.

Alien from the Darkness, or Alien of Darkness as the DVD I have calls it (淫獣エイリアン is its original Japanese title or Injū Eirian in the Hepburn romanization), is a Japanese Hentai, about the crew of a Spaceship who discover and explore a derelict craft which turns out to have an alien entity on board. The Alien turns out to be hostile, not to mention horny, and so of course the crew end up in a fight for survival in this pornographic horror from 1996.

I will be the first to admit that I went into this film as a bit of a sceptic. It had been around 2 decades since I last watched it and I honestly couldn’t remember much about it or if it was any good. Spoiler alert, you may be surprised by the result.

I’m going to go right out and say that this would be a better film without the porn side of it, but also if you take those scenes out it barely even qualifies as a film anymore with its already meagre runtime of 45 minutes. The graphic sexual scenes are what they are, they vary from standard lesbian porn scenes to the hentai staple of invasive tentacles. To be fair we’re not talking full hardcore, though it’s entirely possible my copy is cut, being from the 90s, but it’s certainly over and above incidental sexual scenes that are present in many exploitation films for example. The porn scenes are what people are generally watching this for. The thing is, as a by product of wanting to watch some horny space ladies get it on, the viewer inadvertently ends up watching a fairly decent sci-fi horror. It’s nothing special but I’ve very much seen worse.

The film makes no effort in disguising its influence from a film I’ve already reviewed. Alien. Crew finds an abandoned ship. Crew brings something alien aboard their own ship. Crew start to die. OK so that’s fairly vague but wait until you see the crew’s stasis pods and then tell me Alien wasn’t an influence.

I think what I wasn’t expecting in a 45 minute long hentai was a secondary plot, hell I wasn’t even expecting a plot full stop, I actually found myself fully engaged with the film. Yes it’s got some ridiculous scenes and it’s not a film I would ever recommend to people, unless they were after a sci-fi hentai, but it has plenty of good points.

The artwork is decent and at times quite creepy with the various decomposing corpses on the abandoned ship they find. The absolutely bizarre but entirely welcome inclusion of a cute pet ferret running around the ship and providing some awwww moments as well as taking part in the main plot and providing some comic relief. Speaking of comic relief there’s a fair few examples of it in the film. It’s entertaining and after all, isn’t that what films are supposed to be.

With this in mind and taking the film as what it is, porn, I’m going to give Alien from the Darkness 3 rotating vibrators out of 5. This film has no right being this watchable, it feels like the director Norio Takanami wanted to be making something more serious, and it shows.

**WARNING** SPOILERS BELOW **WARNING**

Welcome to the spoiler section. This is the part where I can bring up some specific parts of the film which I’d like to talk about more, whether they be good, or bad.

The film is strongly influenced by Alien, but surprisingly doesn’t go the whole way and instead goes with quite a few of its own ideas, or at least ideas from different films. Having the creature spend most of the film in the form of a young woman was likely so they could show more boobs but it also means that the crew have no idea that she is in fact the cause of all the deaths and makes this into more of a slasher than Alien.

There is a secondary plot based around the banned substance Metrogria, and our second secret protagonist Lindo, who is trying to smuggle it onto the black market. This was a surprise to me, the fact that they included this in a 45 minute film shows that they cared about more than just a string of tentacle rape scenes.

Let’s talk about Einstein. This furry little ferret was a highlight of the film for me, he’s very cute, even if he sounds ridiculous, his noises clearly being made by a person pretending to be a ferret. He seems like a stand in for Jonesy, the cat from Alien, but really he’s a far more important character. Near the end of the film he leaps at and bites the Alien’s dick! This in turns makes it drop his owner Hikari, who was being gripped by the monster’s tentacles and allows her to shoot it with the Metrogria and blow it out the air-lock. Einstein is my hero.

For a hentai the women are drawn as relatively normal, if physically fit women, which I guess makes sense if they’re the crew of a spaceship. A little more variety in body shape would have been nice but to be honest it’s just nice that they don’t all have massive gravity defying breasts.

In some ways it’s a shame that the film is as short as it is. It does mean that there’s always something happening and the pacing is quick, but it’s a little too fast, even now writing, at this point a week or so later, many of the scenes blur into each other in my mind. It would have been good if we’d had more time to get to know the crew, so we could actually care when they get killed.

Flair, our main protagonist is frankly dull, because, she’s just a monster in a human form, so she doesn’t talk to the crew, or lure them to her in clever ways, they just kind of stumble into each other’s paths and fall under her spell. She’s frankly far more interesting in her monster form, if only because it’s something different to look at.

With regards to the rating system I used, shout out to the scene which I found hilarious the first time I saw it, where the captain and the doctor are getting it on and one of them produces what looks like a grenade, but hey, the captain certainly seems to enjoy it.

This is Emma, last survivor of the…wait, I already did that one…

3 – How do you like your Eggs? (Alien)

As you stare at the TV screen, engrossed, a respectable looking man in a tweed suit walks into shot and turns to camera.

Scientists have yet to determine the age of the craft, or who created it. What they suspect is…hold on…it looks like the first team is returning, perhaps they can…oh…I think somebody is hurt. Dave, cut it there, we’ll do some interviews once we find out what’s happened.

That’s all there is.

Willa steps into the room. The TV screen has turned to static.

Local kid found that tape floating in the brook just east of town. Strange thing is, nobody has any idea where that was filmed. Oh the island is small, but it’s also big at the same time, like a scrunched up piece of paper. You never know what’s hiding round the next bend.

So! How do you like your eggs?

Once again it seems the random number dice Gods have been kind to me. Today’s film is not only my favourite in the Alien franchise, but one of my favourite films of all time.

Alien is a household name when it comes to either the Science Fiction or Horror genres and is probably the film most people think of when asked to name a film which straddles both. We’ve all seen it (We’ve all seen it right?) but we’re still going to review it, Ridley Scott’s 1979 classic, Alien.

The story of Alien follows the crew of the Nostromo, a commercial towing vessel. The ship intercepts a signal from a nearby planet and the crew heads down to the surface to investigate. Once there they discover an alien craft with an organism onboard, an organism which soon has the crew fighting for their lives.

I don’t remember how old I was when I first saw Alien. It was certainly when I was younger than the film’s 18 rating, likely watching a late night TV edit, but I didn’t care, and probably wasn’t aware, I just knew it by reputation. This was one of those films that everyone had to have seen, you were a real grown up if you could say that.

Since then I’ve seen Alien an unknown number of times in various forms, cut for TV, uncut and finally the Director’s Cut. This is one of those films that I’m very happy to own on Blu-Ray, it’s a beautiful film with a stunning sense of enormous scale and claustrophobia at the same time. The iconic look of the alien and its surroundings is the work of Swiss artist H.R. Giger. The organic but, well alien, look of his designs adds hugely to the feeling of unease and fear we get from the alien itself. The design is so important to the film that it’s one of those, sadly rare, times when the average viewer is aware of who created it.

Every time I watch Alien, I’m reminded how timeless it is. Partly this is due to its sci-fi future setting but mostly for me it’s because the film is so tight, it’s so focused on the small crew of the Nostromo and we are so engaged and on edge for almost the entire film, that we don’t have time for reflecting on the depiction of computers or characters’ hairstyles. All of that other stuff becomes iconic and I feel myself believing that it’s entirely what things could look like in the early 22nd century (The far future setting certainly helps as it’s a long time before anybody’s going to be able to call Ridley Scott out on that.)

So hey, this is a horror review, is Alien a horror? As a whole series I think it becomes a matter of opinion and certainly varies a little by film, but this film? Damn straight it’s a horror, it just happens to be set in space. Alien, when you really break it down, is a slasher film. A group of people, being hunted down and taken out one by one by a seemingly unstoppable foe. Slasher, and a terrifying one at that. The claustrophobic setting of the Nostromo, the body horror, the excellent creature effects, the eerie score, and the superb acting keep you paranoid and in suspense for most of the film.

I was going to point out a few stand out members of the cast, but that would be doing a disservice to the others. They are all excellent, from the comic relief (Well as much as a film like Alien allows it) duo of Harry Dean Stanton’s Brett and Yaphet Kotto’s Parker. To Sigourney Weaver’s no nonsense Ellen Ripley, they all do their part to immerse you in the film’s universe and make it real to you. The Alien itself is a true monster, it’s both beautiful and repulsive at the same time, a marvel of design with a reproductive cycle to keep you awake at night.

All of these things come together to create something very special and that’s why I’m (unsurprisingly I imagine) going to award Alien, 5 Rolled up Magazines out of 5. This is a true masterpiece, a candidate not just for best sci-fi horror, but for one of the best films period. A film which stands the test of time and feels as new as the day it was released, but then you don’t need me to tell you that, you’ve seen it, right?

**WARNING** SPOILERS BELOW **WARNING**

Welcome to the spoiler section. This is the part where I can bring up some specific parts of the film which I’d like to talk about more, whether they be good, or bad.

So now that the 3 people who haven’t seen Alien have left the room let’s indulge in some specifics, starting with the iconic Chestburster scene. This scene is fantastic, the mood of the film turns lighter briefly with Kane seemingly fully recovered from his ordeal with the face hugger, everyone’s smiling and joking when suddenly Kane starts convulsing. The crew hold him down and we meet the alien for the first time as it bursts bloodily from Kane’s chest. It’s so visceral and such a contrast to the relaxed feeling moments before that it continues to be shocking with every watch.

Another sequence of the film I love, and one which shows that Alien isn’t just a one trick pony, is the scene where Dallas is crawling around in the air ducts trying to flush the alien out. The paranoia and the claustrophobia in this scene are intense. Every junction in the ducts has multiple directions the alien could come from and the crew’s simple tracking device does nothing to ease the tension. In the end it’s a simple jump scare, but it works.

Let’s talk about Ash. He could just have been a particularly zealous crew member. He could have been a character who was killed for his error of overriding Ripley and bringing Kane back onto the ship, that could have been the limit of his involvement. Many films would have done that. Not here. Having Ash turn out to be an Android, and one programmed to make sure the alien is recovered, crew expendable, really comes out of nowhere. We’re busy worrying about where the alien is and who it’s going to kill next when suddenly there’s another threat, one which we had no idea about, we didn’t even know Androids were a thing! Ian Holm is fantastic and somehow manages to make a scene where he tries to kill Ripley with a rolled up magazine scary, rather than ridiculous.

Ripley has a reputation for being a bit of a badass, but that mostly comes from the sequels, here she’s more of a hardass. She’s far from being a damsel in distress but she’s certainly terrified by her situation and to be honest it’s another thing that I love about this film. She isn’t a superhero, she’s just doing the best she can and keeps her head when those around her are panicking. Ultimately she defeats the alien, blasting it out into space, but it feels like a desperate fight for survival rather than plot armoured inevitability.

Whether you prefer this, or its admittedly excellent sequel Aliens (That’s usually the extent of it, I don’t know many people claiming it’s Alien: Resurrection) this is where it all began and where many other films in the sci-fi horror sub-genre got their inspiration.

This is Emma, last survivor of the Nostromo, signing off.