Science fiction horror films

"You don't think the guy who makes the toilets for the Space Shuttle gets to see the plans for the rest of it?"

"Who the hell are "them", anyway? The government? The mafia? Aliens?"

"Kate, I'm a healthy married male white engineer who enjoys reading horror novels and eating chocolate ice cream. As well as climbing around psycho jungle gyms."

"This place changes your perception about what's possible."

"God, you know, I wish I was just…smarter."

"He's a high-tech genius whose morals make Muammar Kadafi look like Mother Teresa!"

"Holy shit, variable time speed rooms!"

"Maybe we're in Hell!"

"I'm not crazy, and I'm not hard of hearing, either! [turns to the wall] I told you no one would believe me!"

"Some things should never be created! They exist for theoretical purposes only!"

"I'm just blind, not retarded."

"I figure he knows something, something that he didn't want anyone to know. That's usually why people are tortured."

"Jesus. The gravity shifted. Wow!"

"Don't be so stupid, Kate. You know time works differently in this place."

"Welcome to a new dimension in fear."

"You won't believe what's waiting in the 4th dimension."

"There is more to fear than you can see."

"The first one had rules."

"Kari Matchett — Kate Filmore"

"Geraint Wyn Davies — Simon Grady"

"Grace Lynn Kung — Sasha"

"Matthew Ferguson — Max Reisler"

"Neil Crone — Jerry Whitehall"

"Barbara Gordon — Mrs. Paley"

"Lindsey Connell — Julia"

"RUUUUUN, GOOOOO! GET TO THE CHOPPER!"

"You're one... ugly motherf***er!"

"[after pinning a man to the wall with his knife] Stick around."

"[after knocking down a door to shoot two more soldiers] Knock-knock."

"Blain: Bunch of slack-jawed faggots around here. This stuff will make you a god damned sexual Tyrannosaurus, just like me."

"Blain: Come on in, you fuckers. Come on in. Ol' Painless is waitin'."

"Anna: When I was little, we found a man. He looked like—like butchered. The old women in the village crossed themselves, and whispered crazy things, said strange things. El diablo cazador de hombres. Only in the hottest years this happens. And this year it grows hot. We begin finding our men. We found them sometimes without their skin, and sometimes much, much worst. El que hace trofeos de los hombres means... "The demon who makès trophies of men.""

"Nothing like it has ever been on earth before."

"It came for the thrill of the hunt. It picked the wrong man to hunt."

"Soon the hunt will begin."

"[from trailer] In a part of the world where there are no rules, deep in the jungle where nothing that lives is safe, an elite rescue squad is being led by the ultimate warrior. But now, they're up against the ultimate enemy. Nothing like it has ever been on earth before. We cannot see it, but it sees the heat of our bodies and the heat of our fear. It kills for pleasure, it hunts for sport. But this time, it's picked the wrong man to hunt."

"I always wanted to see something with mandibles."

"One of the great science fiction horror films, often imitated, but never properly duplicated, not even by its own sequel."

"There's something deeply hypocritical about a film that first establishes that its guerrillas are the evil variety by having one of them cold-bloodedly execute a hostage, then gives its squad of "expendables" free rein to cold-bloodedly murder all of them minutes later. It's the Reagan era all over: tobacco-chewing, tough-talking, US of A military triumphalism on one hand and self-pitying, bugle-salute sentimentalism on the other (when Bill Duke – giving the one thing in Predator that could actually be termed a performance – goes all misty-eyed over his microwaved buddy Ventura). Most of the big 80s action directors displayed some ambivalence towards the mildly fascistic butt-kicking mores of their chosen form: James Cameron developed his My Little Pony eco side; Paul Verhoeven sharpened his satire. But the full mess and insincerity and dumb contradictions are there unapologetically in Predator, a piece of preening post-Vietnam powder-puff for the US ego."

"I think Predator has odd moments of self-consciousness too. The one interesting (as opposed to efficient) piece of screenwriting is the scene after they've stormed the rebel encampment, when the alien hunter is watching the soldiers in infrared. Carl Weathers's CIA agent thanks Duke for skewering a deadly scorpion on his back; Duke's reply – "Any time" – is played back with menacing distortion by the predator, until it sounds like a warning. The radio operator (played by Lethal Weapon screenwriter Shane Black) tells a variation of the dirty joke he tried out in the helicopter, also concerning an echo. Landham finally gets it, and his booming laugh is picked up by the alien and played back, grotesquely. Echoes, echoes, and more echoes … until all the machismo is hollow. Something telling is going on here, tonally. The final image of the sequence is the predator watching the heat fade out of the scorpion in its own palm. It's like the film is saying: there's always someone bigger."

"Predator presents a confused but not unsympathetic mix of genres: the in-your-face, shape-shifting horror of Alien (film) and the sweaty military mystique of Rambo and Top Gun, with the whole salted by the camp humor and comic book heroics of the typical Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle. It`s also, if only half-consciously, a political allegory, with something unformed but urgent to say about U.S. involvement in Central America."

"McTiernan had a good idea in making his monster all but invisible. (through the film`s first hour, his presence is suggested only through a clever optical effect). Schwarzenegger and his team are, to say the least, very definite physical presences; the only force that could possibly threaten them would be their opposite, something airy and unseen. McTiernan, regrettably, seems more interested in spectacle than suspense, and the attack sequences are filmed for splashy visual impact. And an apocalyptic finale that raises the antiwar message to the nuclear level is more than McTiernan's metaphor can bear. But Predator remains, if not exactly a thinking man`s Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, at least an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie that reflects some thought."

"In the context of racially charged white anxieties about immigration and social order, the historical demonization of Black men is a trope, a stereotype, that easily maps onto cinematic typecasting. The 1987 Hollywood film that launched the Predator franchise fits this pattern. Predator depicted a Black, dreadlocked, large and super-virile male in a way that converged white art with white political history. A white man once said he thought it was cool that I had dreadlocks like the Predator. This is not a compliment."

"Predator starts out as a second cousin to Rambo and Missing in Action, with Arnold Schwarzenegger (as Maj. Dutch Schaefer) leading a covert mission to find military operatives missing in Latin America. After 45 long minutes, he and his cohorts (among them Carl Weathers) find an enemy camp and conduct a raid. Knock, knock, says Mr. Schwarzenegger, kicking down the door to a hut. Stick around, he says, running somebody through with a sword."

"Predator, which opens today at the National and other theaters, is alternately grisly and dull, with few surprises, though the creature's face, when finally revealed, has an interesting claw configuration where its mouth ought to be. The habitat is a good deal more interesting than the action, since it contains both floristy-looking palm fronds and large, deciduous trees that have produced some autumn leaves. The film was shot in Mexico."

"Grisly and dull, with few surprises."

"Yeah, I think there’s something very unique about that movie. For one, the movie itself is something that inspired me to do mixed-genre pictures later. I remember going to see it with my older brother who was a bodybuilder and we saw every Arnold Schwarzenegger movie that came out and we went to see that one thinking it was a Commando type film and then it starts turning – I remember the audience reaction to the film in the theater, they were kinda confused when it turned sci-fi and horror and Arnold didn’t really win at the end, a Predator blows himself up and flies off looking like he’s going to a looney bin in a helicopter. And they were a little like "wow what was that movie?" And it just caught on and kept growing in popularity. And the movie itself was very unique."

""Predator" is an ominous high-tech Stone-Age mixture—ominous because the production is high tech and the script, and its values and mentality, are Stone Age. It's in the bare-bones action-adventure mode that producers Joel Silver and Lawrence Gordon used in "The Warriors" and "The Driver," chic action-fables where nothing impedes the streamlined flow—neither logic, originality nor a single naturalistic moment. Sometimes the form works, but in "Predator," they've hit nada. There's a difference between Walter Hill's minimalism and vacuity—which is what we get from Jim and John Thomas' screenplay. It's arguably one of the emptiest, feeblest, most derivative scripts ever made as a major studio movie. There's no need to do a Mad magazine movie parody of this; it's already on the screen."

"Slightly above-average actioner that tries to compensate for tissue-thin-plot with ever-more-grisly death sequences and impressive visual effects."

"Arnold Schwarzenegger - Major 'Dutch' Schaeffer"

"Carl Weathers - Agent Al Dillon"

"Elpidia Carrillo - Anna"

"Bill Duke - Sergeant 'Mac' Eliot"

"Jesse Ventura - Blain Cooper"

"Sonny Landham - Billy"

"Richard Chaves - Poncho"

"Shane Black - Hawkins"

"RG Armstrong - General Phillips"

"Kevin Peter Hall - Predator"

"You... are... my lucky star."

"[after the Nostromo explodes, seemingly killing the Alien] I got you... you son of a bitch."

"[last lines in the film] Final report of the commercial starship Nostromo. Third Officer reporting. The other members of the crew - Kane, Lambert, Parker, Brett, Ash, and Captain Dallas - are dead. Cargo and ship destroyed. I should reach the frontier in about six weeks. With a little luck, the network will pick me up. This is Ripley, last survivor of the Nostromo, signing off. [to Jones, the ship's cat] Come on, cat."

"It's a robot! Ash is a goddamn robot!"

"[to Dallas] Oh, God! It's moving right towards you! Move! Get out of there!"

"In space no one can hear you scream."

"Sometimes the scariest things come from within."

"There are things so terrifying, they only exist in a nightmare...or outer space."

"A word of warning …"

"Top Secret - Science Officer's Eyes Only...Bring back life form. Priority One. All other considerations secondary. Crew expendable."

""The perfect organism. Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility...its purity. A survivor - unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality." ...Is there room enough in space for us and it?"

"Tom Skerritt – Dallas"

"Sigourney Weaver – Ripley"

"Veronica Cartwright – Lambert"

"Harry Dean Stanton – Brett"

"John Hurt – Kane"

"Ian Holm – Ash"

"Yaphet Kotto – Parker"

"Bolaji Badejo – Alien"

"Helen Horton – Mother"

"Alien is an expensively assembled science-fiction and horror shocker that’s being pushed hard by 20th Century Fox, and enough of it works on the gut-level of cheap thrills to justify the company’s high expectations. Alien has its problems [though]. Visual effects and shock moments aside, Scott seems ponderous about getting through simple plot mechanics that one of the old science-fiction films could have tossed off with workmanlike abandon. But for those who like this kind of film, he’s produced — in 70mm and Dolby sound — something like the equivalent of every amusement park ride rolled into one.”"

"[The] plot is simple in the extreme. Alien has almost no wit, no depth of character, no complexity of plot, no subtext of meaning. In the long run, that might prevent it from being a truly classic horror film. For the moment, however, that won’t matter. The immediate sensation of Alien is nerve-shattering terror, and on that level it works masterfully.”"

"I’m going to attack [the audience] sexually… I’m going to attack the men. I am going to put in every image I can think of to make the men in the audience cross their legs."

"Alien was green lit by 20th Century Fox after Star Wars proved just how lucrative science-fiction could be in 1977. The two films aren’t wholly different, either. Han Solo, a scruffy, self-centered mercenary, was one of sci-fi cinema’s first great working-class heroes, and his battered, lived-in spacecraft inspired Scott. “[Star Wars] influenced me when I did Alien,” he said later. “I thought I better push it a lot further, make [the aesthetic] feel a lot like truck driving.”"

"The sheer normality of these interstellar wage slaves is conveyed before we even see them. At the start of the film, the crew members of the Nostromo, a “commercial towing vehicle”, are snoozing in their suspended animation pods, but one of them has left a plastic drinking-bird ornament bobbing away on a table, and there is a coffee cup on a dashboard. Then, when the ship’s onboard computer wakes them, they don’t slip into form-fitting Starfleet uniforms and hurry to their posts: they shrug on their shapeless overalls, and then sit around eating and smoking while two blue-collar engineers, Parker (Yaphet Kotto) and Brett (Harry Dean Stanton), grouse about “the bonus situation”."

"No other horror or science-fiction film has captured the humdrum reality of doing a day’s work for a day’s pay with such accuracy. For that matter, perhaps no film of any genre has. There may be sitcoms that depict these everyday frustrations and interactions as deftly as Alien does. But in the cinema? The most authentic ever film about earning a living could well be the one with a giant, slimy, acid-blooded extra-terrestrial monster."

"Many, many years ago — back in 1985 — I wrote an episode of my comic strip where two women are talking to each other. They want to go see a movie and one woman says, "I'll only go to a movie if it satisfies three criteria." I have to confess, I stole this whole thing from a friend of mine at the time because I didn't have an idea for my strip. My friend Liz Wallace ... said, "I'll only see a movie if it has at least two women in it who talk to each other about something besides a man." That left very, very few movies in 1985. The only movie my friend could go see was Alien, because the two women talk to each other about the monster. But somehow young feminist film students found this old cartoon and resurrected it in the Internet era and now it's this weird thing. People actually use it to analyze films to see whether or not they pass that test. Still ... surprisingly few films actually pass it."

"Alien is another triumph of technology over art. It is also a horror movie set in space — and it just doesn’t work…. Scott does make a concession to feminism by casting Sigourney Weaver as the hero but he couldn’t resist a sexist jab at the end when, with no motivation, she removes her trousers.”"

"After 40 years, this sci-fi horror masterpiece still feels lethally contemporary. With screenwriters Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett, Ridley Scott created an essay on the hell of other people, the vulnerability of our bodies, and the idea of space as a limitless new extension of human paranoia. Alien also functions as a nightmare [parody]] of the Apollo 11 moon-landing, which had happened just 10 years previously, and the biological weapons industry."

"Weaver begins the action looking girlish and serious, but changes into the toughly self-reliant woman who defined her subsequent roles. Her career evolves before our very eyes. Interestingly, the famous, heart-stopping moment where the alien embryo jumps out of the egg happens much more fleetingly than you might remember. Scott cuts away from it quickly, leaving the negative image impressed on our retina. Editors Terry Rawlings and Peter Weatherley cut the film so cleverly so that we never have a clear notion of what the alien actually looks like until the very last shots. The idea of it starting the size of a toad, then emerging the size of a bus with multiple rows of razor-teeth is skin-crawlingly horrible."

"The amount of academic work that has been written about Alien is phenomenal. But in a way that should not be surprising. The film contains themes about motherhood, gender politics, post-humanism, biology and so much else. Almost everything we can do in film studies we can do through Alien."

"Don’t race to it expecting the wit of Star Wars or the metaphysical pretensions of 2001 and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. At its best it recalls The Thing (from Another World), though the Howard Hawks film was both more imaginatively and more economically dramatized."

"A GIGANTIC construction moves serenely through space where, though the night never ends, there's always enough light to see strange objects. This one looks like the main set of D.W. Griffith's "Intolerance". It's as if Babylon had been cut loose from earth to sail back through space to its own time. In actual fact, it's the cargo-ship Nostromo on its return to earth at the end of an extended voyage to the far end of the galaxy. When we go inside, the ship appears to have been as suddenly deserted as the Mary Celeste. We wander down empty corridors into abandoned living quarters, into engine rooms and, finally, into the command room where the computers are the only signs of life. The interior of the ship is vast. It contains the kind of waste space one seldom sees anymore except in some rare old Manhattan pile like the Dakota. Something decidedly eerie is going on."

"Alien is an extremely small, rather decent movie of its modest kind, set inside a large, extremely fancy physical production. Don't race to it expecting the wit of "Star Wars" or the metaphysical pretentions of "2001" and "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." At its best it recalls "The Thing", though the Howard Hawks film was both more imaginatively and more economically dramatized."

"The horror genre, in any period, is one that you like, or leave distantly alone. The violence in Alien is less ’real’ than the shark-infested waters of Jaws. But telling yourself that these galactic goings-on are improbable nonsense is less effective than it should be in unclenching your fists or making your heart stop pounding. Surrender at all to Scott’s extraterrestrial make-believe and you are in for jolts, shocks and some fairly gruesome and shuddering sights."

"Much admiration is justly lavished on the exquisite Lovecraftian qualities of Giger’s designs, his creation of a monster whose various slime-dripping protuberances managed to be hideous, beautiful and unnervingly sexual all at once. It was Giger who gave Alien its vision. It was Scott, with just one feature (“The Duellists”) under his belt, who gave the movie its impact. To watch Alien now is to marvel at just how patient and stealthily elegant a picture it is, particularly in its first hour, with its creeping camera movements, hypnotic pacing and enveloping, womb-like sense of dread. Released today, it would no doubt feel like an art film among so many noisier, clunkier blockbusters. If Alien looks formally radical in retrospect, it was also thematically provocative in its moment: Here was a movie that turned on the audacious spectacle of a man being raped and impregnated and that gave us a (still) too-rare female action protagonist for the ages in Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley."

"The gender politics of Alien have been grist for endless deconstruction, although “Memory” does examine a few fresh wrinkles. Philippe unpacks the feminist dimension that links the movie to other 1979 releases as different as “Manhattan” and “Kramer vs. Kramer.” Elsewhere, his subjects discuss the Alien’s stature as a Fury, an extraterrestrial manifestation of a figure from Greek mythology, exacting retributive violence on behalf of the repressed feminine. Pointedly, Philippe begins the film with a shot of the Temple of Apollo ruins at Delphi and a dramatization of the Furies, played by a trio of actresses with a few creepy Giger-esque visual enhancements. It may seem like a curious point of entry, but it reinforces that Alien is timeless, in part because it brilliantly cross-pollinated so many of our most ancient and enduring myths. Its abiding respect for the past is what gave such shattering force to its vision of the future."

"Alien is such a great and groundbreaking film that no amount of redundant prequels and sequels will ever reduce its luminous majesty. It will always be there as a never-to-be-improved-upon metaphor for the icy despair and inhuman horror of deep space."

"Make no mistake about it — the gore, which is essential to this film’s effectiveness, is excessive enough to help earn the film the first ‘R’ rating given to any of the four recent sci-fi blockbusters. Any theater playing Alien may well consider building new wings on the restrooms to accommodate queasy patrons.”"

"The premise is simple: seven astronauts working on a battered cargo spacecraft, bring something back on to the ship after touching down on a strange planet, and the alien starts preying on them."

"The film was nominated for Best Art Direction at the Academy Award and won for Best Visual Effects. Anyone who has ever seen the notorious "chestburster" scene – which was inspired by Francis Bacon's 1944 painting [[w:Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion|Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion – will understand why Scott's special effects team, headed by Brian Johnson and Nick Allder, deserved to win."

"Ridley Scott’s 1979 thriller was greeted with no particular fanfare by the reviewers, and if there was a critical consensus it was that the film was at best watchable pabulum-reasonably professionally handled visually and enjoyably scary, but without significant nuance to qualify for discussion as art. Jack Kroll’s comment was typical: “It’s about time someone made a science fiction thriller that thrills, that has no truck with metaphysics, philosophy or theosophy and just boils everything down to the pure ravishingly vulgar essence of fright.” Aside from its manifest violence, the only aspect of Alien that attracted much critical fire was what one reviewer called its “gratuitous sexism.”True to a two hundred-year-old tradition of gothic horror, the film relies for its most gut-wrenching effects on the spectacle of a helpless beautiful woman threatened with violence by an unspeakable, inhuman, but quintessentially masculine horror. Significantly, one scene repeatedly mentioned as a “gratuitous” injection of voyeurism involves Sigourney Weaver’s stripping down to her underwear just prior to a final attac by the alien and her subsequent blasting of the creature into space and, presumably, oblivion. The implication seems to be that Alien was overall good, clean, horrible but simple-minded fun, and shouldn’t have been compromised by random intrusions of irrelevant sex. A close look at Alien, however, reveals that not only is sexuality not occasionally intrusive in an otherwise prestine film, but that sexual symbolism and iconography of a singular kind are pervasive throughout the film and may actually be its “leitmotif”. What Alien is about is gestation and birth. The sexuality of the film has strong reproductive overtones that distinguish it from the kind of garden variety titillation of most thrillers. The centrality of the birth process to the film is not hard to demonstrate."

"The 1979 film had married science fiction with horror in a way unseen since the ‘50s, reviving the monster genre, which had, for the most part, died out in the wake of Psycho’s ushering in of an era of more personal, intimate, human horror."

"Alien has proved an ideal text for academics, a deep well – or perhaps a totem pole – of Freudian allusion from which critics and theorists have drawn whatever they fancied. Since it was first released, every frame of the film has been pored over for meaning. James Cameron’s excellent sequel, Aliens, has been studied too. (The other films in the series, not so much.) Most of this attention has been occupied by the character of Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley and the Swiss artist HR Giger’s terrifying design for the alien, or “xenomorph”. But the androids, the spaceship, the uniforms and even the ship’s cat have come in for analysis. In 2019, the rise of the Alien-academic complex shows few signs of slowing down."

"In an interview looking back at the role, Weaver said: “The writers were especially smart in that they didn’t turn Ripley into a female character. She was just a character, a kind of Everyman, a young per-son who’s put in this extraordinary situation. Believe me, when we did [the sequels], I saw how hard it was to write a woman in a heroic, straight, unsentimental, authentic way.”"

"[Alien is] just an intergalactic haunted-house thriller."

"At its most fundamental level, Alien is a movie about things that can jump out of the dark and kill you. It shares a kinship with the shark in "Jaws," Michael Myers in "Halloween," and assorted spiders, snakes, tarantulas and stalkers. Its most obvious influence is Howard Hawks' "The Thing" (1951), which was also about a team in an isolated outpost who discover a long-dormant alien, bring it inside, and are picked off one by one as it haunts the corridors. Look at that movie, and you see Alien in embryo. In another way, Ridley Scott's 1979 movie is a great original. It builds on the seminal opening shot of "Star Wars" (1977), with its vast ship in lonely interstellar space, and sidesteps Lucas' space opera to tell a story in the genre of traditional "hard" science fiction; with its tough-talking crew members and their mercenary motives, the story would have found a home in John W. Campbell's Astounding Science Fiction during its nuts-and-bolts period in the 1940s. Campbell loved stories in which engineers and scientists, not space jockeys and ray-gun blasters, dealt with outer space in logical ways."

"One of the great strengths of Alien is its pacing. It takes its time. It waits. It allows silences (the majestic opening shots are underscored by Jerry Goldsmith with scarcely audible, far-off metallic chatterings). It suggests the enormity of the crew's discovery by building up to it with small steps: The interception of a signal (is it a warning or an SOS?). The descent to the extraterrestrial surface. The bitching by Brett and Parker, who are concerned only about collecting their shares. The masterstroke of the surface murk through which the crew members move, their helmet lights hardly penetrating the soup. The shadowy outline of the alien ship. The sight of the alien pilot, frozen in his command chair. The enormity of the discovery inside the ship ("It's full of ... leathery eggs ...")."

"Alien has been called the most influential of modern action pictures, and so it is, although Halloween also belongs on the list. Unfortunately, the films it influenced studied its thrills but not its thinking. We have now descended into a bog of Gotcha! movies in which various horrible beings spring on a series of victims, usually teenagers. The ultimate extension of the genre is the Geek Movie, illustrated by the remake of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which essentially sets the audience the same test as an old-time carnival geek show: Now that you've paid your money, can you keep your eyes open while we disgust you? A few more ambitious and serious sci-fi films have also followed in the footsteps of Alien, notably the well-made Aliens (1986) and Dark City (1998). But the original still vibrates with a dark and frightening intensity."

"You’re going to be most appreciative of Alien in its most technically advantageous circumstances."

"It is easy to see that director Ridley Scott had hoped for a cast of Jane Fonda, Warren Beatty and Jim Brown, for the three principals, but settled for lookalikes Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt and Yaphet Kotto. With only about 20 pages of script, it’s understandable why everyone is sulking and biting, even being obscene enough to give the movie an R rating."

"20th Century-Fox is rather superstitiously opening the picture on the same day that Star Wars opened two years ago, and in many of the same theaters, in hopes that box-office lightning can strike twice."

"Although the spaceship models look like they were patched together with Super Glue in your brother's basement, the majority of the 24-year-old movie holds up well. The production design in Alien was always among the movie's strongest points, and the bulky details (a motion detector the size of a leaf blower; spaceship monitors that look like Radio Shack TRS-80 computer screens) seem more industrial than quaint. Even with its horrifying villain and scenes of bloody excess, Alien endures as a superior piece of filmmaking, with a pace that's like watching an art film when compared to the over-the-top space operas in recent years."

"Time has been kind to Ridley’s Scott’s Alien since its release in 1979. What was initially regarded as a science fiction/horror genre work – albeit a superior one – now plays like an existential drama that just happens to take place in deep space. An example of what commercial cinema can aspire to, even on a limited budget, the film boasts an intelligent script, careful performances, clever visual effects and well-crafted sets. The titular alien, which was designed by Swiss artist H.R. Giger, and is only partially glimpsed throughout, remains the most elegantly vile creature to ever grace cinema screens."

"The film, of course, is loaded with innuendo; much has already been said about its phallic predilections, the reverse penetration, conflating consumption with food and sex. The crew of seven is hunted and devoured through air vents that open and close like orifices by a creature that is both biologically perverse yet undeniably industrial. There’s a very good reason why the final scare comes when Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley mistakes the alien for an innocuous wall of her escape shuttle. Teaming with artist H.R Giger and set decorator Ian Whittaker, Scott envelops viewers with a paralyzing fear of replacement, becoming expendable in favour of soulless mutations of machine and matter."

"This being my fourth or fifth viewing of Alien, I’m now able to communicate better what exactly it is that scares me about it so much. Moreso than awakening subconscious biological repulsions of the other, or inherently masculine sexual insecurities, the key is in realizing that the most frightening sequence is the revelation that Ash (an uncanny early performance from Ian Holm that wipes the floor with Michael Fassbender’s David) is an android. Any initial fears of a ravenous, acid-blooded carnivore with the deadly efficiency of a slaughterhouse are immediately trumped by the slow, unsettling drip of milky blood from Ash’s forehead. The creature, the mesh of flesh and artifice driven by inhuman consciousness, was, of course, onboard the whole time."

"Alien’s pairing of genuine, spine-tingling horror and thematic resonance put Ridley Scott on the map, and it’s frankly unfair that the masterful director was able to immediately follow-up with Blade Runner, another existential sci-fi classic. 40 years on, and it has remained one of his best, most invasive and obsessive films. It’s truly a testament that, despite Prometheus and Alien: Covenant’s irritating disposition to posit answers to questions never asked, every turned corner of that first nightmare invites mystery and intrigue. We still don’t really know where the aliens came from, and it’s for the best that we never find out."

"This scary tale of a monster stalking astronauts in deep space, made with no pretense to great art, has almost by accident become of one of the most influential films in history."

"Before Alien, big showdowns were always about the last man standing, not the last woman."

"The end of Alien (spoiler alert!) has Ripley facing down the monster aboard the escape shuttle she’s using to flee the doomed spaceship Nostromo. She plans to eject the parasite from an airlock, but before she does so, she risks her own life by first rescuing the ship’s pet cat, Jones. Author/screenwriter Blake Synder used this scene as a title and theme for his Save the Cat! series of manuals on successful screenplay structure. Snyder, who died in 2009, coined “save the cat” as the moment where a movie hero does something that wins audience affection and empathy. This could happen at any point in a movie. Saving the cat in Alien proved that Ripley had a heart, because she’s a steely cipher in the rest of the film."

"When we didn't make the picture, Dan O'Bannon needed to be interned in a mental institution for two years, suffering because we didn't get to do "Dune." And when he came out he wrote the script for Alien. Alien was the reaction to not doing "Dune." Who would believe that? But it's true!"

"Alien (1979): Directed by Ridley Scott. Starring Sigourney Weaver and Tom Skerritt. It’s Friday night. The sold-out theater is so packed, I have to sit in the last seat available in the front row. My parents, who had no problems taking me to R-rated movies, have to sit elsewhere. Then there’s that stunning scene where John Hurt is eating breakfast with his spaceship crewmates and goes into convulsions. Unbeknownst to me, my mother has somehow sneaked up behind me. In a masterpiece of timing, just as the creature pops out of Hurt’s stomach, my mother grabs my shoulder and goes “Bah!” I still have flashbacks. It’s the most scared I’ve ever been at the movies. The film’s tagline: “In space, no one can hear you scream.” In that theater, everyone heard me."

"[Alien] reached out, grabbed you, and squeezed your stomach it was more gripping than entertaining, but a lot of people didn’t mind. They thought it was terrific, because at least they’d felt something: they’d been brutalized.”"

"The austere minimalism of Ridley Scott’s Alien has kept it from becoming dated. Originally released in 1979, this “haunted house in outer space” scary movie still manages to spook audiences, though its infamous “chest-bursting” scene plays somewhat comic now, with the crew looking on aghast like a bunch of stooges. Best known for creating an atmosphere of dread through production design and art direction (the cavernous ship looks like a sci-fi variation of a dilapidated car garage) and, of course, H.R. Giger’s creature (all limbs and shiny black skin and protruding jaws—watch those teeth!), Alien may be the most artfully directed and well-acted slasher movie of all time."

"It was as stylish and thoughtful a space-horror film as has been made, a delightfully cerebral movie in which thrills and chills were accomplished less by the sight of evil than by its implication. The creature in Alien was an ugly little thing, to be sure, and had a disposition to match. But he never was able to dominate the film as he might possibly have one`s later dreams. In Alien, human beings--the ill-fated crew of the spaceship Nostromo--shared the front seat (and the driving) with special effects, and it was on that strength that the film became a memorable box-office smash."

"Alien begins slowly, with a methodical, restrained pace and some self-conscious interplay among its cast, but once the alien itself is introduced the movie takes as firm a hold as the alien does on its victims."

"This homicidal monster, which keeps changing shape, is designed to provoke nightmares, especially in one early scene in which it catapults itself into view, teeth bared. This scene should go down in the books as one of the most disgustingly horrifying moments in movies."

"No film I have seen in the last year or so, excluding perhaps The Deer Hunter, emanates so strong a whiff of palpable, nerve-straining shock. It is, in fact, an audience reaction picture par excellence. This explains, perhaps better than the colossal build-up, why everyone wants to see it. The public now seems to be sitting back in its seats and saying "Amaze me." Alien, above all others recently, can be relied upon to do just that. Yet it does so, oddly enough, with a story that is basically just a mixture of The Creature from the Black Lagoon and The Thing from Outer Space. A dozen other 50s-sounding titles spring to mind – well, 60s at any rate. The point is the added 70s proficiency. You won't see anything very original anywhere in the film, other than in the actual making of it. There, no holds are barred. Scott, a recruit from advertising, where instant atmospherics has to be the order of the day, manipulates his audience in a far stronger fashion than he managed with The Duellists. His combination of space fiction and horror story is no great shakes as a work of art. Artifice, however, it has in profusion."

"Some people call it a cruel, heartless and essentially exploitative opus. Something to gibber at, in fact. But Alien is not in the business of old-style family entertainment (which was, after all, often as warm and gooey as hot treacle, and about as nourishing). It bases its appeal on a different set of values. Not very enlightening ones, no doubt. But exactly in tune with much more cynical times. It deserves its success for gauging, and gorging, its audience so thoroughly. Technically a British film, it certainly shows how much talent we have in this country if only we had the courage to develop it ourselves. But that's another story, and a much less exciting one."

"Alien is a rape movie with male victims," explains David McIntee, author of the Alien study Beautiful Monsters. "And it also shows the consequences of that rape: the pregnancy and birth. It is a film that plays, very deliberately, with male fears of female reproduction." Does this make Alien a conservative film or a radical one? Over the years the debate has been teased out in either direction. In the opinion of the cultural critic Barbara Creed, for instance, Scott's film epitomized what she refers to as "the monstrous feminine". It trades in classic Freudian imagery (penis-shaped monsters; dark, womb-like interiors) and shudders at the bloody spectacle of childbirth. Here is a horror film made by men that exploits a particularly male fear of all that is female. Others beg to differ. Ripley, they argue, is the game-changer; the character that sends Alien (and its sequels) off in a bold new direction. "Ripley is pretty revolutionary," insists McIntee. "All of a sudden you have a horror film that has a younger female character who is a survivor and a heroine as opposed to a victim."

"Ridley Scott's 1979 film "is not just about people trying not to get eaten by a drooling monstrous animal," film critic David McIntee writes in Beautiful Monsters: The Unofficial and Unauthorised Guide to the Alien and Predator Films. "It's worse. It's about them trying not to get raped by a drooling monstrous animal.""

"20th Century Fox was certainly not seeking intellectual respectability when it began production of Alien in the 1970s. Its executives simply wanted to replicate the massive commercial success of Star Wars and plumped on a science fiction script that writer Dan O’Bannon had been shopping round Hollywood. Scott agreed to direct. Crucial to his approach to the film was the creation of a sense of intense claustrophobia on Nostromo which, he decided, should appear as if it had been drifting around space for eons. Its interior was constructed out of old plane parts while smoke was blown through the whole set to give the film a gritty appearance. Intellectual aspirations were never in his sights, Scott later recalled. All he wanted was to make “a straightforward riveting thriller”."

"It has scared generations of filmgoers; triggered sequels, prequels, computer games and graphic novels; and made a star of Sigourney Weaver. But most of all, the film Alien – which is about to celebrate the 40th anniversary of its first screening – has spawned an academic industry unsurpassed by any other film. Over the past four decades, dozens of books, hundreds of journal articles and innumerable college courses have analyzed, frame by frame, Ridley Scott’s story of a bloodthirsty creature stalking the crew of the spaceship Nostromo. No other film, not even The Godfather or Psycho, has generated quite that amount of attention."

"“It is quite astonishing how much academic work Alien has triggered and from such a wide range of approaches. For example, there are psychoanalytic analyses which stress the importance of the alien as a kind of all-consuming mother figure. The birth trauma of the alien erupting from Hurt’s innards also plays to Freudian interpretations of the film’s significance.” It is as good an example of Nietzsche’s idea of the will to power, the main driving force in existence – to survive and reproduce at all costs. Alien is intriguing when viewed from that philosophical perspective."

"The consensus about the first Alien was that no one had ever seen anything like it, except those of us who had. With its more lived-in, “2001: A Space Odyssey”-like attention to futuristic detail and S&M and bondage–inspired alien design by Swiss surrealist H.R. Giger, Alien was unique and an instant classic, adding the words “facehugger” and “chestburster” to the horror-movie lexicon. Scripted by Dan O’Bannon (“Dark Star”) and Ronald Shusett (Aliens), Alien tells the simple tale of a terrifying and deadly alien creature (played by slender, 7-foot-2-inch London design student Bolaji Badejo in an elaborate, tight-fitting suit) on the loose inside the outer-space “commercial towing vehicle” Nostromo. Alien was, like “Jaws” (1975) and “Star Wars” (1977), another case of a B-movie concept getting the A-list treatment from a visionary young director. Indeed, the Alien screenplay was pitched to studios as “Jaws in space.”"

"With its death’s head “face,” phallus-shaped skull and snapping, slavering jaws-within-jaws, the Giger-designed Alien was unlike anything the movie-going public had ever seen. Like the mummy, Frankenstein monster, King Kong and Godzilla, the Alien creature has long since been admitted into the pantheon of greatest movie monsters of all time."

"Sci-fi classic Alien is really two movies. The first is a drama about work, labor issues, contracts, company rules, and so on; the second is just a horror film. In fact, one can see the unresolved management/labor problems in the first part of the film as being transmogrified into a monster that destroys the mining spaceship (the Nostromo) in the second part. From a wider historical perspective, the 1970s marked the end of an economic order that began at the end of the 1940s and witnessed the rise of unionized labor in the United States (this, in the film, is exemplified by the working-class characters on the spaceship factory—the late Harry Dean Stanton and the still kicking it Yaphet Kotto). The 1980s, on the other hand, marked the beginning of an economic order that transferred a massive amount of power to supermanagers. We have not left the 1980s to this day, which is why this film is still relevant."

"When I was 10 years old, I read in a newspaper that a new film called Alien was so terrifying that people were not only fainting out of fear during screenings but also taken out of the theater on stretchers. I badly wanted to see this movie: one that was so terrifying it could send a person to the emergency room."

"Yes, these films take place in outer space, so light is minimal. But Alien made distinct use of darkness, hiding its monster in the ship’s bowels, down dim corridors and inside caves. The original poster for Alien made the darkness a selling point, with a cracked egglike figure oozing green on a black background and the frightening tag line: “In space no one can hear you scream.” Much of Alien: Covenant is on the lowlight spectrum, too, with no way to know just where, or how many, threats lurk. Another film with Alien DNA referenced the darkness motif outright: Pitch Black, from (2000), which starred a rising Vin Diesel. After crashing, the passengers of a ship find themselves stranded on a planet full of E.T.s that attack in the dark. When an eclipse comes, so does terror."

"Twentieth Century Fox has spent the annual budget of several emerging nations to fashion a zillion-dollar Tunnel of Screams where you ride through the dark, past various waxy things that leap out of the wall at regular intervals and boo! Or rather, bleah! In Alien you're never quite scared - just queasy. For nothing occurs between the Scary Parts but mumbly crew members chatting it up with that gabby control panel. Even an old ghost story has more than ghosts. Alien skips the story. There's nothing to lead you on, to try to trick you and make it seem like it's all happening to real people. The crew is just part of the hardware fright-meters who register shock; the warmest thing aboard is a cat. You can't imagine being stranded out there in space - helpless - the way you could in, say, that old haunted New York apartment in "Rosemary's Baby" or upstairs in a Georgetown brownstone in "The Exorcist," or in the ocean at Martha's Vineyard in "Jaws." A problem with Alien is that, out there in some vast dreary nth dimension, anything goes. It's too darn easy to haunt a cosmos."

"Any amount of symbolism and sociological messages can easily be intellectualized in Alien. There is a whole routine about science, for instance, that is compelling and intriguing. But I leave such considerations to others for now and give fair warning: When going on intergalactic travel, always be sure to take a cat. It may prove a friend.”"

"When the first Alien came out in 1979, promising and delivering screams in space that no one could hear, more than a few critics and regular humans called it a relentless, hard-driving thrill machine. In retrospect it resembles a movie with the patience of Job, taking its sweet, stealthy time before arriving at one of the great moments in the history of extreme cinematic gore. You know the scene, probably. There's John Hurt, an actor whose face always seemed halfway to crestfallen even when he didn't have anything to worry about, sitting around the spacecraft galley, having a jolly meal with his crew aboard the Nostromo. He doesn't realize the steroidal tapeworm inside him, gestating, awaits the right moment to burst forth from Hurt's chest and commence the cat-and-mouse franchise spanning two centuries and counting. That monster has been chasing director Ridley Scott ever since."

"Ridley Scott has given us a chilling and brilliantly rendered antidote to swashbuckling space heroes and amiable robots. This is the best horror film to reach the screen since The Omen and a landmark piece of science fiction that looks back to the ’50s tradition of malevolent aliens.”"

"Alien (like other 1970s films such as Jaws, Superman, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Godfather, and Star Wars) was a seminal landmark in the upgrade of shopworn B-movie clichés — monsters, comic book characters, flying saucers, gangsters, Saturday afternoon serials — into major A-movie assets.”"

"In the days of Blade Runner and Alien, there were what I would call matte paintings. We did pretty well with those paintings with Blade Runner, but when you look at them today you can see the seams. In those days, it was good enough, and digital effects didn’t exist. To do Alien, I literally had to have a guy in a black rubber suit. That’s why the film is like Jaws, where you don’t see much of the shark, and you don’t really want to look that closely. In Alien, the scariest of all the films in that series, you don’t see much of the monster, mostly because I was so limited in what I could do."

"Mr. Scott said that when he first read the Alien script, by Dan O’Bannon, “it was frankly what I would call a very well-written B-movie. And we carried it out in an ‘A’ way with a terrific cast and a fantastic monster.”"

"I think Alien captured our most primordial fears. It’s particularly special because it’s not gilded with any characterization other than what you see is what you get — minute by minute with these people. That’s really why a lot of people were scared to death. It’s because they are living in it, minute by minute, and eventually, second by second."

"Alien screenwriter Dan O'Bannon has gone on record to say he used Giger's design motifs to force male audience members to reflect on the effect of sexual violence; he wanted to force male audiences to understand and experience the visceral horror of rape and sexual assault."

"On an intuitive level, Giger understood how humans express themselves in sexual terms; how it's rarely far from our minds, and how we attribute all kinds of positive emotions with the enjoyment of sex and its capacity for new life. Alien took something we're conditioned to view as wholly beautiful, joyous and celebratory—and twisted it into a nightmare."

"Alien is a corker, a walloper, a rouser, a screecher and a ton of fun. If all movies were as thrilling I would happily spend all of my life in the movies."

"Alien is mostly in the business of thrills, and on that level it did provide more than a few. I looked away from the screen during its most gory scenes. Even more enjoyable, though, was watching the film debut of an actress who should become a major star, Sigourney Weaver (she probably changed her name from Alice) makes an auspicious debut as one of the sturdiest crew members.”"

"When Academy Award-winning Swiss artist H.R. Giger passed away on Monday, he left behind, among his endless menagerie of horrors across a wide array of media, including painting, film, sculpture, and music, one of the most unique depictions of alien life ever put to screen. The titular alien, heretofore referred to as the Xenomorph, from Ridley Scott's 1979 science fiction horror classic, wasn't inspired by the stars. Instead it came from deep within mankind (sorry John Hurt) and somehow developed into something more alien and terrifying than anything from the unknown."

"Famed science-fiction screenwriter Dan O'Bannon (Total Recall, Dark star) and Ronald Shusett, who wrote the original draft of Alien, wanted to make a movie about interspecies rape. The script called for a creature that, after impregnating one crew member on the space freighter, The Nostromo, would go on to force itself on the rest of the crew. For that, they needed a creature that reflected not the best that life in the known universe had to offer, but the worst."

"Alien is only the second feature for director Ridley Scott, but it should establish the young Briton as a major filmmaker. And if there’s any justice, it will cause a scramble to book The Duellists, Scott’s over-looked first film.”"

"In the wake of the huge commercial success of Alien, almost all attention has perversely focused on the provenance of the script (was it a rip-off of It, the Terror from Beyond Space? Of Van Vogt's fiction? Was former John Carpenter collaborator Dan O'Bannon sold out by producers Walter Hill and David Giler's rewrites?). But the limited strengths of its staple sci-fi horrors - crew of commercial spacecraft menaced by stowaway monster - always derived from either the offhand organic/ Freudian resonances of its design or the purely (brilliantly) manipulative editing and pacing of its above-average shock quota. Intimations of a big-budget Dark Star fade early, and notions of Weaver as a Hawksian woman rarely develop beyond her resourceful reaction to jeopardy. At least Scott has no time to dawdle over redundant futuristic effects in the fashion that scuttles his later Blade Runner."

"The price paid for the excitement, and it’s a small one, is very little involvement with the characters themselves. But it really doesn’t matter when the screaming starts. In contrast to the glamorous, adventurous outer-space life often depicted in sci-fi, Alien initially presents a mundane commercial spacecraft with crew members like Yaphet Kotto bitching and moaning about wages and working conditions."

"For those unfamiliar with film, Alien follows the unlucky crew of the Nostromo, a space barge of sorts that picks up what seems to be a distress signal from a nearby planet. After investigating, the crew members find an otherworldly craft on the surface, and one poor fellow (John Hurt) picks up an alien parasite that attaches itself to his face, making him a host to something infinitely worse — a hostile beast that begins picking them off one by one."

"Ridley Scott’s original, 1979’s Alien, is a deeply complex monster movie but it wasn’t the first movie to suggest multinational corporations were a danger to individuality. The late Ned Beatty’s explosive cameo in Paddy Chayefsky’s 1976 nightmare-ish TV news satire Network is a memorable monologue about corporate power replacing the state. Even a hokey, if still entertaining, junk sci-fi flick like 1975’s Rollerball starring James Caan knew that the future belonged to fat cats, not presidents. These movies, all of them almost fifty years old, are also blatantly political. In Alien, the real monsters are the executives who see the humans who work for them as disposable. I don’t think there’s a better encapsulation of modern capitalism."

"It is disingenuous for Rubin to somehow suggest Alien is just a movie about humans being chased by a deadly extra-terrestrial. There isn’t any subtext in Alien. The company is evil, full-stop."

"I was really lucky getting the part of Ripley because it took my career down a much less conventional route than I had thought I had wanted. I had dreamt of being mostly a stage actor, which was the kind of career my mother had. Shakespeare and all that. I think what helped was that I wasn't falling over backwards to get the role. I thought, 'Right, I'm going to be chased around the room by this big blob of Jell-O.' And there wasn't anything startling or original about the script. It's basically Ten Little Indians. Then I met Ridley and he was a madman in a wonderful way. When I saw the set design I realized this was going to be fabulous."

"Thirty-five years ago, when Weaver was cast in a sci-fi horror movie — with a little-known commercial director named Ridley Scott at the helm — Weaver would never have predicted that she'd be talking about the film in the far-flung future of 2014. "(Before I saw the designs,) I pictured this big blob of yellow gel rumbling around," she said. "At the first meeting with Ridley, he pulled out all these beautiful big drawings H.R. Giger had done. He's one of the main reasons we're still here talking about this film. ...I wanted to be part of whatever that was because I had never seen anything like that on the screen before."

"It really is not the traditional kind of space adventure where you have a hero and a sidekick and a damsel in distress. In this case they’ve transformed that. I think in some ways that comes out of the moment in the 1970s when there is a turn toward the more dystopian."

"The mother of all action heroines is Ellen Ripley, the character played by Sigourney Weaver in Ridley Scott's 1979 sci-fi classic Alien. Ripley was no superwoman - just a capable crew member on a space barge that was invaded by a maternal monster who laid eggs inside humans. Ripley was a survivor, but in James Cameron's subsequent sequel, she morphed into an avenger, with more overtly violent tendencies and a surrogate daughter to protect."

"The plot wasn't new even when the film was first released. With its hook of a seven-member, multicultural spaceship crew running afoul of a ravenous space alien who gets aboard their ship and kills them, one by one, it suggests a mix of Stanley Kubrick's "2001," Howard Hawks' "The Thing" and every monster movie since "Frankenstein." But the look of the film was new. Few science-fiction movies are as cold, as full of cavernous space, angst and horrific beings. The original Alien is a work of popular entertainment and movie art in which the makers took the "art' as seriously as the entertainment."

"Alien was released a year after Carpenter's Halloween and it altered the landscape of high-budget studio horror as irrevocably as Halloween changed cheapo horror. Alien was a classy picture with classy people -- both Scott and Holm were later knighted -- but it was also gruesome, awful. "In space, no one can hear you scream," ran the original ad line; like Poole and Bowman in "2001," these astronauts are at the mercy of their ship, and even their computer, as well as the alien."

"The look of Alien remains fabulous: a cross between the elegant austerity of 2001 and the raw funk of Dark Star and other low-budgeters. The sets are dazzling and macabre. The characters are both archetypal -- even slightly cliched -- and cipherlike. Being trapped on those sets, with those people, still imparts a creepy chill. There have been three other Aliens since, by directors James Cameron, David Fincher and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, but though all have their points, none is as relentless as this. Weaver was never quite as sexy, vulnerable or compelling. And though they kept trying and repeating, none had an alien this gruesomely, shatteringly awry and unexpected. When it jumped, or when it jumps now, so do we."

"Alien opens on a disarmingly restful note, with establishing shots of a majestic spaceship in which we first discover the seven crew members slumbering away the long voyage home in "hyper-sleep." But the serenity soon fades as British director Ridley Scott and his collaborators build and sustain a brilliant nightmarish tension. Crew and spectators alike are kept in a state of hyper-apprehension, anticipating the sudden, deadly reappearance of a monstrous alien organism one of the most bizarre and vicious creatures ever to spring from the shadows of a movie set."

"Alien is a stylish update on the tradition of '50s science-fiction monster thrillers like The Thing or Forbidden Planet. Alien may seem no more ingenious or frightening than those films did at first sight, but it enhances their durable fear mechanisms with the latest refinements in special-effects artistry, space-age scenic design, sophisticated pictorial atmosphere, tantalization and dynamism. It is certain to take a respected place along the classics of cinematic suspense and horror."

"The monster in Alien variously recalls the shark in Jaws (film), the demon in The Exorcist, the pods in Invasion of the Body Snatchers and even the benign extraterrestrials of Close Encounters. But the most terrifying adaptation is the mouth: as it grows in both size and ferocity, the infernal beast, conceived by Giger and realized by several visual effects designers, flashes not only jaws but jaws within jaws. After the first shocking, snarling show of teeth, all that's necessary to provoke our self-torment is the buildup of suspense, which Scott orchestrates with masterful visual and rhythmic command and the startling emergence of fragmentary features from some border or background of the image. Alien is scary enough to create a sensation and justify taking the "R" rating seriously, especially for young children. Yet, it is graphically restrained and subtly abstracted compared to the excesses of The Exorcist or Dawn of the Dead. There are two spectacular gruesome passages, but even here the horror concept is at least as frightening as the depiction. Scott has opted for the minimum effective gruesomeness, given the circumstances and current standards in trick-effect traumatization."

"I left Alien feeling contentedly manipulated, but not in an unparalleled entertaining panic. The monster’s one blood-spattered attack will probably become the most talked-about sequence in Alien. The climactic episodes are a rather more impressive cinematic achievement.”"

"Alien is all about “the dark side of technology, of science,” says David J. Skal, author of “The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror.” “Despite all the things we’re told that will make the future a better place, what happens in Alien is our worst nightmare.” That’s exactly what Dan O’Bannon was thinking when he set out to write what he calls “a scary spaceship movie” in the mid-1970s. Influenced by 1950s sci-fi films like “The Thing,” O’Bannon was determined to make a “monster thriller about a monster from outer space, done with the style and technology that had accumulated since the 1950s.” This merger of horror and science fiction proved extremely fortuitous. There had been plenty of monsters in movies before Alien, but mostly they had been of the “man in a rubber suit” variety. Thanks to the creepy vision of Swiss artist H.R. Giger, the extraterrestrial monster in Scott’s film, with its insect-like body, acidic blood and knife-sharp teeth, was truly nightmarish."

"“The H.R. Giger alien was like nothing you’d ever seen before,” says Gordon Van Gelder, editor of Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine. “ Alien was the first film that put the splatter element into a sci-fi context.” “The monster is skeletal, it’s mechanical, it’s insect-like,” Skal says. “It’s all of this stuff hitting you at once, and it’s bound to elicit a response from the viewer.” Thanks in part to an innovative marketing campaign -- the tagline “In space, no one can hear you scream” might be one the best ever devised -- that response translated into a $79-million domestic box-office gross (huge for the time), three sequels and stardom for Sigourney Weaver, whose sexy but no-nonsense Ripley became a template for all subsequent female action heroes. And the film itself became a model of sorts. Take a sexually and racially diverse crew; place them in an out-of-the-way space station, planet or underwater research facility; then have them menaced by a horrific creature until there is only one man, or woman, left standing -- “Leviathan,” “Deep Blue,” “Event Horizon,” “Pitch Black,” “Screamers,” the list of films seems to go on endlessly, and in a sense, that’s the problem."

"“It’s an impossible nightmare, this fusion of technology and vermin, death and sex,” he says. “It goes back to what monsters are: They’re always a fusion of contradictory aspects. They’re things that don’t exist and can’t exist, but they work on a dream level; they capture our imaginations.”"

"Forty years after its release, Ridley Scott’s 1979 chiller is rightly regarded as a sci-fi horror classic. It has aged beautifully – its industrial yet futuristic production aesthetic retains a cutting-edge realism, H.R Giger’s creature and ship designs are unsettling yet perversely beautiful and Dan O’Bannon’s naturalistic dialogue is memorably understated. Alien’s pervading, gloomy atmosphere and sense of lonely terror ensure it remains a touchstone in haunted house cinema. As in other genuinely frightening films, less is more: by cutting his camera away early, Scott leaves much in the minds of audiences. We fill in the blanks by conjuring up nightmarish thoughts and images. Much commentary on Scott’s film justifiably focuses on the film’s technical achievements – direction, cinematography, music and the fearsome alien creature. What’s less remarked upon is how its tension is amplified by Alien’s realism, its sense of everyday life turned upside-down. Yes, this is science fiction and this is outer space, but Alien feels real."

"Although we’re far into the future and far from Earth, the film feels palpably naturalistic and relatable, which makes the ensuing horror even more disturbing. By presenting engineers, technicians and navigators – regular, blue-collar workers complete with hierarchical and contractual disputes – audiences more easily engage with the story. This is something that Lachlan Walter argues in his article ‘Apocalypse Soon-Ish: Blue-Collar Science Fiction and the ‘Ordinary’ Worker As Hero’:"

"Impeccable directing, acting and music aside, Alien’s ‘look’ is perhaps its most memorable feature. While otherworldly, surrealistic art may seem a far cry from workers and realism, it’s worth emphasizing again that were it not for Alien’s remarkable visual style and unshowy presentation of employment in space, the film’s impact and enduring qualities would be much diminished."

"Responsible for designing the seductive yet deadly alien, the insectile ‘face-hugger’ creature and the forebodingly derelict alien ship was Swiss surrealist artist, Hans Ruedi (H.R) Giger. Much like in the ‘body horror’ films of David Cronenberg, such as Videodrome (1983) and The Fly (1986), Giger fuses human and machine, with his sleekly imagined biomechanical mash-ups of bone and metal resulting in images that take on a kind of disordered symmetry. Giger also designed the surface of LV-426, a sunless, boulder strewn, god-forsaken planet where brutal winds never stop blowing and jagged rocky outcrops, almost phallic in appearance, punctuate the landscape."

"Alien’s visual centrepiece is the alien itself, inspired by Giger’s 1976 print Necronom IV. It’s a truly hideous creature, replete with a long, smooth phallic skull, a set of razor-sharp teeth and a second set of pharyngeal jaws similar to those of an eel, which shoot out, stabbing and penetrating flesh. The creature also appears to have no eyes, but we know it sees, and its gender is never revealed, though it displays both male and female characteristics. The creature’s hands are monstrous and dragon-like, with long fingers and claws, but its body resembles the cross-section of some complex industrial machine, with human-like ribs lying externally over a mass of coils, springs and what look like hydraulic mechanisms."

"Areas of the Nostromo are reminiscent of various blue-collar workplaces, a counterpoint to the sleek spaceships imagined in much science fiction before Alien. In his article ‘The set design of Ridley Scott’s Alien, Christopher Aguiar explains that this approach had rarely been seen in science fiction before 1979, which adds to the quality of trepidation: “Fear is built largely from the camera prowling around the empty spaces of the Nostromo ship – a battered, truly ugly spacecraft, unlike the Death Star or USS Enterprise… instead of being outside and exploring the world as sci-fi often wants us to do, we’re largely stuck inside the rundown, twisted corridors of a ship. That immediately works as a way of Scott installing fear and uneasiness.”"

"Sci-fi cinema has a long history of ruthless and evil corporations, including the Tyrell Corporation in Scott’s subsequent Blade Runner (1982), Cyberdyne Systems in the Terminator films (1984-), Omni Consumer Products in RoboCop (1987) and the Soylent Corporation in Soylent Green (1973). The interests of these conglomerates, often inspired by real-life organisations, lie entirely in profit, operating with a total indifference towards the welfare of their employees. The companies at the heart of blue-collar science fiction such as Alien, Moon and Outland are similarly ruthless. Viewers watching Alien 40 years later may have little trouble recognizing the practices of the Weyland-Yutani Corporation; the way it controls its poorer workers with unfair and dangerous working conditions. Grounded in Scott’s gritty, blue-collar vision, it all seems both credible and familiar. As in 1979, 2019 and so in 2122, money is the ultimate goal, not worker’s rights or their well-being."

"Its plot is a kind of nightmarish allegory for the socially conservative backlash, in which a gender-egalitarian and sexually liberated future is torn apart by a monster whose only concern is impregnating everyone against their will. The gender politics of Alien are shockingly progressive, even now."

"Alien is a movie about the tyranny of the body over the self. Culture and technology allow us some degree of reproductive and sexual agency. Alien is about how terrifying it feels to have all that agency stripped away by something that defines you purely by your body — how it feels to be turned from an adult human being to a fleshy vessel that can be used to host and birth someone else’s young."

"In 1979, we had the luxury of imagining the Xenomorph as something fundamentally estranged from humanity. It is, as Ash says, a being comprised of pure reproductive instinct, with no culture or intellect to get in the way of its drive to propagate the species: “A survivor, unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.” Yet today, it’s precisely those conservative “delusions of morality” that are forcing people to live in bodies and lives they haven’t chosen and don’t want."

"Culture, technology, medicine — all the tools that help us to live in our bodies while retaining autonomy and agency over them — are not only necessary, they’re what make us human. Alien rings true for us, 40 years later, because it understands that truth. It shows us that brute, mindless animal existence — a life concerned only with making more babies, no matter the cost — is hideous, horrifying, and destructive."

"What is it about Alien that gets under our skin? Scott’s film pursues an astronaut crew hunted by an alien life form aboard their spaceship. It’s interwoven with endlessly interpretable themes: artificial intelligence, desire, rape, fear of the unknown. But the alien’s ruthless biological imperative to reproduce is the film’s masterstroke."

"On planet earth, predators hunt their prey to consume them. Alien deviates from this evolutionary food chain – the creature is more interested in impregnating humans as carriers for its biological spawn. Scott’s film evokes primal horror of violation and sexual perversion; it’s no accident that the alien itself is so phallic."

"In the original script, characters’ genders were explicitly interchangeable. This was a distinctly unusual feature for a sci-fi script at the time, and meant that the lead Ellen Ripley, the now iconic female action hero played by Sigourney Weaver, was never initially conceived of as a woman at all. This might explain why her behaviour doesn’t conform to the sexist stereotypes rife in 1970s filmmaking. Weaver also told the Independent in 2012 that Ripley was an expression of 1970s feminist insurgency: “Women were agitating to be in the army, to work in warehouses and as truck drivers.” Other than making room for a powerful female lead for the film, the gender-neutral script underlines something crucial about Alien’s horror: all human life is at threat. Audiences were already familiar with women as the targets of sexual assault, but Alien brought a new horror into the mainstream, a truly inhuman sexual attacker indiscriminate about its targets."

"When the BBFC were deciding how to rate the film in 1979, they gave it an X (18) certificate for depicting “a perverse view of sexual function” which runs “like a dark undercurrent” throughout. As we follow Ripley fleeing through the ship’s labyrinthine tunnels, we can imagine the alien’s desire."

"The 40th-anniversary reissue of Alien this month feels timely. While other sci-fi classics like Blade Runner or the Star Wars films showcase technological advances of a coming space age, the vision of the future seen in Alien is one focused on a primal fear that predates technology. The future, Alien asks us to imagine, might not look so different from the present: rape and sexual violence might be more of a threat, not less. Our contemporary cultural landscape is in-comparable to that of the 1970s, and today we are far more aware of the insidious nature of sexual violence. What enables Alien to endure 40 years on is how it suggests men, as well as women, should fear rape. Sexual assault is not limited to female bodies. If Alien makes one thing plain, it is that everybody, regardless of their gender, suffers if sexual violence is allowed to take place unopposed – a message that will be appreciated in 2019 perhaps more than ever."

"With no consideration given at this point to the ideas generated by the film's narrative, I assure anyone with the slightest affection for the SF genre that it's worth its admission price simply for the intelligence and audacity of its look."

"It melds the American-pragmatic form-as-function look of "2001" with the European fantasist influence of artists whose work appears in the upscale-head-comic magazine Heavy Metal. The spaceship in which most of the film takes place is a humble freighter, and it looks used. The crew has humanized it with toys, wind chimes, a cat, and non-company-issued clothing. The outside of the spaceship is standard-issue count-the-rivets Star Wars. But the space suits are based upon 15th-century Japanese samurai warriors. And the dead race which once lived within the alien planet upon which the ship lands created works of engineering which appear made of organic matter. The first half-hour of the film, before we settle in the space-freighter interior for the rest of the evening, is one breathtaking visual effect after another."

"A warning: Despite the state-of-the-art visual effects and Scott's remarkably comprehensive use of the syntax of film, Scott seeks to entertain you by the brutally primal tactic of reaching into your gut and squeezing your adrenal gland: There's an awful thingie there in the dark, and it gets people, and you have to watch it as it does. The filmmakers have come up with some images that are sheerest nightmare. The film earns its shudders honestly: Scott is too talented to need gratuitousness as an aid. We are repelled more by the idea of what's happening than by simple excess of repellent images. Still, even while you acknowledge that the filmmakers are scrupulous, sitting with your arms wrapped around your head because you can't watch the screen may not be your idea of a good time."

"Alien is such a startlingly well-made film that it seems the height of something -- malcontentedness, I guess -- to complain even in low tones about its objectives. Inarguably, the filmmakers achieve their objective entirely -- they make us leave the theater reeling."

"Is it critical overreaching to ask that Scott had been more ambitious? Probably. You never want more from bad films, though. You just want out. Good ones, as they satisfy appetites, often create fresh hungers. But the movie Scott wants to make -- as opposed to the one I'd preferred he made -- works. Wow, does it work. If you leave the theater with your nerves unjangled, you arrived in a coma."

"Few scenes in cinema are as etched in the popular mind as the moment in Alien when a phallic-shaped metal-toothed creature bursts bloodily from the chest of Kane (John Hurt), a crewman aboard the intergalactic mining ship Nostromo, before scuttling off to lurk and grow and begin killing Kane’s crewmates one-by-one. For those who saw it at the cinema in 1979, the world was split in two: the time before the chest burster and the time after. Movies would never be the same. Science-fiction had found its darkest expression. Horror had a new name – the shape-shifting, acid-dripping, all-consuming creature that fans soon labelled the xenomorph, as far from the benign bug-eyed presence of ET as it was possible to imagine. The film spawned a franchise – three more Alien films, two Alien vs Predator spin-offs, and Ridley Scott’s more recent prequels, Prometheus and Alien Covenant – that have collectively earned more than $US1.5 billion ($A2.2 billion) at the box office, and a whole lot more on video, DVD, Blu-Ray and digital platforms. It has spawned PhD theses and endless discussion and riffs in popular culture. Earlier this year, it even spawned a high-school theatre version."

"We live now in a culture saturated in filmed images, but very little of it ascends to the level of shared experience, says Philippe. Game of Thrones was an exception, “but there are very few now that have these moments – like the chest-burster, like the Psycho shower scene – that completely traumatize a generation. They are very rare.” Philippe – who was born in Switzerland but moved to the US 26 years ago with dreams of becoming a professional golfer – is fascinated by these cut-through moments. His last film was 78/52, a forensic examination of the 78 seconds and 52 cuts that comprise the shower scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. His next – which he was about to take to the Venice Film Festival when we spoke earlier this week – is a meditation on The Exorcist. What he sees in these films is an expression not just of their makers’ intentions and talents, but of something far greater – our collective unconscious at play. “There are certain movies that become phenomena because they express ideas that we need to see in our culture at a particular time,” he says. “And rarely are we actually conscious of the fact that we need to see those ideas being expressed.”"

"“I’m very interested in the idea of coincidence versus fate,” says Philippe. “The way I see it, nothing is ever completely coincidental and nothing is ever completely fated. Coincidence can become fate. “You could argue that it is audiences that willed Alien to life,” he continues. “Had Dan O’Bannon, Ridley Scott and HR Giger not been on the frequency for that myth, someone else would have had to be. When you look at the number of coincidences that happened for Alien to be Alien you have to wonder if there were greater forces at work.” The thing that most desperately needed to be expressed, he argues, was a challenge to the “patriarchal imbalance”. Kane’s “rape” by the alien – by the face hugger that latches onto his face and inserts its egg via a tube shoved down his throat – and the shocking experience of “birthing” the alien through his chest “jolted people into a feeling of unease”, he says. “There were things that happen to women that were suddenly transposed to Kane,” he continues. “I don’t think that was being processed consciously – I don’t think the studio was thinking, ‘Oh yeah, here’s $11 million, go make a male-rape movie in space’. I don’t believe O’Bannon, Giger and Scott were thinking along those lines either.” But they were images and ideas that we needed to see in order to deal with the underlying tensions in our culture, he believes. “What makes Alien so amazing is that it took 40 years for society to process and to start having a dialogue about those images and ideas,” he adds. “Alien is, in a way, much more contemporary today than it was 40 years ago.”"

"“The birth of the alien from Kane’s stomach plays on what Freud described as a common misunderstanding that many children have about birth, that is, that the mother is somehow impregnated through the mouth,” determined Barbara Creed, professor of Screen Studies at the University of Melbourne, in “Horror and the Monstrous Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection” (Screen, Vol. 27, 1986), just one of hundreds of academic theses spawned by Scott’s 1979 shocker and its sequels. Academics have always loved science fiction, of course. No film studies syllabus is complete without an invitation to parse alien-invasion B-movies from the ‘50s as fretful cold-war allegories. There was always something a little lordly about this kind of approach to pop-artifacts, as if the little dears couldn’t tell what made their hearts pitter-pat so until the redoubtable professor arrived with his chalkboard, duster, and special subtext X-ray specs. But the cottage industry of analysis that has sprung up around Alien is something else again. In 1980, the highly-respected academic journal Science Fiction Studies devoted an entire issue to the first Alien—an event that may, in time, come to rank alongside Cahiers du Cinema’s All-Hitchcock issue of 1956. Since then, there has been no looking back. We’ve had Alien as feminist allegory (“Woman: The Other Alien in Alien,” Women Worldwalkers: New Dimensions of Science Fiction and Fantasy, 1985), Alien as mothering fable (“Mommie Dearest: Aliens, Rosemary’s Baby, and Mothering,” Journal of Popular Culture, 1990), Alien as abortion parable (“Voices of Sexual Distortion: Rape, Birth, and Self-Annihilation Metaphors in the Aliens Trilogy,” Quarterly Journal of Speech, 1995). Even Jones the cat got his own diagram, courtesy of James H. Kavenagh’s essay “Son of a Bitch: Feminism, Humanism, and Science in Alien” (October, No. 13, 1980), which sought to align the alien attack on humans with an Althusserian-Marxist takedown of humanism in general:"

"What is it about the Alien films? No other modern science-fiction film has inspired this level of termite-like deconstruction save perhaps Scott’s own Blade Runner, whose rain-soaked surfaces teem with postmodern theorists researching doctoral theses with titles like “American Exceptionalism and the Complicit Postcolonialism of Blade Runner” and “Data and Dick’s Deckard: Cyborg as Problematic Signifier.” This suggests that there is something about the rich, art-directed layer-cake of Ridley Scott productions that positively cries out for Greimasian semantic rectangles. “It has absolutely no message,” insisted Scott of the first Alien. “It works on a very visceral level and its only point is terror, and more terror.” Of all the things you can do with Scott’s alien beastie—be frightened by it, thrilled by it, repulsed by it—studying it seems the last thing on anybody’s mind, except of course Science Officer Ash, secretly eyeing it up for the company’s weapons division. When it comes to the burgeoning field of post-doctorate Alien study, Ash graduates summa cum lauda. Study is all he wants to do."

"It’s one reason Alien scholars tend to be a little down on James Cameron, although they love the elevation of Ripley to post-feminist action figure—“get away from her you bitch!”—and approve of the fact that all the white males become dead white males at a faster rate than all the nonwhite males (see Greenberg, Harvey. “Fembo: Aliens’ Intentions”). Marxists, too, have clucked with approval at the series’ clear-eyed take on corporate malfeasance and outer-space worker rights. And Freudians, needless to say, have had a field day, at least with the first film. A movie more in need of a trip to the analyst would be harder to find."

"For a brief moment in the early ‘80s, it looked as if the brave new world of Alien studies was going to splinter irreconcilably on the issue of Officer Ripley’s panties—the anti-panty camp accusing the pro-panty wing of uncritical phallocentrism, the pro-panty caucus accusing the anti-panty wing of repressive and self-defeating assumptions about what constitutes sexism. It was left to Melbourne’s professor Creed to broker a tentative piece between the two camps. “Much has been written about the final scene, in which Ripley undresses before the camera, because its voyeurism undermines her role as successful heroine,” she wrote with an air of weary summary in “Horror and the Monstrous Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection” Screen, Vol. 27, 1986. What if Ripley in her panties “signifies the ‘acceptable’ form and shape of woman. … The display of woman as a reassuring and pleasurable sign.” It’s the system of signification, stupid! As for the sex of the alien “the alien is the mother’s phallus,” she determined, “but the alien is more than a phallus, it is also coded as a toothed vagina, the monstrous feminine as a cannibalistic mother.” Voilà, thanks to another of those toothed vaginas that seem to be all the rage on college campuses these days."

"I have come here to chew bubble gum and kick ass... and I'm all out of bubble gum."

"Mama don't like tattletales!"

"Come to show 'em where I am? Not nice!"

"I don't like this one bit. Not one bit!"

"Brother, life's a bitch, and she's back in heat."

"You know, you look like your head fell in the cheese dip back in 1957."

"The steel mills were laying people off left and right. They finally went under. We gave the steel companies a break when they needed it. You know what they gave themselves? Raises."

"The whole deal's like some crazy game. They put you at a starting line, and the name of the game is "Make It Through Life," only everyone's looking out for themselves and looking to do you in at the same time."

"Look around at the environment we live in. Carbon dioxide, fluorocarbons, and methane have increased since 1958. Earth is being acclimatized. They are turning our atmosphere into their atmosphere."

"They are dismantling the sleeping middle class. More and more people are becoming poor. We are their cattle. We are being bred for slavery. We could be pets, we could be food, but all we really are is livestock."

"The poor and the underclass are growing. Racial justice and human rights are nonexistent. They have created a repressive society and we are their unwitting accomplices. Their intention to rule rests with the annihilation of consciousness. We have been lulled into a trance. They have made us indifferent to ourselves, to others. We are focused only on our own gain."

"Graffiti: They live, we sleep"

"Subliminal Messages on Billboards and Magazines: "OBEY“, "MARRY AND REPRODUCE“, "NO INDEPENDENT THOUGHT", "NO THOUGHT", "CONSUME“, "CONFORM", "SUBMIT", "STAY ASLEEP", "BUY", "WATCH TV", "NO IMAGINATION", "DO NOT QUESTION AUTHORITY", "SLEEP", "WORK 8 HOURS", "SLEEP 8 HOURS", "PLAY 8 HOURS", "HONOR APATHY", "NO IDEAS", "FOLLOW", "SURRENDER", "COOPERATE", "DOUBT HUMANITY", "REWARD INDIFFERENT""

"Subliminal Message on US Currency: "THIS IS YOUR GOD""

"Gilbert: The world needs a wake-up call. We're going to phone it in."

"Drifter: You still don't get it, do you, boys? There ain't no countries anymore, no more good guys. They're running the whole show! They own everything, the whole god-damn planet. They can do whatever they want!"

"Announcer: Attention: Your wristwatch has malfunctioned. This entryway is temporary and will disappear in 10 seconds."

"You see them on the street. You watch them on TV. You might even vote for one this fall. You think they're people just like you. You're wrong. Dead wrong."

"Who are they? And what do they want?"

"They Live is definitely one of the forgotten masterpieces . ... The sunglasses function like a critique of ideology. They allow you to see the real message beneath all the propaganda, glitz, posters and so on."

"Roddy Piper - John Nada"

"Keith David - Frank Armitage"

"Meg Foster - Holly Thompson"

"George Buck Flower - The Drifter"

"Peter Jason - Gilbert"

"Raymond St. Jacques - Street Preacher"

"Jason Robards III - Family Man"

"John Lawrence - Bearded Man"

"Susan Barnes - Brown Haired Woman"

"Sy Richardson - Black Revolutionary"

"Wendy Brainard - Family Man's Daughter"

"Lucille Meredith - Female Interviewer"

"Susan Blanchard - Ingenue"

"Norman Alden - Foreman"

"Dana Bratton - Black Junkie"

"Greetings, my friends. We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember, my friends, future events such as these will affect you in the future. You are interested in the unknown, the mysterious, the unexplainable. That is why you are here. And now, for the first time, we are bringing to you the full story of what happened on that fateful day. We are giving you all the evidence, based only on the secret testimonies of the miserable souls who survived this terrifying ordeal: the incidents, the places. My friends, we cannot keep this a secret any longer. Let us punish the guilty. Let us reward the innocent. My friend, can your heart stand the shocking facts about grave robbers from outer space?"

"My friends, you have seen this incident based on sworn testimony. Can you prove that it didn't happen? Perhaps on your way home you will pass someone in the dark, and you will never know it, for they will be from outer space. Many scientists believe that another world is watching us this moment. We once laughed at the horseless carriage, the aeroplane, the telephone, the electric light, vitamins, radio, and even television! And now some of us laugh at outer space. God help us... in the future."

"Those whom we're using cannot think. They are the dead, brought to a simulated life by our electrode guns. You know, it's an interesting thing when you consider: the Earth people, who can think, are so frightened by those who cannot — the dead."

"As soon as you have enough of the dead recruits, march them on the capitals of the earth. Let nothing stand in your way. Their own dead will be used to make them accept our existence and believe in that fact."

"For a time we tried to contact them by radio but no response. Then they attacked a town, a small town I'll admit, but nevertheless a town of people, people who died."

"One thing's sure: Inspector Clay is dead — murdered — and somebody's responsible!"

"Unspeakable Horrors From Outer Space Paralyze The Living And Resurrect The Dead!"

"Aliens Resurrecting The Dead! Flying Saucers Over Hollywood!"

"Gregory Walcott - Jeff Trent"

"Mona McKinnon - Paula Trent"

"Duke Moore - Lt. John Harper"

"Tom Keene - Col. Tom Edwards"

"Carl Anthony - Patrolman Larry"

"Paul Marco - Patrolman Kelton"

"Tor Johnson - Insp. Dan Clay"

"Dudley Manlove - Eros"

"Joanna Lee - Tanna"

"Bunny Breckinridge - The Ruler"

"Lyle Talbot - General Roberts"

"David De Mering - Danny"

"The Amazing Criswell - Himself"

"Bela Lugosi - Ghoul Man"

"Maila Nurmi - Vampire Girl"

"They say most of your brain shuts down in cryosleep. All but the primitive side... the animal side. No wonder I'm still awake. Transporting me with civilians. Sounded like 40, 40-plus. Heard an Arab voice. Some hoodoo holy man, probably on his way to New Mecca. But what route? What route? Smelled a woman. Sweat, boots, tool belt, leather. Prospector type. Free settlers. And they only take the back roads. And here's my real problem: Mr. Johns, blue-eyed devil. Planning on taking me back to slam... only this time he picked a ghost lane. A long time between stops. A long time for something to go wrong."

"All you people are so scared of me. Most days, I take that as a compliment. But it ain't me you got to worry about now."

"Did I kill a few people? Sure. Did I kill Zeke? No. You got the wrong killer."

"Finally found something worse than me?"

"These people didn't leave. Come on. Whoever got Zeke got them. They're all dead. You don't really think they left with their clothes on hooks... photos on the shelves?"

"You're not afraid of the dark, are you?"

"[to Fry] I guess if it were "trickeration," he'd just "X" me out. He'd kill me. Then again... I am worth twice as much alive. You didn't know that? Your Johns ain't a cop. He's got that nickel-slick badge. And that blue uniform. But he's just a merc. And I'm just a payday. That's why he won't kill me, see? - The creed is greed."

"I don't truly know what's gonna happen when the lights go out. But I do know once the dying starts... this little psycho-fuck family of ours is gonna rip itself apart."

"[about the passengers] I'm not gonna die for them!"

"Is this whole planet dead?"

"Why don't you shut up for two seconds and let me come up with a plan that doesn't involve mass suicide?"

"What's to be afraid of? My life's just a steaming pile of meaningless shit anyhow. So I say, "Mush on.""

"The verdict's in. The light moves forward."

"I had the impression from the model... the two planets were moving as one...and there would be a lasting darkness."

"They're afraid of our light. That means we don't have to be afraid of them."

"It's amazing how you can do without the necessities of life provided you have the little luxuries."

"People, just a suggestion. Perhaps you should flee!"

"I was supposed to die in France. I never ever saw France."

"Pitch Black filmed in forbidding winter conditions in the isolated Australian town of Coober Pedy. "You start to feel quite fragile even though you're playing these cyberbabes. You just call on whatever strength you can to portray that sort of role," she says. Especially when conditions were far from movie-star glamour. "The crew comes over and says 'I'm really sorry, but I have to spray you with water now to make it look like you're sweating,' and they quickly spritz you and run for the hills because they're afraid you're going to murder their families!" Black says, chuckling. "It's character-building. I had a whole street of characters!""

"Q: Okay, Pitch Black. What's up with your eyes? Were you guys doing contacts or was that CGI'd in?"

"The spoiler commences: Yes, night does fall on the planet, every once in a long while when all three suns are in eclipse. I am not sure what complex geometries of space and trajectory are necessary for a planet to exist in a three-star system and somehow manage to maintain any continuity of climate and temperature, but never mind: What is maybe more difficult to accept is that it would develop a life form that appears only in the dark. Since sunlight is the source of heat and energy, Darwinian principles would seem severely challenged by the task of evolving living things that hibernate for 22 years between eclipses. How does a thing that lives in the dark evolve in a planet where it is almost always daytime? This is not the kind of question you're supposed to ask about "Pitch Black," but I'd rather have the answer than any 45 minutes of this movie. The story also poses the problem (less challenging from a Darwinian view, to be sure) of whether the Diesel character will cooperate with his species mates or behave entirely like a selfish gene. Whether this happens or not I leave it to you to discover. By the end of the movie, however, I was wondering if the trip had been necessary; most of the plot could be ported into a Western or a swashbuckler with little alteration."

"With his elephantine glare and trapezius muscles that could support a Mack truck, Vin Diesel, who appears in two films opening today, is definitely the flavor of the movie weekend. In The Boiler Room he is a hulking illegal stock trader who would be right at home in the world of The Sopranos. And in the snazzily atmospheric sci-fi horror film Pitch Black he is Riddick, a fiendishly grinning murderer with a nose for menstrual blood. In the movie's opening scenes, in which Riddick tears off his manacles, he suggests a bone-crushing hybrid of Hannibal Lecter, Harry Houdini and Hulk Hogan stomping out of a leather fetishist's private dungeon. But in both roles Mr. Diesel finds ways to insinuate glints of humor, intelligence and even a grudging sweetness. As styles of macho, shaved-headed antihero go, he is a new variation on something familiar. Think of Telly Savalas as a hip-hop thug, and you'll get the idea."

"But in evoking a fear of darkness and of shrieking batlike things slicing at you when the lights go out, the movie shrewdly taps into the lurking primal terrors of anyone who ever had to sleep with a night light. If Pitch Black goes where The Blair Witch Project has gone before, it has millions of dollars at its disposal to give that unnamable menace a shape as well as a sound."

"One thing Pitch Black can't do is begin to create the engulfing sense of total darkness that its title promises. Even when the survivors' lights begin to fail (among the unforeseen meteorological events on this supposedly parched planet is an unexpected cloudburst), the humans are clearly visible. Still, as their lights begin to flicker, and the ravenous creatures gather on the edge of darkness, you have an ominous sense of what the world must have been like before electric light gave us the illusion of rationality, a time when our demons couldn't be instantly banished with the flick of a switch."

"Pitch Black was made for $23 million, which is about how much Diesel demands per flick these days. While it's debatable whether he deserves it, what isn't debatable is that director David Twohy got his money's worth. The mysterious planet (in reality, the Australian desert) had a distinct, spooky look. The film owed a few debts to Aliens, but was still stylish enough that people didn't mind. The $39 million box office for the film was impressive, given its moderate release (1,800 theaters, as opposed to 4,100 for Spider-Man) and R rating."

"The script called for a hot arid desolate world; and there aren't many places in the world where you can find a place with 360 degrees of no tree's no telephone poles phones, no power lines; and we found that nothingness in the the middle of your outback."

"Fight Evil With Evil."

"There's A New Reason To Be Afraid Of The Dark."

"Don't be afraid of the dark. Be afraid of what's in the dark."

"Are you afraid of the dark? You will be …"

"It's getting Dark."

"There's only one rule: Stay in the light."

"A new species of terror."

"Vin Diesel – Richard B. Riddick"

"Radha Mitchell – Carolyn Fry"

"Cole Hauser – William J. Johns"

"Keith David – Abu "Imam" al-Walid"

"Lewis Fitz-Gerald – Paris P. Ogilvie"

"Claudia Black – Sharon "Shazza" Montgomery"

"Rhiana Griffith – Jack/Jackie"

"John Moore – John "Zeke" Ezekiel"

"Simon Burke – Greg Owens"

"[Repeated line] Hello...?!"

"Please tell me what the fuck is going on!"

"What is it about tower blocks and shopping trolleys, huh?"

"No, see-- See, this is a really shit idea. You know why? Because it's really obviously a shit idea."

"Oh, great, valium. Not only will we be able to get to sleep, but if we're attacked in the middle of the night, we won't even care."

"[to Selena, who has just attempted to kill him] That was longer than a heartbeat."

"Listen to me, listen to me! It's not all fucked..."

"It started off as rioting. But right from the beginning you knew this was different, because it was happening in small villages, market towns... and then it wasn't on TV anymore. It was on the street outside. It was coming through your windows. It was a virus, an infection. You didn't need a doctor to tell you that. It was the blood, or something in the blood. By the time they tried to evacuate the cities, it was already too late. The infection was everywhere. The army blockades were overrun, and that's when the exodus started. The day before the TV and radio stopped broadcasting, there were reports of infection in Paris and New York. You didn't hear anything more after that."

"And that stuff about the answer to infection -- I mean, there is no answer to infection! It's already done pretty much all the damage they can!"

"[regarding Hannah] I don't want her to have to fucking cope! I want her to be okay. When Hannah had her dad it was okay. It was okay for them and it was okay for us. Now it's all just fucked..."

"Do you think he saw us this time?"

"You'd never think it, needing rain so badly. Not in fucking England."

"Just so you know, I don't take cheques or credit cards!"

"[regarding a pile of apples] Hmm... Irradiated."

"[last words] Keep away from me! KEEP AWAY FROM ME! KEEP AWAY FROM ME! Keep away! Away! KEEP AWAY! KEEP AWAY!"

"[It] isn't true, what Dad said. You need us just the same as we need you. We need each other."

"They're dead. And you're gonna be next."

"Salvation is here! The answer to infection is here!"

""The answer to infection". [...] Well, as I said before, it's here. Though it may not be quite what you imagined."

"This is what I've seen in the four weeks since infection: people killing people. Which is much what I saw in the four weeks before infection, and the four weeks before that, and before that, as far back as I care to remember- people killing people. Which, to my mind, puts us in a state of normality right now."

"Eight days ago, I found Jones with his gun in his mouth. He said he was going to kill himself because there was no future. What could I say to him? We fight off the infected or we wait until they starve to death, and then what? What do nine men do except wait to die themselves? I moved us from the blockade, I set the radio broadcasting and I promised them women. Because women mean a future."

"You killed all my boys."

"Man walks into a bar with a giraffe. They both get pissed. The giraffe falls over. The man goes to leave, the barman says "Oi! You can't leave that lying there!" He says "No, it's not a lion. It's a giraffe!" [Jim fails to laugh. To Selena:] He's completely humourless. You two should get on like a house on fire!"

"So lesson one -- you never go anywhere alone, unless you've got no choice. And lesson two- you only travel during daylight, unless you've got no choice."

"I remember my dad had all this cash. He thought maybe we could buy our way onto a plane, even though cash was completely useless. Ten thousand other people had the same idea. The crowd was surging. I lost my grip on my sister's hand. I remember the ground felt very soft, and I saw I was standing on people. People who had fallen. Like a carpet. There were infected in the crowd- it spread fast. You couldn't get away, you could only climb, climb over more people. So I did that. So I climbed, I climbed on top of more people. I got up on top of this kiosk. Looking down you couldn't tell which faces were infected and which weren't. Then I saw my dad. Not my mum or my sister. My dad. I saw his face... Selena's right. You should be grateful."

"[last words] Wait... NO!"

"Piece of Grafitti: The End Is Extremely Fucking Nigh"

"Jim's Parents' Note: In endless love, we left you sleeping. Now we're sleeping with you. Don't wake up."

"Farrell: ...Marge walks onto this ship. Smithers says, "Women and seamen don't mix." And Mr. Burns says, "We all know what you think, Smithers." And that was my favorite ever joke in The Simpsons. And see, that's what they’re doing, a few hundred miles from here across the channel -- across the Atlantic. They’re eating dinner and they’re watching the fucking Simpsons! They’re sleeping in their beds next to their wives...! But we’re here, chained to a fucking radiator because the OC HAS GONE INSANE! Starting the world again when the rest of the fucking world hasn’t even stopped! Just imagine it. Just think about it! How could infection cross the oceans? How could it cross the mountains and the rivers? Th- They-- They stopped it! And right now TVs are playing and planes are flying in the sky and the rest of the world is continuing as fucking normal. Think. Actually think about it. What would you do with a diseased little island? They quarantined us. "There is no infection, it's just people killing people." He's insane!"

"The Days Are Numbered"

"Be Thankful For Everything, For Soon There Will Be Nothing..."

"Day 1: Exposure - Day 3: Infection - Day 8: Epidemic - Day 20: Evacuation - Day 28: Devastation"

"His fear began when he woke up alone. His terror began when he realised he wasn't."

""...people killing people." -Our rage is destroying humanity; whether on a large or small scale, slowly but surely."

"Return to normality"

"Yes. It's this idea of a psychological virus. Like road rage, that moment when the red mist descends, if you magnify that a thousand times and experience it to the exclusion of everything else, imagine what that kind of power would be like. That was our monster. If you really think about that, it's very, very scary indeed."

"One of the problems with filming in Britain is that there's this slightly depressing air of familiarity and scale, but we wanted to make it something mythic and give it a mythical size. We didn't have enough money to pay for carnage on a city-wide scale, but the idea of an emptied London gave us the iconic image we needed."

"Cillian Murphy - Jim"

"Naomie Harris - Selena"

"Noah Huntley - Mark"

"Brendan Gleeson - Frank"

"Megan Burns - Hannah"

"Christopher Eccleston - Major Henry West"

"Stuart McQuarrie - Sergeant Farrelle"

"The television screen has become the retina of the mind's eye. That's why I refuse to appear on television, except on television. Of course, O'Blivion was not the name I was born with. That's my television name. Soon all of us will have special names, names designed to cause the cathode ray tube to resonate."

"After all, there is nothing real outside our perception of reality, is there? You can see that, can't you?"

"The battle for the mind of North America will be fought in the video arena — the videodrome. The television screen is the retina of the mind's eye. Therefore the television screen is part of the physical structure of the brain. Therefore whatever appears on the television screen emerges as raw experience for those who watch it. Therefore television is reality, and reality is less than television."

"North America's getting soft, padrone. And the rest of the world is getting tough. Very, very tough. We're entering savage new times, and we're going to have to be pure... and direct... and strong... if we're gonna survive them. Now, you and this, uh, cesspool you call a television station... and, uh, your people who wallow around in it... and, uh, your viewers... who watch you do it— you're rotting us away from the inside. We intend to stop that rot."

"Your head, we have you head in the box."

"You'll forgive me if I don't stay around to watch. I just can't cope with freaky stuff."

"You know me and I sure know you, everyone."

"[handing Bianca the videotape] Careful... it bites."

"Death to Videodrome! Long live the new flesh!"

"I am the video word made flesh."

"First it controls your mind... then it destroys your body."

"First it controlled her mind, then it destroyed her body... Long live the new flesh!"

"A shocking new vision."

"A terrifying new weapon."

"A vision of enormous impact!"

"Videodrome is a bioelectrical addiction. Videodrome is the ultimate addiction."

"The movie goes into more than the relatively simple issue of morality, like the ways in which television does alter us physically. It's what Marshall McLuhan was talking about — TV as an extension of our nervous systems and our senses."

"I was once on a talk show with a psychiatrist who worked at the Clark Institute with criminals. He had seen my film, Videodrome and said to me, “I’m almost afraid to be sitting here next to you.” He was totally mystified as to how I could empathize with those states of mind and he obviously, could not. It is mostly intuitive with me. One of the reasons I make a movie is that I’m then in a position where I have to analyze and I enjoy that process.*My images come out of the process of making film. I do really think that movies work on the level of dream logic. However realistic or narrative they might like to think they are, they are dreamlike."

"[first lines] My name is Alice. I worked for the Umbrella Corporation, the largest and most powerful commercial entity in the world. I was head of security at a secret high tech facility called The Hive, a giant underground laboratory developing experimental viral weaponry. But there was an incident, a virus escaped and everybody died. Trouble was... they didn’t stay dead. The T-virus reanimated their bodies. But I survived. Myself and one other, an environmentalist named Matt, when we emerged we were seized by Umbrella scientists. Matt and I were separated. We thought we had survived the horror, but we were wrong."

"[to bitten Olivera] Today is your lucky day."

"[during a zombie breakout at the Police Station] I'm leaving town, I suggest you do the same."

"[meeting Alice for the first time] Who the fuck are you?"

"[L.J is handcuffed on a chair next to another zombiefied woman in the police station, the woman tries to struggle out of her handcuffs to get L.J] Somebody get this ugly bitch off me!"

"[seeing a zombie on road while driving] GTA, Motherfucker! [L.J. drives on, the zombie is sent flying by the car and hit the roof with a thud] Yeah! 10 points."

"[As the S.T.A.R.S squad prepares to take down Nemesis] You motherfuckers are crazy! Look at that big motherfucker, got a rocket launcher!"

"[L.J runs into the S.T.A.R.S. members' hideout and find a dozen guns pointing at him] Shit! Maybe I was safer outside."

"[When a S.T.A.R.S. officer hands him a shotgun] Motherfucker, please. [opens his jacket to reveal his two golden Desert Eagles] My shit is custom."

"[runs in after Alice pointing a gun at Carlos] Don't shoot, don't shoot! He's cool. He made a deal with Dr.Doom same as you."

"[L.J stands alone after Nemesis kill the S.T.A.R.S. members, Nemesis stop shooting and looks at him] Respect!."

"[L.J. learns that Carlos has been bitten] You should've told me you were bit motherfucker, I'm hangin' witchu and shit!"

"[Cain asks L.J. who he thinks is a helicopter pilot why they haven't taken off yet] Because I usually drive a Cadilac! [punches out Cain and smiles]"

"Dr. Isaacs: Project Alice Activated."

"Major Cain: Finish Him!"

"Nemesis: S.T.A.R.S..."

"Carlos Olivera: We're assets, Nicholai. Expendible assets... and we've just been expended."

"Angela Ashford: They said I would never get better, just worse."

"[Nemesis encounters Alice for the first time] Major Cain: [to Umbrella staffs] Gentlemen, this is the moment we've been waiting for. The nemesis program is now fully activated."

"Major Cain: You're not mutation, you're evolution!"

"Nicholai Ginovaef after killing a Zombie Dog: Stay."

"Carlos Olivera after killing an Umbrella Guard behind Alice: You missed one."

"Yuri Loginova: Bite this!! [Throws a grenade killing a group of zombies]"

"I'm good, but I'm not that good."

"My name is Alice and I remember everything."

"Our lives are in their hands."

"The evil continues..."

"The infection is spreading faster than anyone could have anticipated."

"You're all going to die."

"I'm not on the menu."

"I don't remember the truth!"

"Get out get out you CAN'T be in here"

"You're all going to die down here."

"The T-virus is protean, changing from liquid to airborne to blood transmission, depending on its environment. It is almost impossible to kill."

"I've been a bad, bad girl..."

"A secret experiment. A deadly virus. A fatal mistake."

"Death is not the end... just pray so."

"Survive the Horror."

"[after just witnessing the blinding light] Well I'll be hornswaggled! Did you see that little ole sky doggy zip down there, Pooh? [Looks at his comic]] Haley's Comet! And it's landed in our backyard! [Excitedly runs into his house to get his shovel, axe, and pick]] This is out lucky day! We gonna be rich! Pooh, we gonna be rich! Thousands of people are comin'! Gonna have hot dogs and helicopters and airplanes and tacos! This is our lucky day! Pooh, we gonna be rich!"

"[Encountering the Big Top] Well I'll be greased and fried! What in blue blazes is the circus doing here in these parts? I love the circus! Come on! Maybe we can get some free passes. [Noticing the purple lights on the tent's cables] I've never seen one that looked like this 'un before. Well... I don't know Pooh, you know there's something kinda peculiar around here. Where is everybody? There's nobody around. Where's the dang ticket booth? [A shadow from inside the tent follows them] How are we supposed to get in and see the show?"

"[Discovering Pooh has been dognapped] What in tarnation is going on here! Where's my dog?! Where's my Pooh Bear?! I'LL TEAR THIS THING APART WITH MY BARE HANDS!!!"

"They took your wife away in a balloon? Well you don't need the police, pal, you need a psychiatrist!"

"I made it through Korea I can make it through this bullshit!"

"I'm supposed to read you your rights. But you're in Mooney's jail, and you ain't got no rights!"

"Amusement Park Guard: What are ya gonna do with those pies, boys?"

"Paul Terenzi: [as Jo-Jo The Ice Cream Clown] I'm Jo-Jo the ice cream clown with the bestest ice cream in town! We'll give you a stick, you'll give it a lick. And it'll tickle you all the way down. Ice cream! ice cream! We brought our goodies here to you! A tasty treat for while you screw! Let's take a break! Cool off those hot lips with our frozen fruity bars! Icy-Wicies, Fudgy-Wudgy bars. And everyone's frozen delight, the Lick-a-Stick!"

"Debbie Stone: Nobody's gonna put me in a balloon again!"

"In Space, No One Can Eat Ice Cream!"

"Alien Bozos With An Appetite For Close Encounters."

"Horrific Harlequins With An Appetite For Close Encounters!"

"Big Top...Big Shoes...Big Teeth!!"

"(from trailer) Killer Klowns From Outer Space...It's Crazy!"

"Grant Cramer - Mike Tobacco"

"Suzanne Snyder - Debbie Stone"

"John Allen Nelson - Dave Hanson"

"John Vernon - Curtis Mooney"

"Michael Siegel - Rich Terenzi"

"Peter Licassi - Paul Terenzi"

"Royal Dano - Farmer Gene Green"

"Christopher Titus - Bob McReed"

"Charles Chiodo - 'Klownzilla' the King Klown"

"[to an Alien] You are one ugly mother..."

"[while exploring the abandoned whaling station, Miller is startled by a penguin] Careful. They bite."

"[Scar shows Alexa that he is activating the bomb in his wrist panel] It's a bomb. Well, I hope it kills every fucking one of them!"

"[to Charles Bishop Weyland] Alexa Woods: When I lead my team, I don't leave my team."

"This whole thing was a trap."

"[to the Predator] Don't turn your back on me!"

"[shows a 3D image of the pyramid] My experts tell me this is a pyramid."

"[First lines] Technician: Hey. Hey, hey, come here, take a look at this."

"Mark Verheiden: [to the Alien] You want a piece of me, you ugly son of a bitch!"

"Whoever wins... We lose"

"It's our planet... It's their war"

"The Enemy of My Enemy is my Friend"

"Sanaa Lathan - Alexa Woods"

"Raoul Bova - Sebastian de Rosa"

"Lance Henriksen - Charles Bishop Weyland"

"Ewen Bremner - Graeme Miller"

"Colin Salmon - Maxwell Stafford"

"Tommy Flanagan - Mark Verheiden"

"Sam Troughton - Thomas Parks"

"Being such a self-confessed sci-fi geek, was there ever a moment when you had to pinch yourself that you were really in charge of this movie?"

"I don’t even know if Sigourney Weaver has read the “Alien vs Predator” draft I wrote. She’s never said she has. But, I was a fan obsessive of the “Alien” franchise, Sigourney. Big time. Particularly Ridley’s original, which is still unmatched. And “Alien vs Predator” — as a concept — is still killer, full of potential. Even its critically maligned first cinematic outing made $172,544,654 worldwide, compared to $159,814,498 for “Alien 3” and $161,376,068 for “Resurrection”. Hardly a financial “fail” there, Sigourney."

"Yeah. Ridley and I talked about doing another Alien film and I said to 20th Century Fox that I would develop a 5th Alien film. I started working on a story, I was working with another writer and Fox came back to me and said, "We've got this really good script for Alien vs Predator and I got pretty upset. I said, "You do that you're going to kill the validity of the franchise in my mind." Because to me, that was Frankenstein meets Werewolf. It was Universal just taking their assets and starting to play them off against each other."

"Its set-up is mundane: billionaire industrialist Charles Bishop Weyland (Lance Henriksen, a.k.a. Bishop) hires himself a motley crew to go to Antarctica, where they find a perplexing, heat-generating Cambodian-Egyptian-Aztec temple 2000 feet under the ice. Luckily, they've brought along someone who can read the hieroglyphics, Italian archaeologist Sebastian De Rosa (Raoul Bova), who essentially explains the plot, if only his fellow adventurers would listen."

"The heat Weyland's researchers noted results from preparations for the Predators' with each stage allotted its own room, for instance, "sacrificial chamber" (the structure is remarkably elaborate and mobile, with ceilings and walls shifting every 10 minutes, rather like the scary place in Cube [1997])."

"While the film's tagline holds true -- "No matter who wins, we lose" -- the underlying notion here, as it has been in both previous entries in the Predator franchise, is that the hunters are comprehensible. Like gamers, they measure their own prowess and keep track of their kills."

"Scar, so named in the movie's credits for a mark on his face and a ritual he performs with Alexa, recalls Cicatrix, the "Scar" of The Searchers (1956), one of the more complex Native American villains in U.S. movies. In Alien vs. Predator, villains and heroes become simultaneously concrete and abstract: they're functions of the game, the franchise, and the broader commercial and moral marketplace, yes, but they're also vaguely resistant, less transparent than they seem."

"The Predator society builds sophisticated spaceships, yet they should not look as sleek and hi-tech as a Star Wars stormtrooper. They are a tribal culture, yet their look should not be as primitive as the orcs from Lord of the Rings. They are also a warrior culture, so the ornate cannot conflict with the practical."

"Q: Which character is worse: Predator or Alien?"

"Alien vs. Predator is a monster mash between two of 20th Century Fox’s franchise creatures. When H.R. Giger’s sleek and slimy killing machines face off against the Rastafarian headhunter, there’s a giddy childish thrill not unlike when King Kong faced Godzilla, or when Frankenstein met the Wolf Man. Their confrontations play out in the exaggerated manner of professional wrestling and take place in an ancient pyramid buried under the Antarctic ice where you half expect John Carpenter’s monster from The Thing to pop up and waste them both. These beasties frequently strut their extraterrestrial stuff and are geared toward audience cheers and jeers. While you can’t argue for Alien vs. Predator as a movie to be taken seriously, it certainly delivers as a loving homage to two of our favorite monsters and their respective super-duper powers."

"Anderson shows such a lack of interest in character or mood that the first 45 minutes, pre-Alien and Predator battles, feels unnecessarily lugubrious. His film lacks the obsessive haunted house setting of Ridley Scott’s Alien, the virtuoso gung-ho action of James Cameron’s Aliens or John McTiernan’s Predator, the bleak doom of David Fincher Alien³, and the cartoon splashes of Jien-Pierre Jeunet’s Alien: Resurrection. Those movies were of varying levels of quality, but the filmmakers were committed to a singular vision. Alien vs. Predator is a technically proficient fan-boy’s wet dream, made for people who want to see the Alien bleed acid on the Predator’s body armor, or the Predator using his nifty laser to blow apart alien hoards. It’s not much of a movie, but it’s a geek’s paradise."

"When it comes to monster films, horror films, and basically the sci-fi genre, African Americans aren't usually featured in a positive way. For years, we were always the first to die or weren't even featured in the film at all, but lately the trend is changing. In the last few years, the unexpected is happening. In "28 Days Later...", Naomie Harris made it through alive and so did Kelly Rowland in "Freddy Vs. Jason". We don't know what fate holds for Sanaa Lathan in the upcoming "Alien Vs. Predator", but she's considered to be the first black actress to lead a sci-fi film. That itself is a history making achievement. Having received a Tony nomination for her role in "A Raisin in the Sun" and co-starring with Denzel Washington in last year's "Out of Time", one would say that Sanaa has chosen some good projects as of late. In speaking with blackfilm.com, Sanaa talks about her role in "Alien Vs. Predator" and compares the physical work needed for this film to the one needed for her recent work on stage."

"Do you realize that with the exception of Pam Grier, who starred with Ice Cube in "John Carpenter's Ghost of Mars", you are probably the first black female lead in a sci-fi film?"

"When we do get to the Predators and Aliens, the film starts to look pretty promising. The Aliens look great, the Predators look great and, at first, their battles are fun to watch. Unfortunately, over-stylized herky jerky camerawork makes the action very hard to follow. It gives one the feeling of watching a fight with a crowd of large people in front of you. It's like you're always trying to jump up to see over someone's head or look around someone, but you keep missing the action."

"I suppose going into this film, everyone has their favorites. For me, the Alien world has always been a very rich and exciting one. The Predator character is pretty cool, but I mean, really, the first Predator was good, but what do we really know about these dreadlocked ugly mothers? Well, I suppose Paul Anderson either disagreed with me or simply decided this was his chance to expand the Predator world, but the Aliens get the serious shaft here."

"Like last year's Freddy Vs. Jason, Alien Vs. Predator never suggests a reason for existing other than the fact that it can. The logical curlicues used to bring the title beasts together defy description; the plot involves ancient civilizations, an abandoned Antarctic whaling station, and an underground pyramid that changes shape every 10 minutes. Into this lair of subterranean mystery and dimly lit sets marches a ragtag group of scientists and explorers led by overqualified Love & Basketball star Sanaa Lathan and funded by Alienseries vet Lance Henriksen. Soon, they discover they've walked into a death trap, an elaborate human-sacrifice machine designed to create Aliens for a ritualistic Predator hunt. Or something like that."

"Was the film shot entirely in Prague?"

"There's a touching scene near the end of Alien vs Predator when an eight-foot, fang-faced predator, using the acidic blood from the severed finger of an alien face-hugger, tenderly scorches a mark of courage and respect onto the cheek of the last human survivor. She grimaces as her skin burns, and then their eyes meet across the great expanse of space and time that separates both cultures, and then they kiss … or they would have if the queen alien hadn't eviscerated the woman's new friend with the pointy end of her tail. And there ends the almost-birth of a new movie genre, the inter-species romcom."

"AvP owes its genesis more to the video games than to the movies that preceded them, but this actually weighs in its favour in that it is not tied down by the conventions of the originals. (Although, that didn't stop the wonderfully loopy Jean-Pierre Juenet from making the spectacularly bonkers Alien Resurrection, a movie that, having Winona Ryder as a vengeful synthetic lifeform, is responsible for one of the most ill-judged casting decisions of all time.) And so, while I am still plagued by the question of how the aliens, without so much as gulping down a bottle of powdered milk, go from eight inches long to seven feet tall in the space of five minutes, in this context I no longer need to care."

"And then there are two: one woman, one predator, and they do what they have to do. She proves her mettle doing what heavily armed eight-foot invisible predators clearly can't. She kicks alien arse, destroys the queen's eggs, and then they both race hand-in-claw into the night toward the almost-romantic denouement. Then, with her beau-that-will-never-be gone, it's down to the feisty Ripley-replacement to take out the alien queen and source some anti-scarring cream for her permanently disfigured face. He should have just given her a ring."

"On the twenty-third day in the month of September, in an early year of a decade not too long before our own, the human race suddenly encountered a deadly threat to its very existence. And this terrifying enemy surfaced, as such enemies often do, in the most seemingly innocent, and unlikely, of places..."

"[singing] Poor! All my life I've been poor! I keep asking God what I'm for! [Mushnik glares at him the moment he stops work so he hastily resumes] And he tells me "Gee, I'm not sure! Sweep that floor, kid!" Oh I started life as an orphan, child of the street, here on Skid Row. He took me in, gave me a shelter, a bed, a crust of bread and a job... treats me like dirt. Calls me a slob, which I am. [he walks dejectedly along the streets with the passers-by as his backup singers]] So I live... downtown... [all: "downtown"] That's my home address. So I live. [all: "Downtown."] Where my life's a mess. So I live [all: "Downtown."] Where depression's just status quo. Down on Skid Row.... [wanders into an alley] Someone show my the way to get outta here, [beggars slowly appear from nowhere and climb the gateway at the end of the alley] Cos I'm constantly praying I'll get out of here, someone give me one shot, or I'll rot here."

"Wait for me, Audrey. This is between me and the vegetable!"

"[singing about Mr. Mushnik] And he calls me a slob, which I am …"

"[singing about her dream house] With a washer and a dryer, and an ironing machine…somewhere that's green."

"[repeated line] Feed me!"

"I'm starving!"

"[asking Seymour what he wants] Money? Girls? One par-ticu-lar girl! How 'bout that Aaaaauuuudrey? Think it over! There must be someone you can 86 real quiet-like, and get me some LUNCH!!!"

"DOES THIS LOOK "INANIMATE" TO YOU, PUNK?! If I can talk and I can move, who's to say I can't do anything I want?!"

"[after Seymour deduces that Audrey II wants to take over the planet] No SHIT, Sherlock!"

"[Seymour says he won't feed the plant, due to the guilt] Tough titty. [Seymour then tells him to watch his language.] Aw, cut the crap. Bring on the meat!"

"[singing] I'm just a mean, green mother from outer space and I'm bad!"

"Going back to the beginning, Howard and I were in David Geffen’s office and we both wanted to retain the original ending, with the plant winning and the key people dying, and David was against that. He said you can’t do that, but again he knew Howard and I wanted to, so David supported us. The film was completed two years later and we went to San Jose for the first preview and everyone was very excited about it. This was, I think, the most expensive film Warner Bros. had done at that time. For every musical number there was applause, they loved it, it was just fantastic…until we killed our two leads. And then the theater became a refrigerator, an ice box. It was awful and the cards were just awful. They were saying that they hated us killing them. You have to have a 55 percent “recommend” to really be released and we got a 13."

"Don't feed the plants."

"A Singing Plant. A Daring Hero. A Sweet Girl. A Demented Dentist."

"I'm a mean green mother from outer space... And I'm back!"

"Rick Moranis - Seymour Krelborn"

"Ellen Greene - Audrey"

"Vincent Gardenia - Mr. Mushnik"

"Steve Martin - Orin Scrivello, DDS"

"Levi Stubbs - the voice of Audrey II"

"Tichina Arnold, Michelle Weeks, and Tisha Campbell - Crystal, Ronette, and Chiffon"

"Jim Belushi - Patrick Martin"

"John Candy - Wink Wilkinson"

"Christopher Guest - The First Customer"

"Bill Murray - Arthur Denton"

"Miriam Margolyes - a Dental Nurse"

"Stanley Jones - the Narrator"

"Appropriate sparks are flying, somebody cue the power ballad."

"Look at him, he's killing his hard-on."

"The Yogurt Shoppe, Yogurt Shop-e, what the fuck's a Shop-e?"

"[sees Andy Effkin being talked to by police] Andy Effkin toasts with the most."

"[Blue Ribbons circle around Steve] Ice Ice Baby."

"It's not like you think. It's a whole new kind of cool. Everything's beautiful, man."

"I had no idea the evil was this pervasive."

"[shouts] You signed me up for the program?"

"Be the ball."

"Sounds razor."

"Who put the acid in my Spam?"

"(after throwing Steve out of the boiler room) Wait! You like Kurt Vonnegut?"

"You'd be surprised how interesting people become when they think you're really stupid!"

"I'm getting rid of rats."

"Hey, teacher! Leave those kids alone!"

"Treat yourself."

"Bad wrong, wrong bad, bad wrong, wrong bad."

"[Blood running down her face] I have to go home. I've got a big physics test tomorrow."

"Allen Clark: What're you doing, dipshit? Don't worry about the snakes in your garden when you've got spiders in your bed."

"Betty Caldicott: Meet the musical little creatures that hide among the flowers."

"U.V.: I bet you didn't know toast came in 3 flavors."

"U.V.: Denial ain't just a river in Italy, bud!"

"U.V.: I've got like, two customers left! If this keeps up, I'm going to be the 7-11 guy!"

"Andy Effkin: [snaps Mary Joe's neck] Slut."

"Dr. Caldicott: Science is God!"

"It doesn't matter if you're not perfect. You will be."

"You'll never be the same."

"In Cradle Bay... there's nothing more frightening than perfection."

"James Marsden - Steve Clark"

"Katie Holmes - Rachel Wagner"

"Nick Stahl - Gavin Strick"

"Steve Railsback - Officer Cox"

"Bruce Greenwood - Dr. Edgar Caldicott"

"William Sadler - Dorian Newberry"

"Chad Donella - U.V."

"Ethan Embry - Allen Clark"

"Katharine Isabelle - Lindsay Clark"

"A.J. Buckley - Charles 'Chug' Roman"

"Crystal Cass - Lorna Longley"

"Tygh Runyan - Dickie Atkinson"

"Tobias Mehler - Andy Effkin"

"Derek Hamilton - Trent Whalen"

"P.J. Prinsloo - Robby Stewart"

"He's just resting — waiting for a new life to come."

"[in a letter] You must have faith in me, Elizabeth. Wait, my work must come first, even before you. At night the winds howl in the mountains. There is no one here. Prying eyes can't peer into my secret...I am living in an abandoned old watchtower close to the town of Goldstadt. Only my assistant is here to help me with my experiments."

"This storm will be magnificent. All the electrical secrets of Heaven. And this time we're ready, eh Fritz? Ready."

"There's nothing to fear. Look. No blood, no decay. Just a few stitches. And look, here's the final touch. The brain you stole, Fritz. Think of it. The brain of a dead man waiting to live again in a body I made with my own hands, with my own hands. Let's have one final test. Throw the switches."

"Quite a good scene, isn't it? One man crazy — three very sane spectators."

"There can be no wedding while this horrible creation of mine is still alive. I made him with these hands, and with these hands I will destroy him. I must find him. [to Victor] You stay here and look after Elizabeth. I leave her in your care, whatever happens. Do you understand? In your care."

"You think I'm an idiot, don't you? But I'm not! Anyone can see with half an eye that there's something wrong. And I have two eyes, and pretty good ones at that. Well, what is it?...What's the matter with my son? What's he doing?...Why does he go messing around an old ruined windmill when he has a decent house, a bath, good food and drink, and a darn pretty girl to come back to? Ha, will you tell me that?"

"I understand perfectly well. There's another woman — and you're afraid to tell me. Pretty sort of experiments these must be."

"[toasting Henry and Elizabeth] Here's to a very good health...to a son of the House of Frankenstein...Here's to jolly good health to Frankenstein."

"Edward van Sloan: How do you do? Mr. Carl Laemmle [the producer] feels it would be a little unkind to present this picture without just a word of friendly warning. We are about to unfold the story of Frankenstein, a man of science who sought to create a man after his own image without reckoning upon God. It is one of the strangest tales ever told. It deals with the two great mysteries of creation — life and death. I think it will thrill you. It may shock you. It might even — horrify you. So if any of you feel that you do not care to subject your nerves to such a strain, now's your chance to — uh, well, we warned you."

"Elizabeth: The very day we announced our engagement, he told me of his experiments. He said he was on the verge of a discovery so terrific that he doubted his own sanity. There was a strange look in his eyes, some mystery. His words carried me right away. Of course I've never doubted him but still I worry. I can't help it."

"Dr. Waldman: Herr Frankenstein is a most brilliant young man, yet so erratic he troubles me."

"Villagers: Burn the mill! Burn it down! Burn the mill!"

"A Monster Science Created — But Could Not Destroy!"

"The man who made a monster"

"A Chilling Thriller"

"Warning! The monster is loose!"

"Science's Monster Terror!"

"...no man has ever seen his like ...no woman ever felt his white-hot kiss..."

"The monster that terrorized the world."

"The Original Horror Show!"

"The Monster Who Brought Destruction!"

"Colin Clive - Dr. Henry Frankenstein"

"Mae Clarke - Elizabeth"

"John Boles - Victor Moritz"

"Boris Karloff - The Monster"

"Edward Van Sloan - Dr. Waldman"

"Frederick Kerr - Baron Frankenstein"

"Dwight Frye - Fritz"

"Lionel Belmore - Herr Vogel"

"Marilyn Harris - Little Maria"

"It's going to be a terrific storm!"

"She's alive! Alive!"

"To a new age of gods and monsters!"

"Tell him that Dr. Pretorius is here on a secret matter of grave importance and must see him alone, tonight."

"Booted, my dear Baron, is the word for knowing too much."

"Do you like gin? It is my only weakness... [toasting with Henry] To a new world of gods and monsters! Ha, ha. The creation of life is enthralling, distinctly enthralling, is it not?"

"My experiments did not turn out quite like yours Henry. But science, like love, has her little surprises - as you shall see."

"There is a pleasing variety about my exhibits. My first experiment was so lovely that we made her a Queen. Charming, don't you think? Then of course, we had to have a King. Now, he's so madly in love with her that we have to segregate them.... now, now. I have to be careful with the king. now behave. My next production looked so disapprovingly at the other two that they made him an Archbishop... he seems to be asleep. I must wake him up. the next one is the very Devil - very bizarre, this little chap. There's a certain resemblance to me, don't you think? Or do I flatter myself? I took a great deal of pains with him. Sometimes I have wondered whether life wouldn't be much more amusing if we were all devils, and no nonsense about angels and being good. Oh! there's the king out again. even royal amours are a nuisance. poor archbishop. he has his hands full. there. that will keep you quiet. My little Ballerina is charming but such a bore! She won't dance to anything but Mendelsohnn's Spring Song and it gets so monotonous. My next is very conventional, I'm afraid. But you can never tell how these things will turn out. It was an experiment with seaweed. Normal size has been my difficulty. You did achieve size. I need to work that out with you."

"[in a mausoleum] I should wait here for a bit. I rather like this place."

"I'm glad to see the Monster roasted to death before my very eyes."

"Mind me he don't get loose again. He might do some damage and hurt somebody."

"I'd hate to find him under my bed at night. He's a nightmare in the daylight."

"Who is it? You're welcome, my friend, whoever you are."

"Come in, my poor friend. No one will hurt you here. If you're in trouble, perhaps I can help you. But you need not tell me about it if you don't want to. What's the matter? You're hurt, my poor friend. Come. Sit down."

"Perhaps you're afflicted too. I cannot see and you cannot speak. Is that it?"

"I have prayed many times for God to send me a friend. It's very lonely here. And it's been a long time since any human being came into this hut. I shall look after you and you will comfort me. Now you must lie down and go to sleep. Yes, yes. Now you must sleep. Our Father I thank thee that in thy great mercy, thou hast taken pity on my great loneliness and now out of the silence of the night has brought two of thy lonely children together, and sent me a friend to be a light to mine eyes and a comfort in time of trouble. Amen."

"Before you came, I was all alone. It is bad to be alone."

"Fire: no good."

"Alone: bad. Friend: good!"

"[to his bride] Friend? Friend?"

"[after the Bride recoils and shrieks] She hate me. Like others."

"Yes, go! You live! Go! [to Dr. Pretorius] You stay! We belong dead!"

"Hunter: Get out the bloodhounds. Raise all the men you can, lock the women indoors, and wait for me."

"Warning! The Monster demands a Mate!"

"WHO will be The Bride of Frankenstein? WHO will dare?"

"A Mate... For The Monster!"

"Created in a weird scientist's laboratory... from the skeletons of two women and the heart of a living girl"

"Boris Karloff - The Monster"

"Colin Clive - Dr. Henry Frankenstein"

"Valerie Hobson - Elizabeth Frankenstein"

"Ernest Thesiger - Dr. Pretorius"

"Elsa Lanchester - Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley/The Monster's Mate"

"Gavin Gordon - Lord Byron"

"Douglas Walton - Percy Shelley"

"Una O'Connor - Minnie"

"E. E. Clive - Burgomaster"

"Lucien Prival- Albert (the butler)"

"O. P. Heggie - Hermit"

"Dwight Frye - Karl"

"Reginald Barlow - Hans"

"Mary Gordon - Hans' wife"

"Anne Darling - Shepherdess"

"[opening lines] "The future has not been written. There is no fate but what we make for ourselves." I wish I could believe that. My name is John Connor. They tried to murder me before I was born. When I was 13, they tried again. Machines from the future. Terminators. All my life my mother told me the storm was coming - Judgment Day, the beginning of a war between man and machines. Three billion lives were vanished in an instant. And I would lead what was left of the human race to ultimate victory. It hasn’t happened, no bombs fell, computers didn’t take control. We stopped Judgment Day. I should feel safe. But I don’t. So I live off the grid, no phone, no address. No one and nothing can find me. I’ve erased all connections to the past. But as hard as I try, I can't erase my dreams. My nightmares."

"[waking up from his nightmares] I feel the weight of the future bearing down on me. A future I don't want. So I keep running...as fast as I can...anywhere...nowhere..."

"[last lines] By the time SkyNet became self-aware it had spread into millions of computer servers all across the planet. Ordinary computers in office buildings, dorm rooms, everywhere. It was software, in cyberspace. There was no system core. It could not be shut down. The attack began at 6:18 P.M. just as he said it would. Judgment Day. The day the human race was nearly destroyed by the weapons they built to protect themselves. I should have realized our destiny was never to stop Judgment Day; it was merely to survive it. Together. The Terminator knew. He tried to tell us, but I didn't want to hear it. Maybe the future has been written. I don't know. All I know is what the Terminator taught me. Never stop fighting. And I never will. The battle has just begun."

"Arnold Schwarzenegger - The Terminator"

"Nick Stahl - John Connor"

"Claire Danes - Catherine Brewster"

"Kristanna Loken - T-X"

"David Andrews - Lt General Robert Brewster, USAF"

"Next summer, the Machines will Rise."

"The Machines Will Rise."

"[from trailer] Judgment Day is upon us [..] and our last hope in the war against the machines is one of them."

""In one word : Great. There was a small part of me that hoped it wasn't good - but another part of me hope'd it succeeded. And it did. And I'm so glad it did. Jonathon's made a great movie. Arnold's in great form. I really like what he's done with it". If he had done it, would he have handled it differently: "Yes. That's only natural. I mightn't have structrued it the same, nor may I have ended it the same way - but coming in where he has, such a hard thing to do, and I give Jonathan points for it"."

"My parents are these people, I live with them…I'm boring."

"I'm just a guy. I work in an office building, doing office building stuff."

"I don't wanna die, I'm just being realistic. You think they'd go to all the trouble to build this thing if we could just walk out?"

"Do you think we matter? We don't."

"I mean, this is an accident, a forgotten, perpetual public works project. Do you think anybody wants to ask questions? All they want is a clear conscience and a fat paycheck."

"I mean, nobody wants to see the big picture. Life's too complicated."

"Just out of curiosity—I mean, don't hit me again, I think—but what are you going to do when you get there?"

"Let's rule out aliens for now and concentrate on what we know."

"You can't see the big picture from in here, so don't try. Keep your head down, keep it simple. Just look at what's in front of you."

"Leaven…you beautiful brain."

"What do you think the establishment is? It's just guys like me. Their desks are bigger but their jobs aren't. They don't conspire, they buy boats."

"Every day I mop up after your bleeding heart. The only reason you even exist is because I keep you!"

"I know your type. No kids, no man to fuck you. So you go around outraged, sticking your nose up other people's assholes, sniffing their business!"

"I looked through the walls. I dreamed him, at his desk, designing everything. He can't let you solve the puzzle, see, because there is a purpose."

"I'm not dying in a fucking rat maze!"

"Only the government could build something this ugly."

"It's okay, I just swallowed my button."

"It's all the same machine, right? The Pentagon, multinational corporations, the police! You do one little job, you build a widget in Saskatoon and the next thing you know it's two miles under the desert, the essential component of a death machine!"

"God help you, Quentin. Did you smack your kids around too?"

"Look around. Take a good, long look-see. 'Cause I got a feeling it's looking at us."

"No more talkin'. No more guessin'. Don't even think about nothing that's not right in front of ya. That's the real challenge. You've got save yourselves from yourselves."

"Suck on it...keeps the saliva flowin'."

"I knew that my first film was going to have a very low budget, and therefore it was probably going to have to take place on one set. But I knew that also that I was also not the kind of filmmaker who would do something like My Dinner with Andre. So, I had a little brainstorm one day, where it occurred to me, "Well, what if one set doubled for many?" So I would have the advantage of shooting in one space, but I would also be able to move my characters from place to place. This made me think of a maze of identical rooms, and therefore a symmetrical maze, and therefore a cube and so on. It took awhile to, from that kernel of an idea, turn it into a three-act structure. But with the help of some friends, I did…"

"When Cube came out, the American company that distributed it decided they wanted to do a sequel and they approached me. I said "No, thanks". First of all, I'm not a huge fan of most sequels. And then I just didn't think it was a story that sequelized well. I mean, it was hard enough making one movie out of that premise, and believe me, if you've ever shot in a cube, you don't want to do it more than once. It's not a lot of fun. It was actually a very hard film to make…So, I said "No, thank you", and in some respects, I regret having said that because now, people come up to me all the time and say, "Did you direct Cube 2 and Cube 3?"…that happens all the time. I mean, for better or worse. I'm not judging those films. I can't claim ownership over them and I don't like it when people assume I made them. So, that was a lesson. If by some incredible fluke Splice got a sequel, I would remain involved…"

"Honestly, maybe it's better that other people did it, because they were able to approach the material in a fresh way. But my feeling was and is that it's like Jaws. You're in the water with a shark and a couple people. There's only one story to tell, in my opinion. You could have spun off into some very esoteric, interesting, weird places…Once you went out of the cube, virtually anything could be out there. Probably it's not a cube at all. Probably it's something much more bizarre, and abstract. But honestly, I never put serious thought into it."

"Fear…Paranoia…Suspicion…Desperation"

"Don't Look For A Reason…Look For A Way Out"

"The Walls Are Closing In."

"Nicole de Boer — Joan Leaven"

"Nicky Guadagni — Helen Holloway"

"David Hewlett — David Worth"

"Andrew Miller — Kazan"

"Wayne Robson — Rennes"

"Maurice Dean Wint — Quentin"

"[after his friends said he didn't have the balls to do the experiment] You bring the equipment, I'll bring my balls."

"Today is a good day to die."

"[doing CPR] One one thousand, two one thousand . . . what comes next?"

"Philosophy failed. Religion failed. Now it's time for medical science to try."

"Everything matters, everything we do matters."

"Somehow we've brought our sins back physically. And they're pissed."

"C'mon, Billy Mahoney. C'mon... Gimme your best shot. I dare ya. I fuckin' dare ya."

"Hello, I'm nice, he's nice, we're both fucking lunatics. Can I come in, please?"

"[talking to the tombstone of Billy Mahoney] Wake up you little shit, you got company!"

"[talking about the experiment] I did not come to medical school to murder my class mates no matter how deranged they might be."

"[dictating a diary entry into his tape recorder] Halloween morning. Rotting pumpkins. Burning leaves. Black cats mating like rats in the alley. It was as if . . . it were as if we felt no fear, as if we were already dead and had nothing to lose by dying. Or perhaps it was because we had lived life so well, and loved life so much, that we fancied ourselves immortal, overwhelming the powers that be with the force of our passion for science. [long pause] Or maybe we were just fucked in the head."

"Good thing I didn't flatline. My 350-pound babysitter would be chasing me for the half-eaten pastrami sandwich I stole from her."

"David Labraccio: [about his death experience] It's like being paranoid without the fear. Like being watched."

"David Labraccio: Die to be a hero someday if you want to, but don't die to be a celebrity."

"Rachel: [as she's about to "flatline" in their experiment] See you soon."

"Winnie Hicks: [the little girl in his mind to David Labraccio] Hey, fellatio! Got a match? Well, I do. Your face and my ass. Your breath's made of buffalo fart. You don't know jack SHIT! BUTT-WAD, NEEDLE-DICK, COCK-BITE, JACK-OFF, LIMP-WRIST, CORN-HOLE, BANANA-BREATH, SHIT-BIRD, BIRD-TURD, TURD-FACE, KISS-ASS, BROWN-NOSE, MACHO-WIMP, LIMP-DICK, FART-FACE, TURD-MERCHANT! What's the matter? Gonna cry? Cry-baby Davie. Cry Cry Cry! SHIT-FACED, RAT-TURD, ASS-LICKING, SON-OF-A-BITCH."

"Joe Hurley: This is not the kind of shit I want on my transcript."

"Joe Hurley: Excuse me, I don't want to ruin anybody's evening, but are we in the room with a dead man?"

"David Labraccio: [screaming at a religious stained-glass portrait] I'm sorry.. we trespassed on your… fucking territory. God! I'm sorry!"

"Some lines shouldn't be crossed."

"Kiefer Sutherland - Nelson"

"Julia Roberts - Rachel Mannus"

"Kevin Bacon - David Labraccio"

"William Baldwin - Joe Hurley"

"Oliver Platt - Randy Steckle"

"Kimberly Scott - Winnie Hicks"

"Joshua Rudoy - Billy Mahoney"

"Benjamin Mouton - Rachel's Father"

"Hope Davis - Anne Coldren"

"[Talking to his surviving baboon, while drinking] "Residue" means old boyfriend, doesn't it? Stathis Borans is her old boyfriend. "From the desk of Stathis Borans" - how about "Under the desk of Stathis Borans"? She's working for her old boyfriend. Now she runs out late at night to see him. What is this, the Ronnie game?! I'm catching on, I'm catching on... [As the baboon swats at a fly] I didn't mean to kill your brother. But he didn't die in vain, if that's of any comfort. And, as the General said, "There's nothing I'd ask you to do that I wouldn't do myself, boys." ...Hey, you're all right. From looking at you, I can tell you're okay. What are we waiting for? Let's do it."

"[To Veronica] I will say now, however subjectively, that human teleportation, molecular decimation, breakdown and reformation is inherently purging. It makes a man a king. From the moment I walked out of the pod, I felt like a million bucks... I mean, what an accomplishment! But what have I really done? All I've done is say to the world: "Let's go! Move! Catch me if you can!""

"[To Veronica] You're afraid to dive into the plasma pool, aren't you? You're afraid to be destroyed and recreated, aren't you? I'll bet you think that you woke me up about the flesh, don't you? But you only know society's straight line about the flesh. You can't penetrate beyond society's sick, gray fear of the flesh! Drink deep or taste not the plasma spring, see what I'm saying? And I'm not just talking about sex and penetration, I'm talking about penetration beyond the veil of the flesh! A deep, penetrating dive into the plasma pool!"

"[To Veronica] I was not pure. The teleporter insists on inner purity; I was not pure. A fly...got into the transmitter pod with me that first time when I was alone. The computer got...confused, there weren't supposed to be two separate genetic patterns, and it decided to, erm...splice us together. It mated us, me and the fly. We hadn't even been properly introduced. [Smiles] My...teleporter turned into a gene-splicer. And a very good one. Now I'm not Seth Brundle anymore. I'm the offspring of...Brundle and housefly."

"[Being filmed by Veronica] How does Brundlefly eat? Well, he found out, the hard and painful way, that he eats very much the way a fly eats. His teeth are now useless, because although he can chew up solid foods, he can't digest them. Solid food hurts. So like a fly, Brundlefly breaks down solids with a corrosive enzyme, playfully called "vomit drop". He regurgitates on his food, it liquefies, and then he sucks it back up. Ready for a demonstration, kids? Here goes..."

"[Adding his teeth to a collection of lost body parts] You're relics. Yes, you are. Vestigial, archaeological, redundant. Artifacts of a bygone era. Of historical interest only. [Notices Veronica] You've missed some good moments. Is that why you're here? To catch up? My teeth have begun to fall out. The medicine cabinet is now the Brundle Museum of Natural History. You wanna see what else is in it?"

"Be afraid. Be very afraid."

"Half man, half insect... total terror."

"Something went wrong in the lab today. Very wrong."

"(from movie trailer) There is a limit, even to the imagination... a point where our greatest creations meet our deepest fears. You are about to go beyond that limit."

"He starts to change first perhaps mentally. He starts to get very speedy and hyper and exuberant. So the first manifestation of what’s been happening to him is mental rather than physical. But then it’s also physical because of the sugar lust. I’m just trying to see what the two things do and how far it goes. My interest in insects is more than I deal with in The Fly, actually. It’s phenomenal that any insect transforms. They all do. That’s part of being an insect."

"Think of the plot of The Fly. Two attractive people fall in love. The man suddenly contracts this incurable disease. He goes downhill in a horrible and hideous way as his mate watches and then he asks her to kill him and that’s the end of the movie. Now, people would not accept that. You could not deal with that in a normal, realistic fashion. It’s just too upfront and too hard and too despairing. If you gave Hollywood that plot, they wouldn’t make the movie. And yet, because it was sci-fi, fantasy, horror, no one ever questioned how dark it was. That’s another good thing about horror—it allows you to come to grips with the nitty gritty and at the same time gives you a little cushion, a little protection as well, because it is fantasy."

"Jeff Goldblum - Seth Brundle"

"Geena Davis - Veronica "Ronnie" Quaife"

"John Getz - Stathis Borans"

"Joy Boushel - Tawny"

"Leslie Carlson - Dr. Brent Cheevers"

"George Chuvalo - Marky"

"David Cronenberg - Gynecologist"

"Where's my daughter, Where is... [stutters] ...she. Why can't I remember my daughter's name? Where is she?!"

"Oh, can you use Wynn's aux. monitor because we'll need the big guns here for our little mouse hunt."

"I hope your shortcut worked, Mr. Quigley."

"Instant paralysis. They really weren't kidding, were they?"

"I don't trust machines, I have a machine to thank for this [points to his right eye, which is robotic] and this! [pounds the ground with his cane] I want to see them with my own God-given eye!"

"Can we spend five minutes without bringing up Owen?"

"You know what sort of people end up in there."

"Do you believe in god?"

"She's gonna die in there, and she's probably innocent!"

"This room is... green."

"Would you forget the party line for a minute and make the call?"

"Isolation - Panic - Terror."

"Every nightmare has a beginning."

"Zachary Bennett — Eric Wynn"

"Stephanie Moore — Cassandra Rains"

"Michael Riley — Jax"

"Martin Roach — Haskell"

"David Huband — Dodd"

"Mike Nahrgang — Meyerhold"

"Richard McMillan — Bartok"

"Terri Hawkes — Jellico"

"Tony Munch — Owen"

"Jasmin Geljo — Ryjkin"

"Diego Klattenhoff — Quigley"

"I cannot - yet I must. How do you calculate that? At what point on the graph do "must" and "cannot" meet? Yet I must - but I cannot!"

"Your people were getting too intelligent. We could not wait until you were strong enough to attack us; we had to attack you first."

"The child is impertinent."

"I will re-calculate. Your deaths will be indescribable."

"Show yourselves, and I promise you a painless death."

"Hu-mans, listen to me. Due to an error in calculation, there are still a few of you left"

"Carla: Is Alice going on a date with Ro-Man?"

"Johnny: [to Ro-Man] You look like a pooped out pinwheel."

"The Professor: [Roy walks up to the group and collapses] He's dead, and there's nothing we can do."

"The Professor's Assistant: I'm bossy? You're so bossy you oughta be milked before you come home at night."

"Monsters Attack Earth!"

"Moon monsters launch attack against Earth! How can science meet the menace of astral assassins? New Science Fiction Thrills!"

"Adventures Into The Future in New TRU-3 Dimension"

"George Nader - Roy"

"Claudia Barrett - Alice"

"Selena Royle - Mother"

"John Mylong - The Professor"

"Gregory Moffett - Johnny"

"Pamela Paulson - Carla"

"George Barrows - Ro-Man the Monster/Great Guidance"

"[chances upon another pair of guards after fooling Richter and company with the hologram-bracelet] Ha ha ha, you think this is the real Quaid? [guards look behind them] It is! [Quaid shoots the guards]"

"[on video] Howdy, Quaid. If you're watching this, that means that Kuato is dead, and you led us to him. I knew that you wouldn't let me down. Sorry for all of the shit I've put you through, but hey, what are friends for? All I want to do is wish you happiness and good living, old buddy, but unfortunately, that's not gonna happen. You see, that's "my" body you have there, and I want it back. Sorry for being an Indian giver, but I was here first. So, adios, amigo! [the screen zooms out to reveal Cohaagen, who puts his hand on Hauser's shoulder] And thanks for not getting yourself killed. Hey, maybe now we will meet in our dreams. You never know. [they laugh and walk off-camera]"

"I felt the movie, in some way, should not take itself too seriously. In fact, ultimately, the casting of Arnold—he was already cast before I was there. So I had to take Arnold. I liked the script already, but Arnold was playing the main part. So, take it or leave it. I said I wanted to do it with Harrison Ford, like in "Blade Runner." But I might have made a mistake because "Blade Runner" is also very serious. And because Arnold was there, that changed everything. Arnold being there made it really necessary to flip it a little bit. And I think, in retrospect, it was a gift. Arnold was supposed to be an accountant in the original story and it was still in the script. And I'm like, "Arnold an accountant? That's ridiculous." So I proposed, "Let's have him do something physical." What are those things he's using?"

"They stole his mind. Now he wants it back. Get ready for the ride of your life."

"Your mind is the center of your life. It is everything you hear, everything you see, everything you feel... It is everything you ARE. You wouldn't know if you lost your mind... Would you know if someone STOLE it?"

"What if you discovered somebody stole your mind... and there was only one way to get it back?"

"In this world, they can steal your mind, erase your memory, and give you another identity. But the most dangerous thing that can happen to you is... TOTAL RECALL."

"He'll show you a side of Mars that no one on Earth has ever seen before... He should be so lucky."

"Arnold Schwarzenegger - Douglas Quaid/Carl Hauser"

"Sharon Stone - Lori Quaid"

"Rachel Ticotin - Melina"

"Ronny Cox - Vilos Cohaagen"

"Michael Ironside - Richter"

"Marshall Bell - George/Kuato"

"Mel Johnson Jr. - Benny"

"Michael Champion - Helm"

"Roy Brocksmith - Dr. Edgemar"

"Ray Baker - Bob McClane"

"Rosemary Dunsmore - Dr. Lull"

"David Knell - Ernie"

"Alexia Robinson - Tiffany"

"Dean Norris - Tony"

"Mark Carlton - Bartender"

"Marc Alaimo - Everett"

"Robert Costanzo - Harry"

"Pricilla Allen - The Fat Lady"

"Jullia Alonzo- Babu"

"[to Dan, trying to convince him to assist in his research] We can achieve every doctor's dream! You'll be famous, and live lifetimes."

"Do you agree he's dead now? [picks up the dead cat and drops it with a clunk] Do you agree that he's dead now?"

"[regarding the dead cat he is reanimating] Don't expect it to tango; it has a broken back."

"I must say, Dr. Hill, I'm very disappointed in you. You steal the secret of life and death and here you are, trysting with a bubble-headed co-ed. You're not even a second-rate scientist."

"You'll never get credit for my discovery. Who's going to believe a talking head? Get a job in a sideshow."

"I am not through here! I told you I have a theory: overdose!! [wields two full reagent hypodermics]"

""How can you teach such drivel? These people are here to learn and you're closing their minds before they even have a chance!" [Herbert west to Dr. Hill after pencil snapping lesson]"

"[about the death & reanimation of Dean Halsey] This is a dream. Fiction."

"[about Dean Halsey] He's not insane. He's dead."

"[whispered to Megan, in the film's final line] I love you."

"[about the two pencils West has just deliberately snapped] Mister West. I suggest you get yourself a pen."

"[about West's basement lab] Hmm. Interesting little la-bor-ah-tory you have here."

"Mace: [about the morgue] Don't know why they keep locked doors around here. Nobody wants in, and ain't nobody gettin' out."

"H.P. Lovecraft's classic tale of horror"

"Death Is Just The Beginning..."

"Herbert West has a good head on his shoulders... and another one on his desk."

"...It will scare you to pieces."

"When we were doing the research on it, we were spending a lot of time talking to pathologists in various morgues, and they had the blackest sense of humour I’ve ever encountered! I think you have to if you’re going to do a job like that. I think that, somehow, managed to make its way into the movie."

"Re-Animator was released unrated, which is very seldom done, but it allowed us to do anything we wanted to. With From Beyond, they insisted that it be rated R, which meant that it was more restricted in what we’d be allowed to do."

"Jeffrey Combs - Herbert West"

"Bruce Abbott - Dan Cain"

"Barbara Crampton - Megan Halsey"

"David Gale - Dr. Carl Hill"

"Robert Sampson - Dean Alan Halsey"

"Carolyn Purdy-Gordon - Dr. Harrod"

"Al Berry - Dr. Hans Gruber"

"Gerry Black - Mace (Miskatonic security guard)"

"[grabs some of the sticky substance that is growing over his skin] Beth, if you stay with me, I'll show you a magic trick you'll never forget."

"[on videotaped notes that Martin watches] It's possible that the teleporter somehow... improved me. Theoretically, it might have seen where things could be improved, and it did it. I told it to be creative, and...I dunno, maybe it has been..."

"[cornered by the "Martinfly"] Martin, I know you can understand me. Don't do anything rash. I won't hesitate to kill you in a second if I have to. [shoots him once, aims at Beth when he notices her moving, then shoots "Martinfly" again, causing him to collapse on the floor, whimpering] I almost wish it didn't have to end like this. Bye, Martin. ["Martinfly" suddenly grabs and squeezes his hand, forcing him to drop the gun as he tries to shoot again]"

"Like father, like son."

"A new generation of terror!"

"[from TV spot] Hush, little baby, don't be sad. You'll grow up to be like Dad. Hush, little baby, don't you cry, just because your Dad was the Fly..."

"Eric Stoltz - Martin Brundle"

"Daphne Zuniga - Beth Logan"

"Lee Richardson - Anton Bartok"

"John Getz - Stathis Borans"

"Frank C. Turner - Shepard"

"Ann Marie Lee - Dr. Jainway"

"[opening lines] Our plane crashed in the endless southern Pacific, and we drifted for days between life and death. On the sixth or seventh day, the two men who had survived with me began to fight over the last canteen of water. They fought like beasts, not men. I fought for my life, just as savagely as they did."

"[narrating] I saw very little of Moreau as the crisis broke. He was in the laboratory, working away in pursuit of his dream to create a perfect human race. Nothing was said of my attempted escape. Montgomery, who had once been a brilliant neurosurgeon, was reduced to being the beast-people's jailor - and now he had become mine too."

"[closing lines] This is a true record of what I saw. I set it down only leaving out the longitude and latitude of the island, as a warning to all who would follow in Moreau's footsteps. Most times, I keep the memory far in the back of my mind, a distant cloud. But there are times when the little cloud spreads, until it obscures the sky. At those times, I look about me at my fellow men and am reminded of some likeness to the beast-people. And I feel as though the animal is surging up in them, and they are neither wholly animal nor wholly man, but an unstable combination of both. As unstable as anything Moreau created. And I go... in fear."

"I have almost achieved perfection you see, of a divine creature that is pure, harmonious, absolutely incapable of malice. And if in my tinkering I have fallen short of the human form by the snout, claw or hoof, it really is of no great importance. I am closer that you could possibly imagine sir."

"[On Dr. Moreau] Animal rights activists drove him out of the States. Got so bad, you couldn't cage a rat without reading him his rights."

"[When Edward attempts to use a radio for help] Who do you think you're going to call, hmm? What are you going to say when you get someone on the horn? "Mayday, mayday, I'm being held by a pig lady"?"

"[Gone insane. Imitating Dr. Moreau] Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgement ye judge, ye shall be judged. And with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye. Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam that is in thine own eye and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote of thy brother's eye. Neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet... and then, give not that which is holy unto the dogs."

"[Imitating Dr. Moreau] I destroyed the serum. All of it."

"[Imitating Dr. Moreau] And though I give my body to be burned and have not charity, I am nothing. And though... I give all my gifts to feed the poor, and though l give my body to be burned, and have not charity, I am nothing."

"It is a hard way, the way of being a man. Sooner or later we all want a thing that is bad. To walk on all fours. To suck up drink from a stream. To jabber, instead of saying the words. To go snuffling at the earth, and to claw on the bark of trees. To eat flesh, or fish. To make love to more than one, every which way. These are all bad things. These are not the things that men do. But we are men, are we not? We are men because the Father has made us men!"

"[After Douglas offers to find a way to stop the regression to animals] No. No more scientists, no more laboratories, no more experiments. I thought you would be able to understand that. We have to be what we are, not what the Father tried to make us. To go on two legs... is very hard. Perhaps four is better, anyway."

"We are NOT men!"

"There is no pain, there is no law!"

"Tell me, why you make the pain, if we are your children."

"NOW I... AM THE LAW! [Hyena-Swine proceeds to kill Dr. Moreau when he attempts to escape]"

"I was just so bored, I didn't know what else to do!"

"The truth of the matter is The Island tends to come around every time the Planet of the Apes films come back in business. And it’s the grandfather of all kinds of movies, including Jurassic Park. But the original remains a tough nut to crack – mostly because of its themes, which could never be properly explored in a family movie. At its core it has a Darwinist message, which is at odds with the regular American summer movies, and its view of the impossibility of creating a utopian society is a little dark, even for science-fiction."

"The one part that’s become very clear to me is that Moreau’s going to be funded by corporate money, rather than being an isolated, obsessive individual. The issue of the beast people being property – that they’re essentially a copyright of the company that’s made them, and aren’t free to have their own lives – amused me."

"By the time Brando had arrived [...] no one was willing to say no to anything, which is why Brando wears an ice bucket on his head in one scene"

"[Marlon would] be in the middle of a scene and suddenly he'd be picking up police messages and would repeat, `There's a robbery at Woolworths'."

"Nature's law has been broken."

"The gates of hell are unlocked."

"On a remote ISLAND in the South Pacific, the balance OF nature has been upset by the experiments of DR. MOREAU... with the key of science he's unlocked the gates of hell."

"H. G. Wells' most terrifying creation about the line that separates man from beast, and the notorious doctor who dared to cross it."

"Marlon Brando - Dr. Moreau"

"Val Kilmer - Dr. Montgomery"

"David Thewlis - Edward Douglas"

"Fairuza Balk - Aissa"

"Daniel Rigney - Hyena-Swine"

"Temuera Morrison - Azazello"

"Nelson de la Rosa - Majai"

"Peter Elliott - Assassimon"

"Mark Dacascos - Lo-Mai"

"Ron Perlman - Sayer of the Law"

"Marco Hofschneider - M'Ling"

"Miguel López - Waggdi"

"William Hootkins - Kiril"

"[as he kills Mrs. Haskell] Hohohoho. No ticky, no washy!"

"[to the Mayor] You fat slob! Let's see if you've got any guts. [he punches the mayor in the stomach and rips out his guts] Officer O'Clancy, take care of this toxic waste."

"Honest cops are all alike. A bunch of fuckin' faggots!"

"I owe you for the other night, monster faggot! So now we're gonna give you six new assholes. Compliments of me, Cigar Face!"

"All right everybody, drop your tacos or I'll blow your brains out!"

"Hey Frank, teeny-boppers! You like video games, teeny-boppers? Your mom give you quarters for video games? Well, cough 'em up!"

"Look what we've got here. A little mother and a littler baby. You like Mexican food, little baby? [points his gun at the baby] Well, how would you like to have this hot tamale shoved down your throat?"

"Frank: Now if you all do just what we tell you, you just might, just might, get ya asses home all intact."

"Sara: Why, Melvin, you're beautiful. You're a beautiful person. You're so muscular. It's been two years since I've touched a man."

"Melvin was a 90lb. weakling until nuclear waste transformed him into...The Toxic Avenger"

"The first Super-Hero... from New Jersey!"

"He was 98 lbs. of solid nerd until he became...The Toxic Avenger"

"Mitch Cohen - The Toxic Avenger"

"Jennifer Babtist - Wanda"

"Cindy Manion - Julie"

"Robert Prichard - Slug"

"Gary Schneider - Bozo"

"Pat Ryan - Mayor Belgoody"

"Mark Torgl - Melvin Junko"

"Dick Martinsen - Officer O'Clancy"

"Chris Liano - Walter Harris"

"David Weiss - Chief Of Police"

"Dan Snow - Cigar Face"

"Doug Isbecque - Knuckles"

"Charles Lee Jr. - Nipples"

"Stick all the bits of brain in a plastic bag, Barry."

"Suck my spinning steel, shithead!"

"I'm a Derek. Dereks don't run!"

"Stay where you are then, and I'll give you an eye witness description of this, intergalactic wanker!"

"The headshot's the only true stopper."

"What are you dirty hooers doing on my planet?"

"Well this sure has buggered your plans for conquering the world, eh? Hehe... my friend, the astro-bastard, time for talkies. By the time my colleagues get here I want to have you babbling in some extra-terrestrial language!"

"Eat lead sucker!"

"I'm coming to get you bastards. [laughs in a mad way]"

"I'm born again!"

"[after drop-kicking an alien's head out of a window] The old magic is still there."

"The bastards have landed!"

"[after shooting the alien that was about to execute Giles in the head] I bet that cleared the sinuses."

"That's the end of those weekend cowboys!"

"I'm sure you'll be pleased to be leaving this shitty planet!"

"Tomorrow we're having you for lunch!"

"I think the gruel is ready!"

"The sad news is that we will be heading back to nalak not with six of our co-workers in a state of permanent death. They died today, murdered by some real arseholes."

"[after trying to fire on Barry with an empty gun] Oh, sod it!"

"Barry: I think Derek's turned his toes up, guys."

"Coldfinger: I think this is a job for real men!"

"Lord Crumb: [Sniffing on bowl of alien vomit produced by Robert] Mmmhh, exquisite bouquet, Robert!"

"Lord Crumb: [drinking bowl of alien vomit] Aren't I lucky, I got a chunky bit!"

"One thing the aliens hadn't counted on was Derek, and Dereks don't run!"

"Watch out Aliens... ... here comes Derek!"

"Crumb's Crunchy Delights."

"Human meat for intergalactic hamburgers"

"Terry Potter - Ozzy/3rd Class Alien"

"Pete O'Herne - Barry/3rd Class Alien"

"Craig Smith - Giles/3rd Class Alien"

"Mike Minett - Frank/3rd Class Alien"

"Peter Jackson - Derek/Robert"

"Doug Wren - Lord Crumb"

"Dean Lawrie - Lord Crumb SPFX Double/3rd Class Alien"

"Peter Vere-Jones - Lord Crumb's Voice"

"[talking into tape recorder] I'm gonna hide this tape when I'm finished. If none of us make it, at least there'll be some kind of record. The storm's been hitting us hard now for 48 hours. We still have nothing to go on. [turns off tape recorder and takes a drink of whisky. He looks at the torn long johns and turns it back on] One other thing: I think it rips through your clothes when it takes you over. Windows found some shredded long johns, but the nametag was missing. They could be anybody's. Nobody... nobody trusts anybody now, and we're all very tired. Nothing else I can do, just wait... R.J. MacReady, helicopter pilot, US outpost number 31. [turns off recorder]"

"I know I'm human. And if you were all these things, then you'd just attack me right now, so some of you are still human. This thing doesn't want to show itself, it wants to hide inside an imitation. It'll fight if it has to, but it's vulnerable out in the open. If it takes us over, then it has no more enemies, nobody left to kill it. And then it's won."

"We're gonna draw a little bit of everybody's blood... 'cause we're gonna find out who's The Thing. Watching Norris in there gave me the idea that.. maybe every part of him was a whole. Every little piece was an individual animal.. with a built-in desire to protect its own life. You see when a man bleeds.. it's just tissue. But blood from one of you Things won't obey when it's attacked; It'll try and survive. Crawl away from a hot needle the same."

"[on finding a partially-assembled spaceship beneath the tool shed] Blair's been busy out here all by himself."

"[the Thing roars at MacReady] YEAH, FUCK YOU TOO!!! [throws stick of dynamite]"

"Norwegian passenger with rifle: Se til helvete og kom dere vekk. Det er ikke en bikkje. Det er en slags ting! Det imiterer en bikkje. Det er ikke virkelig! Kom dere vekk, idioter! (Get the hell away. That's not a dog. It's some kind of thing! It's imitating a dog. It's not real! Get away, idiots!)"

"Clark: I don't know what the hell's in there, but it's weird and pissed off, whatever it is."

"Garry: [after passing the blood test] I know you gentlemen have been through a lot. But when you find the time... I'd rather not spend the rest of the winter TIED TO THIS FUCKING COUCH!"

"Norris: This is just what it wants! To pit us against each other!"

"Windows: Are you guys gonna listen to Garry?! Are you gonna let him give the orders?! I mean, he can be one of those things!"

"Blair: Hey, wait a minute. Wait a minute, man. I want to come back inside, don't you understand? I'm alright, I'm much better. And I won't harm anybody. Now you gotta let me come back inside."

"[from teaser trailer] Some say the world will end by fire. Others say it will end by ice. Now, somewhere in the Antarctic, the question is being settled forever."

"[from theatrical trailer] Twelve men have just discovered something. For 100,000 years, it was buried in the snow and ice. Now it has found a place to live. Inside. Where no one can see it. Or hear it. Or feel it."

"[from TV spot] Its origin: alien. Location: Antarctica. Age: unknown. Intent: survival. Destination: MAN."

"Man is the warmest place to hide."

"Look closely at your neighbors. Don't trust anybody."

"The ultimate in alien terror."

"Anytime. Anywhere. Anyone."

"Look closely at your neighbour ... Trust no-one ... They might be THE THING [UK video box]"

"Masur: My character's defining characteristic was that he wasn't really interested in people, but rather loved working with dogs. I got the idea for the character's personality from working with Jed the wolf-dog. There was a little room off to the side in the sound stage. During the rehearsal period, dog trainer Clint Rowe brought Jed the wolf-dog in to get him used to the sound and smell of people. He was a young dog, so he was very jumpy. I worked with Jed and Clint for an hour on the first day of rehearsals and every day after that. It worked out very well during shooting, too. Jed would come and stand next to me, and he wouldn't do that thing that dogs do where they look back at their handlers. If you watch the scenes between us, he's never looking at my hand for a treat. He's just there with me; he's making his own choices. That’s what makes his performance so spooky."

"Masur: During rehearsal, [Keith David] and I started talking about how our characters felt about each other. That’s how we [knew we didn't like each other.] Like in the scene where Childs pulls a gun on my character and I pull a knife on him. Mind you: In California, it was really hard to get a knife that would flip open. I wanted it to be a buck knife, so I got one at a survivalist store. And while I was there, I also got a little attachment so you could flick the knife open with your thumb. I oiled the hell out of that knife and cut my hand several times."

"Clennon: We wasted hours and hours of rehearsal time discussing fucking metaphysics! Some of the actors were obsessed with this question: When you become the Thing — when the alien takes over your mind and body — do you know that you've become the Thing? Or do you just go on thinking that you are your old self? I couldn't see the point of solving that silly riddle. What difference was it going to make in anybody's performance? The story's point was that every creature looked, sounded and smelled exactly the way it did before the alien took it over."

"Masur: There were two sets that were refrigerated, but I didn't work on either of them. There was the Norwegian camp, and then the room with the ice block. Those sets were on the same stage. They figured out how to make the sets look very cold from the original The Thing from Another World. You have to keep the sets at about 40 degrees, just above freezing. And then you have to spray humidity into the air. It's the humidity that makes it possible to see the actors' breath. But most of the time, we were working in full Arctic gear on a nicely air-conditioned sound stage. It was only horrible when we went outside."

"Clennon: It was all happening in front of us: We didn't have to imagine some post-production [computer-generated] effects and then pretend to be shocked or mesmerized. Rob Bottin gave us all we needed to be well and truly freaked."

"Carpenter: I'm always concerned about safety, so any time you set somebody on fire … jeez. We also held our breath every time the actors used [flamethrowers]. [Laughs] These things shoot gasoline and are on fire! And these are actors. You just don't know. They might turn around to ask you a question and burn you up. We trained the actors to put out the fire during the scene in the dog kennel. They ran in and put it out. They actually put out the fire too quickly. But I didn't worry about it then … and I usually worry about everything."

"Clennon: I think I saw the film at a cast-and-crew screening. Alien was still fresh in my mind. That film was very effective because you had a clear fix on who each of the characters were. So when the alien was stalking a particular crew member, you had an emotional investment in that character. Take Harry Dean Stanton and his kitten, for instance. You really didn't want the alien to shred him or his kitten. In The Thing, [screenwriter] Bill Lancaster had written scenes that introduced each of the 12 men. And we shot those scenes — maybe two, three minutes total — but John left that material out during editing. I felt the audience didn't have a chance to identify each character before they got sucked up into being a Thing. It was a little fuzzy at first: "Who's that guy? Is he the biologist? The geologist? The company doctor? Should I care?" I think that made it harder for a general audience to get involved in The Thing. Maybe that's why Alien had a broader appeal and drew bigger crowds into the theaters. Then again, The Thing has its own integrity. It's a colder, harder, darker world. The outpost culture is totally male, and the outlook at the end is grim and pessimistic."

"While The Thing is now regarded as the pinnacle of practical and visual effects, its power comes equally from its oozy tactile quality and disturbing flights of twisted imagination; a dog splits in two, a chest undergoing an autopsy grows fleshy jaws and bites a surgeon’s arms off, a head sprouts spider-legs and toddles off. The Thing became Bottin’s labor of love and it nearly killed him. “I wanted this stuff to come out great,” he remembered. “So I actually lived at Universal for a year and five weeks, without taking a day off. I’d sleep on the sets, in the locker rooms, in the labs. I ended up in hospital at the end of the show.”"

"There are significant differences, too. For where Alien boasted an on-board computer nicknamed ‘Mother’, a female protagonist and an egg-born nemesis, The Thing is set in an all-male environment, and is as much a study of masculinity in crisis as an update of the sort of siege scenario that Carpenter had already played out in Assault on Precinct 13. The first time we meet chopper pilot and hero RJ MacReady (Carpenter regular Kurt Russell), a loner who lives apart from the rest of the crew’s quarters in a shack outside, he is in the rec room, pouring himself a scotch on ice, and resuming a game of chess – not with one of his companions, but with the computer. “Poor baby, you’re starting to lose it,” he comments, before the Chess Wizard checkmates him. With his masculine ego damaged, MacReady’s response is to pour his drink into the computer’s circuitry, frying it with the words, “Cheating bitch.” It is a misogynistic slur (accompanied by an absurd destructive act) against the only presence on the station that might be deemed female – for the Chess Wizard, despite its masculine name, has the distinctive voice of a woman (in fact Carpenter’s then wife Adrienne Barbeau). With that word ‘bitch’ still ringing in the audience’s ears, Carpenter cuts away to the husky outside, racing from its armed Norwegian pursuers to the relative shelter of the American station – and through the magical implicature of editing, we infer that this new arrival is also a bitch, come to invade this male community with her feminine otherness – even as it smuggles in all the alien cells that will be these men’s ultimate undoing."

"“It was so frightening that my popcorn flew out of my hand,” said Carpenter who included clips of the film in his 1978 box office smash Halloween. “The original story was like Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians, with the creature imitating one or all of them. And that idea fascinated me.”"

"“A lot of movies up to that point had always ended up with a man in a suit,” Carpenter recounted in the documentary Terror Takes Shape. “Even in Alien, as well done as it was, there’s one shot where this thing stands up and you realize it’s a big guy in a suit. Great suit, but still a suit. So the whole point of The Thing was to say, “Let’s do the granddaddy of monsters, and let’s actually show it.”"

"Basking in the afterglow of a warmer alien visitation – E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial had opened two weeks earlier and was charming everything before it – Ronald Reagan’s America rejected The Thing’s ambiguous nihilism wholesale. It was, in Carpenter’s words, “El Tanko”. “It was unpleasant for audiences for deal with,” he later reflected. “I think the social climate in the country at that time had a lot to do with it. There was a recession under way and people rejected its downbeat, depressing view of things. They didn’t like the horrible inevitability of the movie.”"

"It is annually the film of choice for the scientists arriving on the first night at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station on June 2 (they end their stay by watching The Shining, perhaps when the madness has set in) and inspired a short story by Canadian writer Peter Watts that recasts the events of the film from the point of view of the Thing itself, struggling to understand why it is receiving such hostility."

"People hated it. It was HATED. Especially by the horror fans. I thought that was the best film I’d made but everybody dumped on it"

"[Morricone] did all the orchestrations and recorded for me 20 minutes of music I could use wherever I wished but without seeing any footage. I cut his music into the film and realized that there were places, mostly scenes of tension, in which his music would not work... I secretly ran off and recorded in a couple of days a few pieces to use. My pieces were very simple electronic pieces – it was almost tones. It was not really music at all but just background sounds, something today you might even consider as sound effects."

"I've asked [Carpenter], as he was preparing some electronic music with an assistant to edit on the film, "Why did you call me, if you want to do it on your own?" He surprised me, he said – "I got married to your music. This is why I've called you." ... Then when he showed me the film, later when I wrote the music, we didn't exchange ideas. He ran away, nearly ashamed of showing it to me. I wrote the music on my own without his advice. Naturally, as I had become quite clever since 1982, I've written several scores relating to my life. And I had written one, which was electronic music. And [Carpenter] took the electronic score."

"The professional reviews were similarly damning. “The quintessential moron movie of the eighties” screamed Vincent Canby in the New York Times. “The Thing is so single-mindedly determined to keep you awake that it almost puts you to sleep,” derided David Ansen in Newsweek. Adding insult to injury, even Christian Nyby, the director of the original, weighed in. “If you want blood, go to the slaughterhouse. All in all, it's a terrific commercial for J&B Scotch.”"

"“It was the way I felt watching The Thing the first time I saw it in a movie theatre,” he continued. “I just really connected to it. This crazy suspense leads to terror to a place suspense rarely ever gets to…The paranoia amongst the characters was so strong, trapped in that enclosure for so long, that it just bounced off all the walls until it had nowhere to go but out into the audience. That is what I was trying to achieve with The Hateful Eight.”"

"Kurt Russell - R.J. "Mac" MacReady"

"Wilford Brimley - Blair"

"Keith David - Childs"

"T.K. Carter - Nauls"

"Thomas Waites - Windows"

"David Clennon - Palmer"

"Richard Dysart - Dr. Copper"

"Charles Hallahan - Norris"

"Peter Maloney - Bennings"

"Richard Masur - Clark"

"Donald Moffat - Garry"

"Joel Polis - Fuchs"

"In 2009 a deadly virus burned through our civilization, pushing humankind to the edge of extinction. Dr. Robert Neville dedicated his life to the discovery of a cure, and the restoration of humanity. On September 9th, 2012, at approximately 8:49 p.m. he discovered that cure; and at 8:52 he gave his life to defend it. We are his legacy. This is his legend. Light up the darkness."

"Mommy look, it's a butterfly!"

"My name is Robert Neville. I am a survivor living in New York City. I am broadcasting on all AM frequencies. I will be at the South Street Seaport everyday at mid-day, when the sun is highest in the sky. If you are out there... if anyone is out there... I can provide food, I can provide shelter, I can provide security. If there's anybody out there... anybody... please. You are not alone."

"Dr. Robert Neville, September 5th, 2012, GA series, serum 391. Animal trials. Streaming video. [goes over to a stack of glass cubicles containing KV infected rats] GA series results appear typical. Compounds 1, 3, 4, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 14, 16, 18 did not kill the virus. Compounds 2, 5, 7, 12, 13, 15, 17 all killed the host. [pause] Hold on a second. Compound 6 appears to be showing decreased aggression response. Partial pigmentation return. Slight pupil constriction. GA series, serum 391, Compound 6, next candidate for human trials. You hang in there, #6."

"Day 1001. Uh, we came in close contact with a hive today. Blood tests confirm that I am immune to both the airborne and contact strains. Canines remain immune to airborne strain only. [to Sam] You can't go running into the dark, dummy. Vaccine trials continue, I'm still unable to transfer my immunity to infected hosts. The Krippen Virus is... elegant. Just fishing in the dark, son. Hm, a behavioral note, um, an infected male exposed himself to sunlight today. Now, it's possible decreased brain function or the growing scarcity of food is causing them to... ignore their basic survival instincts. Social de-evolution appears complete. Typical human behavior is now entirely absent."

"This is Ground Zero. This is my site. I can still fix this."

"[sees the department store dummy, Fred, outside of the store] What the hell are you doing out here, Fred? What the hell-No! NO! [grabs his assault rifle] What the hell... Fred, if you're real, you better tell me right now! Dammit Fred... IF YOU'RE REAL, YOU BETTER TELL ME RIGHT NOW! [guns the dummy down] DAMN IT, FRED!! DAMN IT!"

"I like Shrek."

"[now completely alone, Neville talks to the department store mannequins] I promised my friend I would say hello to you today. Hello. Hello. Please say hello to me. [crying] Please say hello to me!"

"[telling Anna about Bob Marley] He had this idea. It was kind of a virologist idea. He believed that you could cure racism and hate... literally cure it, by injecting music and love into people's lives. When he was scheduled to perform at a peace rally, a gunman came to his house and shot him down. Two days later he walked out on that stage and sang. When they asked him why — He said, "The people who are trying to make this world worse are not taking a day off. How can I? Light up the darkness.""

"Well, we actually, and this also is reflected in the casting of Emma Thompson in that cameo at the very beginning. Francis and Will, this would be chapter one on nerds on parade, spent an unbelievable amount of time at the CDC. I'm pretty sure [they] are probably infected right now with something, so you should all wear masks. But I think that [we] finally came to this idea that it's too easy to always assume that things will go wrong because someone was twirling their mustache. That, in fact, sometimes things go wrong out of people trying to do right. That was sort of trying to take a different turn on it. So that was where I think we came out. You really liked that. That was really you"

"We shut down six blocks of Fifth Avenue on a Monday morning. That was probably poor logistics, which was poor planning. You realize that you have never actually seen an empty shot of New York. When we were doing it, it’s chilling to walk down the middle of Fifth Avenue. There is never an opportunity to walk down the middle of Fifth Avenue. At 2 o’clock in the morning on Sunday you can’t walk down the middle of Fifth Avenue."

"It was such a wonderful exploration of myself. What happens is that you get in a situation where you don’t have people to create the stimulus for you to respond to. What happens is that you start creating the stimulus and the response. There is a connection with yourself, where your mind starts to drift so, in those types of situations, that you learn about yourself things you would never even imagination."

"[To Rob, immediately prior to the monster's arrival] You gotta learn to say, 'Forget the world,' and hold on to the people you love most."

"Beth McIntire is from a whole 'nother planet, bro. I mean, she's beautiful, she's charming. As for you, I mean, I love you and all but let's face it; you're kind of a douche-bag."

"My name is Robert Hawkins. It's, uh, 6:42 AM, on Saturday May 23rd. Approximately seven hours ago, uh, some thing attacked the city. I don't know what it is. Um, if you found this tape, I mean if you're watching this, then you probably know more about it than I do. Uh, whatever this thing is, it killed my brother, uh, Jason Hawkins, it killed my best friend Hudson Platt and Marlena Diamond, and many many others. Um, we've taken shelter under this bridge. The military has begun bombing the creature, and we're caught in the middle."

"Maybe you should have left town a bit earlier, man."

"Rob, it is time to leave the electronics store."

"Beth lives in Midtown. All right? Midtown is that way. Guess what else is that way! Some horrific shit is in Midtown!"

"[repeated line] I'm documenting."

"[pointing the camera at himself as he prepares to cross a treacherous rooftop] If this is the last thing you see, that means I died."

"No one ever listens to me, now they are- we're all gonna die...."

"(with Marlena and Lily, trying to get Rob to stop) One of us is gonna have to tackle you and that's gonna be very uncomfortable for everyone involved!"

"Another day to live through. Better get started."

"December 1965. Is that all it has been since I inherited the world? Only three years. Seems like a hundred million."

"There was a time that eating was pleasurable. Now it bores me."

"A dying world. An empty, dead, silent world."

"I can't afford the luxury of anger. Anger can make me vulnerable. It can destroy my reason and reason's the only advantage I have over them."

"[filling up a bag with stakes] How many more of these will I have to make before they're all destroyed? They want my blood. It's their lives or mine. I still get squeamish."

"Better put that garlic back where it belongs. I can't live a heartbeat away from hell and forget it."

"Another day... another day to start all over again."

"This is Robert Morgan. If somebody can hear me, answer me. For God's sake, answer me!"

"Your new society sounds charming."

"Freaks! All of you, freaks! Mutations! I'm a man! The last... man..."

"Kathy Morgan: Mommy, where are you? Mommy, I can't see."

"Ben Cortman: Morgan! Do you hear, Morgan? Morgan, come out!"

"Virginia Morgan: [after becoming a vampire] Let... me... in."

"By night they leave their graves, crawling, shambling, through empty streets, whimpering, pleading, begging for his blood!"

"Do you dare to imagine what it would be like to be... the last man on Earth... or the last woman?"

"Alive among the lifeless... alone among the crawling creatures of evil that make the night hideous with their inhuman craving!"

"Vincent Price as Dr. Robert Morgan"

"Franca Bettoia as Ruth Collins, an infected individual"

"Emma Danieli as Virginia Morgan, the wife of Robert Morgan"

"Giacomo Rossi-Stuart as Ben Cortman"

"Umberto Raho as Dr. Mercer"

"Christi Courtland as Kathy Morgan"

"Antonio Corevi as the Governor"

"Ettore Ribotta as the TV Reporter"

"Rolando De Rossi"

"Carolyn De Fonseca dubbed for Ruth Collins' voice in the English release of the film. She was uncredited."

"Giuseppe Mattei as the leader of the survivors. He was also uncredited."

"Hi. Another day, another dollar."

"[To a bust of Julius Caesar set up near a chessboard] Your move, Imperator."

"[makes drink] Join me? Hmm? Miserable schmuck! [to his own image on the video screen]"

"Isn't he? Isn't he a sullen b- [stops when he hears the "Family" outside]"

"[to the "Family"] SHUT UP! Why the hell can't you leave me alone?"

"[later, to the bust of Caesar] What day is it, anyway? Monday? Huh? The hell it is. It's Sunday. Sunday I always dress for dinner."

"[first lines, as the last man on earth wrecks his car] There's never a cop around when you need one."

"[Enters a car dealership in search of a new car, talks to a decomposed corpse of a car salesman] Cannot say I am too crazy about the paint job...Thanks a lot you cheating bastard."

"[talking to his own image on a TV screen] Hi, Big Brother, how's your ass?"

"[hearing the "Family" loudly holding a book-burning revel] At it again, I see? What will it be tonight? Museum of Science? Some library? Poor miserable bastards."

"You know the old song? If you were the only girl in the world, and I was the only boy, well, okay, but until then, don't bother me? Well, I guess I'm the only boy...."

"And Speedy Bob Neville- his great legs churning goes speeding across the finish line with a three minute and fifty second mile. Go ahead, let's see some son-of-a-bitch beat that."

"[Unsure whether or not he saw a healthy human woman or if it just his imagination] Is this how it starts? A trip to the laughing academy? No, you silly bastard, it starts with you asking yourself silly questions. Okay, let's get cleaned up."

"We were warned about The End. Well, here it is."

"Take him to the little room... for questioning."

"Here is the instrument of cleansing, my brethren. And nothing quite cleanses like fire."

"Lisa: Is there anything you can do, DOCTOR, I mean, seeing as how you've lost over 200 million patients?"

"Army officer: [during Neville's flashback to the military conflict] Abort firing! Abort firing! Interception will fragment bacilli carrying missile! Abort firing! Abort firing!"

"The Last Man always carries an automatic weapon."

"The Last Man on Earth is Not Alone"

"Pray for the last man alive. Because he's not alone."

"The World Is Dead. One Survivor. Then The Others. Crawling In Darkness. The Strangest Sect Of All. Hunting The Last Man On Earth."

"Charlton Heston - Neville"

"Anthony Zerbe - Matthias"

"Paul Koslo - Dutch"

"Rosalind Cash – Lisa"

"Eric Laneuville - Richie"

"Kei, here comes the sun."

"The next time we meet... will be at gunpoint."

"Kei: [in prison] Will I be put to death? I just want to die... it's very easy. Just put me outside in the sun. Then I'll die..."

"Gackt - Sho"

"Hyde - Kei"

"Leehom Wang - Son"

"Taro Yamamoto - Toshi"

"Susumu Terajima - Shinji"

"Zeny Kwok - Yi-Che"

"You Kurosaki - Jun"

"Anne Suzuki - Hana"

"Etsushi Toyokawa - Luka"

"Kanata Hongō - Young Sho"

"I will be damned if I'm going to let those idiots from Weyland-Yutani take it back to Earth. They just might succeed, and that would be it for the rest of mankind. Maybe for all life on the planet. I don't see why these things wouldn't be able to reproduce in any animal of a size larger than, say, a cat."

"We give you thanks, O' Lord. Your wrath has come and the time is near for us to be judged. The apocalypse is upon us! Let us be ready! Let your mercy be just! Amen!"

"[explaining his prison barcode tattoo, to Ripley] After my student years, despite the fact that I had become secretly addicted to morphine, I was considered to be most promising. A man with a future. Then during my first residency, I did a thirty-six hour stretch on an ER. So I went out and I got more than a little drunk. Then I got called back. Boiler had blown on a fuel plant, and there were thirty casualties... and eleven of them died. Not as a result of the accident, but because I prescribed the wrong dosage of painkiller. And I got seven years in prison and my licence reduced to a 3C. [pause] At least I got off the morphine."

"The Bitch Is Back"

"This time it's hiding in the most terrifying place of all..."

"Our worst fears have come true. It's back!"

"Three times the suspense. Three times the danger. Three times the terror."

"In the original Alien, Weaver played a young lieutenant on an industrial spaceship, who sheds her naivete to display a bold brain and steely core that leaves her the only survivor of the crew`s first encounter with the alien. Waking up after spending 57 years in hypersleep, adrift in an escape pod, the Ripley of the Aliens sequel is made of even tougher stuff. Cynical, smart and very fit, she manages to make most of the men on board seem like posturing wimps, but still displays a tenderly fierce maternal impulse toward Newt, a little girl orphaned by the alien. In the second film, we left her with sort of everything ahead of her. She`d found this daughter and she had, perhaps, a fellow, maybe. And I think there was, at least on my part, an expectation that maybe she`d be able to lead a normal life. But, life not being fair, she doesn`t get to pursue that dream, says Weaver."

"The maternal storyline hits a dead end in Alien 3, which, Weaver says approvingly, is much closer to the spirit and flavor of the first film. She credits director David Fincher with that. Well, he`s amazing. He`s completely uncompromising, she says, while admitting that, I was sort of the last person to jump on the Fincher bandwagon. I was just a little wary because I wanted very much to break new ground with Ripley. You know, you never know with these sorts of geniuses where their attention is going to go, she says, carefully. But, Fincher, particularly, I think, blew us all away by being such a committed actors` director and so patient. And I think we did break new ground with Ripley. I feel very complete about her. I think she`s more vulnerable. I think she is truly alone. It`s very interesting to play a character who is truly alone, especially a woman, because women are always seen in relation to men or to other woman. It was a very-not to put our audience off-but it was a very existential situation in many ways."

"In Alien 3, Weaver landed in a movie with a history as acidically sticky as anything excreted by the alien itself. In the five-odd years since its conception, the film devoured some seven writers and three directors and so trampled its shooting schedule and estimated $50 million budget that Twentieth Century Fox halted production a year ago. Less than a month before its scheduled release, in fact, the movie`s actual ending remained in doubt. Audience reaction, in sneak previews, Weaver says, was ambivalent. For emotional reasons, we felt we needed to give the audience one more thing to enhance the ending. The missing ingredient turned out to be six more seconds, drawn from the original script and shot at a price estimated at $500,000. The original ending is still there, says Weaver, but now, There`s like a period on it. There was never any doubt, however, about Ripley`s fate, according to Weaver. This is Ripley`s last one, she says firmly. There`s only so much bad luck that a person can have. For her to continue to wake up and confront the alien and resolve the situation, then go back to sleep and wake up to yet another situation-to me, it`s a burden on the whole science-fiction premise of the alien."

"I hated what they did... I couldn't stand 'Alien 3' - how they could just go in there and kill off all these great characters we introduced in Aliens, and the correlation between mother and daughter? It stunk."

"I saw the rough cut of the film, uncut, and there were some scenes in there that were pretty gross. There was an autopsy scene on the girl [Newt] and I like certain gore in the films. I do it [professionally], and it made me sick. It really grossed me out and I remember people got up and left, walked out of the theatre and I was just thinking, 'This will never be in the film. They can't show this stuff.' It was just too much I thought. And when the film came out, it wasn't in the film."

"Look, it wasn't a nightmare, despite what you may have read or heard elsewhere. But it certainly wasn't an easy shoot. What was on the screen was quite removed from what was in the script. But, with that said, I don't regret that I was a part of it. I mean, I knew going into 'Alien 3' that this was a big franchise picture – and there are a lot of cooks in the kitchen on these things."

"Nevertheless, at least one thing was evident as shooting on Alien 3 got underway – this was not going to be the sort of special effects laden supernova that Aliens had been. “I was pleased with that actually,” admits Dance. “I didn’t go back and watch the other two films before Alien 3 – however, I did see Alien when it first came out and I remembered it fondly. On the other hand, I didn’t think Aliens was very good. To me, it was not a very good story – it was just a lot of people firing guns all over the place. What got me excited about the third film was that they toned that down. But what ended up on the screen was a different animal than what was on the page.”"

"The film was critically panned upon its release, but has since gained a cult following. “I think Alien 3 was a better film than Aliens, to be frank,” says Dance. According to the actor, Vincent Ward’s initial script for the film was “really spooky” and centered on a religious cult in a penal colony, but since the character of Ripley was relatively minor, “changes were made to the script.” And the problems didn’t stop there. “Fincher had the studio on his back the whole time phoning him at all hours of the day and night—not taking into account the time change,” says Dance. “But I remember walking on this huge set at Pinewood Studios and Fincher comes up and fires off his shot list for the day. Here’s this guy young enough to be my son who knew all the crew’s jobs, all the shots he wanted, and where he was going to make the cuts in the film, and I thought, ‘My God, this guy is going to go far.’”"

"[N]ow comes "Alien 3 " - as unnecessary a sequel to a major movie as we've seen in some time. First-time director David Fincher and four writers have created another horror movie, attempting existential overtones as they make the alien in this film Ripley's "Moby Dick.""

"There are a lot of problems with this film, but the worst are its dreary, dark motif; the lack of sympathetic characters; the unpleasantness of the film's premise, which has Ripley eventually discovering she has a queen alien growing inside of her; and a lengthy chase sequence that is so dark, and edited so chaotically that it becomes confusing."

"1992's Alien 3, the film, was a strange installment in a franchise that's struggled to find itself ever since its first two movies, an oddly somber experience that was born of complex studio strife and emerged undeniably comprised. With no guns, just a single alien and a cast of barely developed supporting characters, it represented a poor foundation for a licensed game tie-in. So it was hardly surprising that the games that did come out, bearing the title Alien 3, were only loosely connected to the events of David Fincher's directorial debut."

"Aliens, a great action movie, cheapened the original by replacing one hyper-intelligent, indestructible monster with an army of gormless critters. This third entry has only one creature, but unfortunately it's just as gormless. When Ripley (Weaver) crash-lands on a prison planet full of hard-nut slap-heads, they haven't seen a woman in years. Discovering that there's an alien loose, Ripley asks the warden to break out the guns, and can't believe it when she is told there aren't any. Nor can we. Good acting has salvaged many a poor script in the past, but not here."

"I lost interest [in Alien 3], when I realized that the aliens could at all times outrun and outleap the humans, so all the chase scenes were contrivances."

"One of the best looking bad movies I've ever seen."

"“I thought it was dumb. I thought it was a huge slap in the face to fans,” said Cameron without hesitation. “Look, David is a friend of mine. David is an amazing, amazing filmmaker, unquestionably. But that was kind of his first big gig, and he was getting vectored around by the studio, and he was dropped into the production late, and they had a horrible script, and they were rewriting it on the fly, and it was just a mess. I think it was a big mistake.” “I was disappointed,” added Biehn. “But I actually got into [Aliens] because another actor dropped. So, I got into the movie on a fluke, and then I got cut out of Fincher’s movie. And Fincher’s movie, because he was young and they didn’t have a good script, wasn’t any good. And the fourth one [Alien: Resurrection] wasn’t any good. … So, to me, I’m the leading man in the best Alien movie.” Henn, who at 16 would have aged out of the Newt role by the time Alien 3 was made anyway, had already decided by that point that she wasn’t going to continue acting. She got to experience some of the hoopla, though. “Sigourney actually made sure I was invited to the premiere for it,” she said of Alien 3. “I got to experience it as 16-year old, and I knew who these movie stars were and I was like, ‘Oh, wow!’”"

"SPJ: Ripley tries to extinguish the species a second time in Alien 3, throwing herself into the cauldron to kill the alien incubating inside her. Is this action as morally repugnant as nuking all the aliens from afar? Is it worse?"

"If I go on to make 10 great [movies], this'll probably be looked upon as my first bungled masterpiece."

"I hadn’t directed a movie yet. I was just going off to do that. Once I had gone to Pinewood for two years and had been through a situation where I was a hired gun to make a library title for a multinational, vertically integrated media conglomerate, I had a different view of how writers and directors needed to work."

"I didn't like the script, but I love 'Alien,' so yeah, I signed up, naive, and went off to Pinewood [Studios] to be sodomized ritualistically for two years."

"There's no one problem with a $65-million, f***ed-up, first-time filmmaker. Look, I made a crucial error. I listened to the people who were paying for the movie, and they said, the way to go about this is not to work with your friends. The way to go about this is to work with people who have done this time and time and time again. And basically, that translates into: meet a lot of people who are going to resent you and your age and are not going to want to take instruction from you, and allow them to tell you what you can't do."

"Once I had gone to Pinewood for two years and had been through a situation where I was a hired gun to make a library title for a multinational, vertically integrated media conglomerate, I had a different view of how writers and directors needed to work. I kind of resented his anti-auteurist take. I felt that what the script really needed to talk about was the notion of enforced collaboration: You may not like the fact that you’re going to be beholden to so many different disciplines and skill sets in the making of a movie, but if you’re not acknowledging it, you’re missing the side of the barn. A script is the egg, and it needs a donor to create the cellular split that moves it into the realm of something playable in three dimensions and recordable in two dimensions and presentable to other people."

"So out went my carefully constructed motivations for all the principal prisoners, my preserving the life of Newt (her killing in the film is an obscenity) and much else. Embittered by this experience, that's why I turned down Alien Resurrection."

"Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), the unluckiest woman in the universe, is once again in a bind. She`s been awakened prematurely from her hypersleep by the crash of her spaceship on Fiorina 161, a distant prison work colony. It seems she isn`t the only survivor her crash, however; when the residents of the colony begin turning up shredded, and it`s up to Ripley to play the role of aliencatcher again. Alien3 tries to get back to what made Alien great-suspense, dimly lighted glimpses of the alien, and the suggestion, rather than exposition, of gore-but is saddled by one overpowering burden. How much can you so with this storyline? The alien shows up, it kills people, Ripley hunts it down, end of movie. By the third time around, it`s just worn out. Great performances from an interesting cast (including Charles S. Dutton of TV`s Roc), convincing industrial sets, and visually exciting Alien effects can`t salvage Alien3 from its all-encompassing tiredness. (STAR) 1/2"

"After directing a string of popular music videos, David Fincher was commissioned by Fox to direct Alien³ but left the project before editing commenced because of studio interference. If Alien³ is not his film, neither is the studio’s “extended cut” (Fincher didn’t want anything to do with the project). Unlike the director’s cut of Aliens, this extended edition of Fincher’s first film does more harm than good. Impregnated with an alien queen, Ripley lands on Fury 161, a prison planet occupied by horny religious criminals. The scenario is the same (more doubting Thomases and labyrinthine tunnels) except the returns are less exciting or scary; an amalgam of power shots (some reminiscent of Fincher’s clips for Aerosmith’s “Janie’s Got a Gun” and Madonna’s “Express Yourself”), the film’s overall effect is noticeably suffocating. Charles Dutton’s preacher man, Dillon, conducts an impromptu funeral service and the extended cut intercuts his prayer with scenes from Fincher’s intended alien-birthing sequence (from canine to bovine). This creepy interplay brings to mind the final moments of Apocalypse Now but doesn’t really spill over into the rest of the film. Not only is Ripley personality-free (is the character jaded or is Weaver simply bored?), so is the alien. If the material appears to strain to offer the new alien attacks a ridiculous religious context, that’s because the filmmakers never really evoke a sense of godlessness on the planet community to begin with."

"No sooner is Ripley speeding away from the napalm-laced carnage of Aliens than she finds herself crashing into a prison planet full of Brits. Relentlessly dark and filled with unsympathetic characters, Alien³ is not loved by many. But director David Fincher seems lucky to have come away with any kind of movie, as is revealed on a surprisingly frank DVD from Fox. As with the other DVDs in the Alien Quadrilogy, you can choose between watching the theatrical release or a new special edition. David Fincher declined to put together another cut of the film, but has approved this new half-hour longer version. All the subplots removed by the studio are now here to see, including a different dogburster scene, the convicts capturing the alien and a slightly different ending. Trouble is, the production was in such disarray that this new longer take on the movie doesn't sort much out from the incoherent nature of the original."

"David Fincher has not done any new interviews for this release so other people fill in, including director Renny Harlin - who pops up in the Development featurette. Fans will be interested to hear what Harlin's vision was, the story options discussed, and why he was not keen on setting it in a prison. Still, that's nothing compared to the original idea of writer Vincent Ward to set the movie on a wooden planet populated by monks. Thanks to extensive image galleries and an in-depth featurette, you can explore what was certainly a bold, if somewhat strange, idea. While there is undoubtedly some fascinating gossip still to be told about the fraught production of Alien³, at least Fox has allowed frank comments to be aired. There's a great shot of an alien (man in suit) sitting with his head in his hands that seems to sum up the whole experience. Major changes to the script were regular occurrences, no end ever seemed in sight on the shoot, and it was finally shut down and taken to LA so the studio could try and fathom something out of it all."

"One idea would have seen Xenomorphs arriving on Earth and destroying New York City, which is as close to the film the teaser suggests as any of the unmade Alien 3 scripts. Between 1987 and 1990, more than ten screenwriters had a bash at scripting the film, including William Gibson, Eric Red, David Twohy, and John Fasano. Drafts differed on whether Weaver’s Ripley would be in the script or not, whether Biehn’s Hicks had a bigger role or not, and whether the film would be about a “Marxist space empire”, a prison planet, or a satellite full of monks. The latter idea came from director Vincent Ward, who was signed up to direct the project. However, Fox executives didn’t like his vision for Alien 3, with Jon Landau dismissing it as “more on the artsy-fartsy side than the big commercial one” than the studio wanted. In the end, Giler and Hill wound up writing the screenplay, inspired by various bits and bobs from different incarnations, with co-credit going to script doctor Larry Ferguson."

"Once again, Weaver is shocked to discover the alien loose—this time in a desolate prison colony. You'd think she'd get over those surprises by now. Once again, she has to rally a group of macho men (rapists and murderers) to take on the beast; and, once again, it doesn't take a college degree to guess who'll be left facing whom."

"Ironically, "Alien " is not a bad movie. In fact—here's the rub—it's too interesting to make an exciting summer flick. At the core is a promising tale written by Australian filmmaker Vincent Ward, who made "The Navigator: An Odyssey Across Time," an often brilliant, time-hopping saga about medieval men journeying into the 20th century. His "Alien " is woven out of the same classic sci-fi yarn. The prison is a Middle Ages-type institution, with gaunt-faced, monastic characters in robes walking through dark, twisting corridors bearing candles."

"This movie—peopled with English performers, including Brian Glover, Ralph Brown, Paul McGann and Danny Webb—seems more like a "Star Trek" episode than an "Alien" picture. It's also hard to get a handle on how big or small the alien is, the usual sign of low-budget horror filmmaking. Sometimes it seems small as a child; other times, it looms eight feet high."

"First of all, it is difficult to empathize with (or care about) any of the characters in this film. And there is very little in the way of character development, that might help this problem. I've heard that this film was heavily cut before its theatrical release, and that there is a much longer director's cut, which is ultimately more satisfying in this respect. I wish Fox had used it here. Another problem with Alien 3 is its poorly conceived and written script. To start off with, we're asked to accept the idea that the alien queen managed to lay a few eggs unnoticed in the scant minutes she was on board the Sulaco. Then we're asked to believe that a single face hugger could cause enough damage to require evacuating the crew in an EEV, and then we're asked to believe that the EEV just happened to eject near a populated (albeit sparsely) planet. To make matters worse, all of the survivors of the previous film are immediately killed off (problems with budget or contract negotiations perhaps?), including Ripley's surrogate daughter Newt. Which leads to the script's other major problem - it's just a major downer. After the sheer horror of the first film, and particularly coming off of the edge-of-your-seat thrills of Aliens, this film seemed far too subdued and somewhat less than frightening. It just wasn't at all what I was expecting. Which is not to say that the film doesn't have some merits. I did find the quasi-religious undertones of Fury's inhabitants compelling. And the concept of the alien creature taking on some of the physical characteristics of its host (in this case a dog) was intriguing. But again, the film stumbles over another major shortcoming, which is that the creature effects are just, well... bad. More often than not, the creature effects were accomplished by using a marionette-type puppet that was shot in front of a blue screen, and optically added to each shot with the actors. In other cases, its just a mechanical prop... and it shows. The first time we ever see the creature (in chapter 9), it just looks silly. The best thing about the creatures in the first two films, was that we barely saw them. They were far more frightening. Here we're seeing way too much."

"Alien 3" was already chasing a release date when Fincher boarded the project, taking over from outgoing director Renny Harlin rather late in the process, so he only had five weeks of prep time. According to Film Stories, the movie was originally scheduled to have a 12-month turnaround, from the start of production in January 1991 to a theatrical release in December 1991. The Christmas deadline was soon extended, but even before the story was finalized, an infamously misleading teaser trailer announced, "In 1992, we will discover, on Earth, everyone can hear you scream." As anyone who's seen the film can attest, Earth was not, in fact, the setting. They began shooting without a completed script, partly because "Alien 3" had already undergone numerous rewrites and no one could seem to get it perfectly tailored. William Gibson, author of the Hugo and Nebula award-winning cyberpunk novel, "Neuromancer" (which influenced "The Matrix"), wrote a draft that kept Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), the Oscar-nominated heroine of the first two movies, in a coma. It instead centered on the space Marine, Hicks, and the robot, Bishop, played by Michael Biehn and Lance Henriksen, whose characters were left alive at the end of "Aliens."

"Eric Red ("The Hitcher," "Near Dark") whipped up the next version of the script for "Alien 3" in under two months, and it was set on Earth (hence that teaser about screaming there), but it was quickly discarded. Then there was David Twohy's prison planet version, developed alongside Vincent Ward and John Fasano's legendary wooden planet version, where the setting was a kind of monastery in space. Producers David Giler and Walter Hill and script doctor Larry Ferguson eventually fused elements of these last two versions into what became the working draft of "Alien 3," with Fincher and his own uncredited script doctor, Rex Pickett, doing further rewrites. All told, there were reportedly ten different writers on the film. While other classic movies like "The Wizard of Oz" have juggled that many writers in the past, "Alien 3" could not be termed anything other than a cult classic at best."

"The third movie in the Alien series was a hot ticket at the time. The Bond films were halted and locked in a bitter legal battle that eventually took six years to resolve. So Alien had suddenly become one of the world's biggest franchises and was camped, almost insultingly to the impotent, sleeping Bond, on Pinewood's giant 007 Stage."

"It's left to Paul McGann, playing Golic, to spell things out in a way that only McGann can. I've met him a few times by this point, going back to the 1986 production of The Monocled Mutineer, a two-part TV series on First World War deserter Percy Toplis. He's established himself, at 31, as one of our biggest stars, with Withnail And I and a sharp TV series called Dealers. He's a Scouse jack-the-lad who calls a spade a shovel – particularly when it's used for shovelling manure. "There are more producers around here than actors," he tells me. "I wondered who the hell they were at first. It's like having an extra fucking audience for every scene. You can't get a clear picture of who wants what, it gets changed as we go along. I don't know what they're doing here. Rewriting some of the script? Getting in the way? Fuck knows. But movies are in a mess. I am in the only fucking film which is shooting in England. The situation is getting dire with this recession going on. We're going to be down to one cameraman and one sound crew in this country if we aren't careful.""

"Putting it into the mildest terms, Alien 3 was an omnishambles. Armed with a trailer and a release date, 20th Century Fox didn’t know what the movie was going to be about, but knew it was going to come out in 1992. A film that had already seen several writers and directors come and go, with just as many concepts making their way through the revolving door, the resulting story came partially from re-writes done by David Fincher himself. In the end, no one would know just how the experience would turn out, as a pretty impressive, yet misleading, teaser promised quite a bit: Through his trial by fire on Alien 3, David Fincher emerged as a directorial phoenix, and went on to make Seven as his next feature film. Understanding that writers and directors literally need to be on the same page, the lessons learned from his own career and also from reading his father’s script, Fincher understood that no person is an island in the movie business. If only the Fox executives that trashed his version of Alien 3 could have learned that back in 1991, maybe we'd be talking about the "absolute classic" Alien 3, rather than the very expertly crafted euphemism that David Fincher used to describe what was essentially, a living hell."

"On the face of it, Alien 3 should have been a pretty great movie. The first two films from the franchise were spectacular; it had a director at its helm that would go on to be one of the best of the modern era, it was written by the legendary Walter Hill, and it was packed to the brim with stellar acting talent. But in the end it was just downright turgid."

"If it hadn’t been for the American science fiction horror movie Alien 3, one of the brightest lights in Hong Kong’s scientific community could well have spent his days staring into a microscope and performing autopsies. “The night before the [job] interview, I went to see Alien 3 – which opens with a postmortem. I thought, ‘Do I really want to start my days with a postmortem?’ So, in the end I became a chemical pathologist – we look at blood rather than dead bodies,” says Professor Dennis Lo Yuk-ming, the Li Ka Shing professor of medicine at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). It seems, then, that we have American film director David Fincher to thank in part for Lo’s many contributions to health – from the development of non-invasive prenatal testing to new screening tests for cancer."

"Alien 3 has a certain reputation with different groups—to David Fincher, it was a nightmare first production for the enfant terrible director, one he has since refused to be associated with because the studio will not restore his child autopsy scene, which even the biggest Gone Girl fan in the world would admit is a bit much. For movie dorks, it’s a movie you like to argue is better than whoever is tolerating listening to you remembers. For most people, it’s the one where Sigourney Weaver got head shaved. For losers, it’s the one where Newt dies off-camera and they get angry. I remember Alien 3 as the first rated R movie that had a very large toy push, meaning I was being sold ephemera related to a product I technically wasn’t supposed to see. For cyberpunk novelist William Gibson, Alien 3 was how he got his WGA card. He says as much in this books—an adaptation of a screenplay that wasn't used—introduction. Gibson’s association with Hollywood has largely been uninteresting. Adaptations of his work that have made it to screen amount to 90s-doing-80s footnotes like Johnny Mnemonic and New Rose Hotel (though he allegedly wrote most of Kathryn Bigelow’s excellent Strange Days without screen credit). For Alien 3, Gibson turned two drafts over to Walter Hill and David Giler that had little to do with the final product. That's a good thing. Gibson’s script has long been available on the internet. It’s not enough of an oddity to be interesting. It’s okay. The comic is ultimately okay too."

"Alien 3 was a very silly movie to work on. It had already been going for four months by the time I started, and they hadn’t even begun thinking about making the Alien. The script wasn’t even finished by that point, and I don’t think there was a director either. All there was was a bunch of models of the characters that were going to die – the Alien didn’t get made until five or six months later. In fact, the Alien was the last thing to be considered out of all the effects. On my first day, they weren’t even sure what the Alien was going to look like – there were all kinds of different drafts of the script, and at one point it was a glass planet so they were talking about having a glass Alien, and then it was going to be all wood and they were talking about having a wooden Alien because it was supposed to adapt to its surroundings. They had done the facehugger which you see at the beginning of the film, because that was the thing they were least worried about. There was another super-facehugger, a clear one, that took us about three months to make, on and off; that was kicked out just after we’d finished it. We also built a huge ox that the Alien burst out of, but David Fincher didn’t like that. Eventually they went back to America and reshot it anyway; now it’s a dog. It was a colossal waste of money."

"The original Alien had these kind of pipes sticking out the back that took it away from just being a man in a rubber suit, but creature designers Alec (Gillis) and Tom (Woodruff) hated them, so we left them off. The very first day we took our Alien on set, Fincher said, "Where are the stove pipe things on the back?", so he had us make some foam ones and glue them on. We made them overnight and they were strapped on with string – this is on a multi-million dollar movie – and when we got on set with them he just said, ‘Take them off’. It was extraordinary."

"The way it worked was that we’d start making something for the film and it would be written out, so we’d stop making it. Then it would be back in again, so we’d start making it again – the same thing happened with the sets. [Special effects supervisor] George Gibbs reportedly built this huge set for the ending of the film on the 007 stage at Pinewood, and they changed one aspect of the script so he had to tear it down and start again. We also spent a huge amount of time and money making an Alien suit and some other guys did the same, making an alien puppet, and the two things just don’t match up, they don’t look like the same Alien. Again, that was because it got to the stage where it just had to be done, so consequently they don’t look like each other in the final movie."

"I suppose you can’t really blame him, you’ve got to blame the people who want to make a film without having a script to start with. You’ve got to blame Sigourney Weaver to a certain extent, too, for having too many fingers in the pie. From what I was told she had a lot to do with the script: she was the one who didn’t want there to be any guns in the film, she was the one who decided to have the love scene. There was no reason for it other than she decided Ripley had to get into bed with someone."

"IT'S apparent during the opening credits of "Alien 3" that this is going to be a movie for the generation that finds the computer friendly. Those of us born before 1975 can't possibly comprehend all of the introductory information that goes clicking across the on-screen television monitor, spelling out time, place and imminent crises with the relentlessness of a speed-reading exam. The information is also so understated that only someone who speaks computer language realizes that life, as we know it, is about to crash. Yet again. What the computer generation knows, and the rest of us don't, is that this information isn't really necessary or especially relevant. Logic is out. Visceral sensation is the point. Unlike "Alien" (1979) and "Aliens" (1986), the new film, directed by David Fincher, puts no great emphasis on futuristic technology. "Alien 3" belongs to that branch of fantasy comics, best exemplified by the "Road Warrior" movies, in which the iron and space ages meet for dizzy results."

"Fiorina 161 is a planet, but we never see much of it. Clearly, though, it is a place where the sun doesn't shine. The outside temperature hovers in the neighborhood of 40 degrees below zero. Formerly a maximum-security prison, Fiorina 161 has been decommissioned and is now home to 25 of society's worst rejects, former prisoners who have elected to remain on the planet to live lives of edgy atonement. They are members of what is called "an apocalyptic millennarian fundamentalist Christian sect." Whatever they are, they obey their own commandments."

"The production is dourly handsome, with great, chunky, dimly lighted sets that suggest dungeons out of the Middle Ages. They are actually so dark that sometimes it's not easy to know who is doing what to whom. Blood looks black, which may not be all bad. The alien is seen in glimpses, but it's seen often enough so that it seems to be nothing worse than a large, dark sticky lobster claw with a terrible disposition."

"Mr. Fincher, who has directed music videos for Madonna, Billy Idol and others, doesn't waste time trying to make things plausible. His direction of "Alien 3" suggests that he grew up reading instructions on how to program VCR's. He knows that most explanations, like directions, are incomprehensible, and thus irrelevant."

"David Fincher’s Alien³ may be the only film ever made to peak with its logo. As the 20th Century Fox fanfare crescendos over the studio’s familiar logo, the music holds on the minor chord before the usual last note, replacing jubilant bombast with a dissonant groan of strings. The alteration produces an immediate sense of discomfort and unease, setting the tone for something ominous and fearsome. It’s an ingenious shot across the bow from Fincher, ushering in a feature career dotted with immaculately ordered, carefully scored works of blockbuster entertainment that veered from audience-pleasing major keys to their grim underbellies. The perversion of the Fox theme epitomizes a succinct grasp of horror that only occasionally surfaces in the film proper."

"Too often, Alien³ shows its seams, whether in its thematic arc or the design of the xenomorph, and at not even two hours it still feels weighed down by unnecessary exposition and padded suspense scenes. But blame for much of this cannot fall at one person’s feet, as the film was notoriously the product of years of production hell that saw the studio soliciting wildly different drafts from writers including (but not limited to) cyberpunk author William Gibson, writer-director Vincent Ward, and producer/filmmaker Walter Hill. Eventually, ideas from each version found their way into a Frankenstein monster of a shooting script, one further plagued by endless on-set rewrites that left Fincher so exasperated that even Fox’s officially released behind-the-scenes footage shows the director railing against the pressures of the studio’s poorly planned project."

"Considerable criticism, from both audiences and former cast and crew members on the series, was directed at the decision to callously kill off Lt. Hicks (Michael Biehn) and Newt (Carrie Henn) in the opening credits. Regarded on its own terms, though, their deaths fit well within the series’s bleak tone. Structured in staccato clips inserted between the credits, the scene shows off the sense of visual economy that Fincher picked up while making music videos. It plays out in ominous glimpses of a hatched alien egg, a facehugger stretching toward Newt’s cryogenic pod, a crack of glass, and seepage of blood into cloth. In seconds, all of the good feelings left over from the end of Aliens are brutally cast aside, robbing Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) of the ad hoc family she’d only just rallied together. It’s a promisingly nihilistic beginning, and Ripley’s dismay upon learning of her friends’ deaths is compounded by the revelation that she’s crash-landed near a Weyland-Yutani prison, a refinery work camp whose inmates are all men with double-Y chromosomes, a defect that enhances their aggression and leaves them more likely to rape and murder. The early scenes, of Ripley interacting with men actively afraid of her presence and what it might encourage in them, mark the film’s thematic high point, balancing Ripley’s fears of a possible xenomorph outbreak against the equally immediate worries about the rippling aftershocks of her presence on the inmates’ vows of celibacy, made in a mass religious conversion among the prisoners that occurred long before she arrived. Frequently, the men use their religion as pretense for distrust of the woman, if not outright abuse. Ripley has always had to deal with unfriendly elements, but they usually came isolated in the form of company men (or androids); here is an entire facility’s worth of people with an innate antagonism against her, one that stymies her attempts to lead them against the alien threat that breaks out shortly after her arrival."

"In what’s become something of a recurring theme of the franchise since its first two entries, Alien³ arguably peaks before the alien itself takes center stage. The looming, Brutalist-style prison setting evinces a sense of decay well before the camera explores its dripping, darkened corridors and vents. The private-owned prison, more work camp than carceral institution, has a wide-open feel that paradoxically enhances the feeling of being trapped, a testament to the assurances of its builders that those who worked there would know they had nowhere, ultimately, to run. When the alien finally does begin to roam the prison, however, the environment too quickly loses its character, its labyrinthine structure and dangerous areas (a ventilation shaft with a giant fan telegraphs a gruesome human purée well before it happens) betray their usefulness to the story. No longer does the facility have its own story to tell; instead, it looks as if it were built around the alien sequences."

"The alien itself is a disappointment, as the filmmakers’ intriguing idea of having a xenomorph infect and thus absorb the DNA of a quadrupedal animal is squandered on a garish puppet creation that moves in jerky, dissonant steps that completely divorce the creature from the environment. This robs the alien of even a hint of menace, barring a few close-ups that keep the image limited to the xenomorph’s face and teeth. Prefiguring an issue that’s plagued all future Alien movies in the CGI era, the depiction of the xenomorph so casually in full view saps much of the suspense that the first two films wrung out of keeping the monsters hidden or partially glimpsed. Once its definitions are set, the creature loses its amorphous, undefinable shape and size, limiting it to something comprehensible. The lackluster alien undeniably drags down the proceedings, but the film maintains a consistently bleak atmosphere that elevates it above its sloppy sequel and the more self-conscious philosophy of recent prequels by staying truest to the simple hopelessness of the original film."

"Even within arguably the most nihilistic franchise in cinematic history, Alien³ stands out for its consistent tone of despair. It presents a reality where even machines feel fear and agony, as when Ripley reactivates the heavily damaged Bishop droid (Lance Henriksen), its tattered face struggling to focus a sagging, milky eye as it relays Weyland-Yutani’s continued, destructive interest in capturing and weaponizing the xenomorph. Having warned Ripley, he then asks her to be shut off, saying he feels pain in his current form and fears being rebuilt into something less special and perfect than what he was. Ripley’s death drive, always present but overwhelmed when she discovers an alien embryo inside of her, is so intense that it blunts the confrontational behavior of the men around her, even Dillon (Charles S. Dutton), the prison’s religious leader whose initial hostility toward Ripley fades when he recognizes the purity of her martyrdom. The deflating alien antics of the film’s back half sap some of the power from Ripley’s ultimate sacrifice, but her final act, taking pro-choice symbolism to self-immolating extremes, is one of the most powerful images in the entire Alien franchise."

"For all its inherent structural problems, Alien³ remains a worthy intended conclusion to the series, finding its true resolution in Ripley’s resolve to break the endless cycle of her torment. Initially panned upon release, Fincher’s film now has its supporters thanks in part to a 2003 recut that restored footage that’s even more evocative of the filmmaker’s overriding sense of dejected gloom. Yet its most lasting impact may be what it said about the direction that blockbusters would go, perpetuating the franchise’s close bonds to the state of tent-pole releases to their respective eras."

"Alien enjoyed [[w:New Hollywood|New Hollywood freedoms in its use of avant-garde production design and its deliberate, character-driven storytelling while its first sequel operated along the faster, more upbeat and cathartic tone of the mid-1980s. This film, the product of a hastily reconciliation of incomplete ideas, points to a future in which blockbusters would be crafted as if on an assembly line, no longer the product of one vision or even that of a group but of a conglomeration running on autopilot. As producer Jon Landau later said of the film, “We set out to make a release date, not a movie.”"

"Q: Thinking back over your career, you were attached to over Alien 3 for over a year. Can you tell us what happened there?"

"The movie opens with spooky, effective opening credits that completely rip apart everything you loved about Aliens. If Alien is mysterious, and Aliens is hectic, Alien 3 promises at the opening to be depressing as hell, which happens when you kill an innocent little girl in the opening five minutes. Combined with the death of Hicks, Alien 3 destroys the surrogate family unit from Aliens, and now Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) is the sole survivor of a tragic crash and the only woman on a desolate planet populated by murderers and rapists. Except the prisoners have found religion, and this is where you can see Alien 3‘s split personality emerge. The religious angle from Ward’s script has been retained, but now it’s been shoehorned into a story where a skeleton crew of prisoners (the film has a weak explanation of why a huge facility would be kept running by and for about twenty people) now have Christianity for some reason. The script then tries to dance with this aspect, but it only remains an interesting idea even though there was the possibility that this idea could have been developed on its own merits despite being outside of Ward’s original intent. These men have been able to turn their lives over to God, but they’ve also been devoid of temptation. There’s not much on the planet Fiorina “Fury” 161 worth wanting, and then Ripley comes into their lives, which begs the question of the value of faith without temptation. But then the movie’s ugliness reemerges when some of the prisoners try to rape Ripley. Then Charles S. Dutton rescues Ripley, beats the crap out of her attackers, and the attempted rape is never referenced again."

"To the film’s credit, Alien 3 consciously doesn’t want to be a retread of the first two movies. The xenomorph doesn’t even carry human DNA, and instead comes from a dog, which turns it into a quadruped, even though that ultimately doesn’t make much of a difference. To quote Warden Andrews (Brian Glover), who has my favorite description of the xenomorph ever: “It kills on sight, and is generally unpleasant.” It’s also kind of background in a movie that can’t really be anything because it was torn apart at its fundamental level. They had sets with no story, characters without purpose, and discarded plotlines galore right down to seemingly insignificant scenes like the xenomorph coming out of an ox rather than a dog. The whole thing is a mess, and it’s an infuriating mess not only because it’s stifling Fincher’s talent, but because Alien 3 is littered with potential. It’s an atmospheric film, but it’s not worth breathing the air. Even Ripley is less interesting this time around even though there are plenty of places they could have gone with her character."

"When it came time for Ripley to jump, Fincher wanted to stick by the religious angle that had been so thoroughly reduced throughout the picture: “I said ‘whatever happens she has to be in peace at the end.’ It has to be a sigh rather than gritting teeth and sweat. So we talked about it and went over and shot this blue-screen element. We were shooting that shot four days before the film opened, a completely ridiculous mess. I don’t know if it works.” And it ends with gritted teeth and sweat. I have mixed feelings about the ending. Had Fincher been able to get his vision through, then perhaps that ending would work, but as it stands in the theatrical cut, the moment fits in with the ugliness that permeates the rest of this movie. A peaceful sigh doesn’t fit with a grey-brown palette, attempted rape, and a dead little girl getting her ribcage cracked open. Ripley and the alien had become one, and it cursed her until her final moment."

"That's it: the trilogy is now complete - uneven, incoherent, often unpalatable, but still one of the great achievements in popular cinema. The last part is the worst, no question, but it isn't your average sequel; for these films contained many sequels within themselves, the same old story flicking round time and again, refusing to give up for dead. As each movie came and went, the heart of darkness kept pumping away: The horror. The horror. The horror. This time it starts with the credits. Slipped in between the names we see slashes of wild movement, the now familiar elements of evil: acid, fire, a hiss like a hot iron, something clamping on to Ripley's face. By the time we get to the name of the director, David Fincher, we know what he does best. He cuts fast and surely, like a surgeon in a hurry, delving towards the warm root of the problem. No wonder he shoots an autopsy so well. I'd heard about the scene and was dreading it, but there's nothing to look away from, unless you count the little two-handed saw shaped like a parsley chopper. Somehow it doesn't look sick; blood coils silently into a dish, no more than that, leaving our imaginations to do their worst. And their worst is their best, to judge by the nervous wailing that rose from the auditorium, dotted with giggles and gulps."

"Alien3 is hopeless, scarfed in a rusty gloom that's light years away from the sheen of a good blockbuster; no wonder that American audiences soon learnt to stay away. It reads like a suicide note, a pulp version of Celine: 'I'd rather be nothing', or 'I need you to kill me . . . I'm dead anyway'. All three movies have been dank and dour, of course, and that is their triumph. After years of brushed chrome and spacious command rooms, along came Alien, and soon the lights were going out all over space. It was the first film to suggest that a spaceship was just that, a ship in space - a wet, primitive hulk, cavernous yet cramped, with all manner of malevolence shivering behind its timbers. The new film keeps up the claustrophobia but turns it inwards, too, putting the squeeze on the souls of the inhabitants and wringing the fight out of them."

"The alien is all she has, and all she has to kill; Holmes is nothing without Moriarty, Achilles needs Hector more than he ever did Patroclus. Their whole life resides in these few hours of remorseless wrath. What of soul is left, I wonder, when the killing has to stop? These are grand ways of looking at it, but then the Alien trilogy is grand. Not pretentious and talkative, just laden with images of doom and sexual control, the unstoppably fecund as well as the unbearably blocked. The final part doesn't let us down here, with all its writhing corridors and Satanic furnaces, the odd tongue of flame rasping against Piranesi girders and whale-grey walls. It suffers from poor supporting performances, and a plot that splutters instead of pushing on; but when the chase is on, all is forgiven. Fincher brings on the Steadicam and whips it through tunnels at alien pace, flipping upside down and bulging the walls with wide-angle lenses. You can't tell what the hell is happening, but you know it's hell all right. I can't give the ending away, but I wish I could. Everything is wrapped up a treat - Fincher can't really tell a tale, but he can wheel on the awe with the best of them. I think he must have been watching Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc, which I saw again last month. Both films are graced by actresses with shaven heads and staring eyes, at the furthest reach of their powers; both pound along towards fire and sacrifice, and edit our nerves into thin strips. Dreyer made a masterpiece, Fincher made a mess; but he rounds out a modern myth, and in so doing ensures that, like Lieutenant Ripley, we will never sleep easy again."

"The shape-shifting "Alien" trilogy reverts back to the form of the first film in this third close encounter—a muddled effort that offers little more than visual splendor to recommend it. Although certain to open strong thanks to the must-see faithful, look for a quick fade beyond the first couple of box office orbits as word-of-mouth and the dour tone pull "Alien3" down to earth, making it a likely also-ran among this summer's blockbusters. In interviews, star/co-producer Sigourney Weaver has spoken of the producers’ conflict with Fox over crafting a more cerebral film rather than an outright thriller, and that indecisiveness shows."

"In any event, Ripley (Weaver) finds herself stranded on a planet with a bunch of converted convicts who’ve embraced religion, led by Charles S. Dutton of TV’s “Roc.” The colony’s kindly doctor (Charles Dance), with whom Ripley shares another kind of close encounter, suspects something is wrong, but throughout the early part of the story Ripley won’t share her suspicions with him that an Alien has landed on the planet. That reticence is only one of numerous inexplicable aspects of “Alien3,” which again relies on the same faceless “company” as an unseen heavy while toying furtively with the sexual politics of a lone woman trapped on a planet of murderers, rapists and miscreants. In that vein, a significant problem stems from the fact that aside from Ripley and perhaps Dutton and Dance, none of these characters has a defined persona, making the bald convicts all virtually indistinguishable Alien-bait."

"Music video director David Fincher doesn’t reveal much finesse with actors in his bigscreen debut, and the screenplay (by producers Walter Hill and David Giler, plus Larry Ferguson) proves fraught with lapses in reason, motivation and logic. That leaves Weaver to carry the load, but her character is so encumbered with baggage that she can’t really showcase the qualities–particularly evident in the second film–that made the audience empathize with her. Much has been made of her shaved head, but Weaver has more importantly been shorn here, for the most part, of the epic strength that made Ripley such a striking female protagonist in “Aliens.” As for the much-discussed re-shoot of the movie’s ending, one can only judge what’s on screen, which shows that the screams of heavy-handed religious symbolism can be heard even in space."

"The Alien itself remains a technical marvel in its three repugnant forms, more a tribute to H.R. Giger’s original design than anything else. Fincher, turning to musicvideo editing techniques, resorts to rapid-fire glimpses of the beast, relying on a variety of methods ranging from rotoscoping to puppetry. Still, we’ve seen those dripping jaws before, and even impressive shots of the creature rapidly scurrying across ceilings don’t justify the fare to be a passenger on this latest voyage. Other technical aspects are also top of the line, although the production design proves so relentlessly bleak that there’s no relief from the film’s oppressiveness, even when there are lapses in the tension. While the look is an accomplishment, this isn’t the sort of environment that tag-along filmgoers–or even those who bring them–will relish visiting."

"By all accounts, Alien 3 should have been one of the most successful sequels of all time. At the close of 1986’s rip-roaring Aliens, Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley, having defeated her interplanetary acid-blooded adversaries, retreated into a space pod bound for Earth accompanied by her compatriots Bishop, Hicks and Newt. All four characters were (seemingly) put into a very safe cyber-sleep. The next instalment, one assumed, would pick up shortly thereafter – with the fabulous foursome awake, and in fresh surroundings, pitted against a new horde of hot-tempered Xenomorph menace. Unfortunately, it was not to be. With ex-music video helmer David Fincher opting to take the franchise in an unexpectedly dark and dingy direction – with a plot detailing Ripley’s struggle for survival on an inauspicious all-male prison-world – 1992’s would-be summer blockbuster, Alien 3, was not what anyone expected. Highlighting just one solitary space-beast, and a group of gun-less victims, the often-meandering movie could not be further removed from the “gung-ho”, blood-pumping bullet ballet that propelled its immediate predecessor into a pop culture phenomenon."

"Initially, the plan was to concentrate on Michael Biehn’s Hicks character – with Weaver taking a back seat to the action. When this idea was scrapped, later screenplays were commissioned – including an aliens-on-Earth option courtesy of Eric Red (who had penned the popular vampire potboiler Near Dark) to the now-legendary wooden-monastery planet take instigated by Vincent Ward (who obtained a credit for “story” on the final flick). Finally, though, original Alien creators Walter Hill and David Giler were brought in, alongside Highlander scripter Larry Ferguson, to form the film that became Alien 3 – although Fincher and his own pen-man, Rex Pickett, would do a further rejig as shooting was about to commence."

"For some, part of the interest of the Alien franchise comes from the underlying elements of maternal malevolence and gender-subversion, from a male giving birth to the penetrative-parent alien. You can see Alien 3 as extending these intriguing elements, with Ripley forced to dominate a group of males, and in the process masculinising herself (witness that shaved head), before dying in the midst of giving birth to a beast that she, understandably, does not want to introduce to the world. According to Hill, though, giving too much Freudian thought to this tale of torrid parentage is best approached with caution. “You would really need to explain some of that stuff to me,” he chuckles. “Listen, I once made a wise ass remark. It was about 25 years ago and I have never had so many letters in my life. I said something about psychoanalysis – basically that it is astrology for intellectuals, and I got about 200 letters scolding me. Everybody has to make a living, though, and some people have obviously decided they can make living out of writing that stuff on the Alien films. But that is not the business I am in. All I know is that we just wanted to make good scary movies. Maybe some stuff got snuck in there without me realising – who knows?”"

"“I was, and am, surprised that the franchise kept going,” admits Hill. “When we did Alien all we wanted to do was to bring a more sophisticated style of filmmaking to what had always been regarded as a B-picture. I always thought that if you did that you would have a commercially rewarding endeavour. But who knew that approach would lead to the Hollywood you have now, where more serious dramatic films have been squeezed out by that B-movie approach. The fact that our monster movie contributed to the loss of a wider approach to filmmaking is, in a way, quite sad.” Such a pessimistic statement seems entirely fitting for a feature on sci-fi’s most famous feelbad follow-up. Even so, we would wager that few would argue that, in the grand scale of studio sequels, it’s unlikely that anyone will ever again dare to destroy a potent celluloid property like David Fincher did with Alien 3. For that reason alone, we can but admire the decisions – however mad – that led to this most unlikely of threequels."

"The end product was set on an all-male prison planet, with inmates and jailers instead of monks, but it retained a bit of Ward's flavor. Everyone was bald thanks to a lice infestation. The sweaty domes, the faintly monastic single-sex casting of the prisoners, the fearful and hateful descriptions of women, and the invocation of religious language and imagery gave the whole thing a Biblical or medieval feel—and as Ripley overcame her depression and near-paralysis over losing her surrogate daughter Newt and maybe-boyfriend Cpl. Hicks in the crash, her possessed, crusading demeanor had echoes of Saint Joan. As Tafoya points out in his video essay, the direction, photography, writing and production design of "Alien 3" reference a tradition of religious art and tales of spiritual torment, even filming the shorn heroine so that she resembles Falconetti, the star of Carl Theodor Dreyer's silent classic "The Passion of Joan of Arc."

"The sight of a woman testing herself against macho environments was always a fixture in the "Alien" series, with its threats of rape and impregnation, and its mostly male casts swaggering through landscapes of industrial or military machinery, cursing and smoking and muttering about "the bonus situation" or teasing each other as "ladies." But this aspect becomes more pointed, and more poignant, in "Alien 3." The inmates' misogyny is built right into the storyline. The religious elements are teased out through prayers and talk of devils and deliverance via Ripley's Joan of Arc figure. And much of the picture is—when you boil it down to its essence—about a woman who was sleep-raped by a monster trying to abort the spawn before company executives that masterminded the crime can cut it out of her, and use it as the seed for a biological weapons program."

"Because the third film revolves almost entirely around Ripley's desire to protect the integrity of her body—specifically her womb—"Alien 3" feels more purely feminist than the previous two movies, for all their innovative images of a badass heroine fighting bugs whose bodies fused male and female genitalia into a Freudian nightmare. In the first movie, she's fighting to save her crew. In the second, she's fighting to save a little girl, and in so doing, embracing her own latent potential for motherhood; the climactic action scene even brings her face-to-face with another mother, the alien queen, in an egg chamber. These are all engaging, relatable motivations, but they're culturally conservative, because they play on the traditional image of woman as potential victim or maternal protector. In "Alien 3," Ripley is fighting for Ripley, period. She has to. Nobody else will fight for her. She's been betrayed and abandoned by everyone and everything she ever valued. She's shattered by grief, staring numbly out at a universe that barely seems worth saving. She has allies but no protectors—nor, it seems, does she expect any, not after enduring so much suffering en route to this hellhole. The film's unexpectedly powerful final sequence flips the ending of Cameron's "Aliens" on its head. The second movie closed with an image of Ripley in hypersleep alongside her "daughter" Newt, with her potential mate Hicks slumbering nearby: a fairy tale image of a (makeshift) nuclear family, heartwarming in an almost Spielbergian way. The climax of "Alien 3" shows Ripley leaping into a firey pit to destroy the murderous "baby" inside of her. When it tears out of her gut anyway, she grabs it and holds it close to make sure it burns. Her pose evokes a mother cradling a newborn."

"Reviews were generally unkind to the film that eventually made it to theaters, calling it stylish but shallow. Variety described Alien 3 as “a muddled effort that offers little more than visual splendor to recommend it,” while the New York Times complained that the film was too dark and too implausible. The third installment in the franchise “is nothing to scream about,” wrote a critic for the Washington Post."

"Alien 3 is very much a David Fincher film, as distinctly the product of his dark and twisted imagination as Seven (film)|Seven]] or Zodiac or The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Just as the icy survivalism of Alien helped set the tone for Ridley Scott’s career, and the guns-blazing ferocity of Aliens helped pave the way for James Cameron’s later work, Alien 3 works as a setup for the rest of David Fincher’s films. It’s nihilistic and misanthropic, bleak and despairing, slickly shot and bathed in ragged industrial gloom. It’s a big-budget movie about human frailty and the inevitability of death in which the characters are never particularly likable or heroic and the protagonist dies at the end. As in Seven], the ending is a shock downer. As in Fight Club, the character relationships are built from a series of existential dialogues. As in Panic Room, the story is driven by the need to use one’s surroundings to survive what is essentially a home invasion. The alien of Alien 3 is, in a way, Fincher’s first serial killer."

"Visually, Alien 3 may be the most distinctive entry in the franchise. Cinematographer Jordan Cronenweth, whose work on Blade Runner defined a certain decaying urban sci-fi aesthetic, had to quit after a short time on the job. But the final work by British photographer Alex Thomson is stunning in its own way. Backgrounds are textured with steam columns, damp surfaces, and sharp beams of light that give the sets a textured physicality. For much of the film, the camera lingers close to the floor, pointed up, as if to emphasize the close confines of the prison space and the impossibility of escape. Beyond the visuals, Alien 3 also excels as an exercise in imaginative world building. Its lonely prison planet is as richly detailed and lived-in an environment as the industrial corridors of Alien or the abandoned mining colony of Aliens. Its sequestered society, in which a religious contingent effectively runs the prison while a small group of overseers struggles to maintain a facade of control, is as nuanced a cinematic sociology as the corporate power structures that drove the first film, or the military conventions that powered the second. Like its predecessors, Alien 3 is an exploration of human power dynamics in a confined setting and the limits of institutional control. Fincher, in other words, put his own particular stamp on the tropes that animate the Alien franchise: He took the ideas that Scott and Cameron had developed and remade them in his own image. His ideas may be too bleak, too gloomy, too misanthropic for some, but they are clearly his, and in Alien 3 they are presented as forcefully as ever."

"Full of clanging corridors, belching furnaces and ravaging monsters, the cavernous maze-world of “Alien 3" (citywide) is not only seemingly the last stop for the entire “Alien” series—it looks like civilization’s last stop as well. In a way, that’s what this erratic, ambitious super-thriller is about. It’s not just the ultimate duel between Sigourney Weaver’s beleaguered Ripley and the kill-crazy extraterrestrials that have chased her through three hellacious movies, it’s about running into the ultimate cul-de-sac."

"“Alien 3" isn’t a classy, visionary nightmare like Ridley Scott’s 1979 “Alien” and it’s not really a hell-for-leather, super-tech toboggan ride like James Cameron’s 1986 “Aliens.” It has a different mood than either of its predecessors, and a different look: stylish but gloomy, portentously grim. It does succeed in rounding the three movies off, not smashingly but interestingly."

"Fincher has good designers and a great cinematographer—Alex Thomson, who lit “Excalibur” for John Boorman—and he’s obviously trying for something closer to Scott’s “Alien” than Cameron’s. A rock video specialist, he wants eerie Gothic chic instead of a slam-bang, cleanly lit apocalypse; he wants his images to have a shine, a pizazz, a depth. But, although “Alien 3" is stylish—and ambitious—the movie doesn’t have the soul or guts to sustain that ambition. It gets swallowed up in its own technology and genre expectations. And Fincher gets stalled in the drama, trapped in too many scenes of talking heads looming out of the gloom."

"The underlying theme of all the “Alien” movies, the distant glossy ancestors of Howard Hawks’ 1951 “The Thing,” is the rot in the technology, bugs-against-machines. In a way, this “Alien” capstone is about the end of everything, a technological and spiritual meltdown—which, considering the social and governmental breakdowns all around us, may be appropriate to 1992. But, however much it tries, the movie can’t escape the bugs in its own machine: the money-driven monsters that keep driving it into infernal cul-de-sacs."

"Sigourney Weaver - Ellen Ripley"

"Charles S. Dutton - Dillon"

"Charles Dance - Jonathan Clemens"

"Brian Glover - Harold Andrews"

"Ralph Brown - Aaron"

"Paul McGann - Golic"

"Danny Webb - Morse"

"Pete Postlethwaite - David"

"Holt McCallany - Junior"

"Peter Guinness - Gregor"

"Clive Mantle - William"

"DeObia Oparei - Arthur"

"Phil Davis - Kevin"

"Niall Buggy - Eric"

"Christopher Fairbank - Murphy"

"Lance Henriksen - Michael Bishop (Bishop II)"

"He knows that a horse has four legs. He knows that a murderer has two arms. But still, the Devil must be afraid of one honest Cossack."

"The following report to the Royal Geological Society by the undersigned, Alexander Saxton, is a true and faithful account of events that befell the Society's expedition in Manchuria. As the leader of the expedition, I must accept responsibility for its ending in disaster, but I leave to the judgement of the honorable members of the Society the decision as to where the blame for the catastrophe lies."

"Christopher Lee - Alexander Saxton"

"Peter Cushing - Dr. Wells"

"Teddy Savalas - Captain Kazan"

"Alberto de Mendoza - Father Pujardov"

"Silvia Tortosa - Countess Irina Petrovska"

"Julio Peña - Inspector Mirov"

"Alice Reinheart - Miss Jones"

"We plan ahead, that way we don't do anything right now, Earl explained it to me."

"I can't believe we said no to free beer!"

"Good morning Mr. Bassett, this is your wake up call. Please move your ass."

"[looking at Old Fred's messed-up corral with chunks of dead sheep lying on the ground] What the shit?"

"What the hell is going on? I mean what the hell is going on?!"

"[hearing music from below ground] So where the hell's that goddamn golden oldie comin' from?"

"Hey guys, I think I've found the ass end!"

"This valley is just one long smorgasbord."

"[to Rhonda] GET OUT OF YOUR PANTS!"

"[to Earl] Who died and made you Einstein?"

"That's how they get ya. They're under the goddamned GROUND!"

"We decided to leave town just one damn day too late!"

"I've got a goddamn plan!"

"I'll tell you. Nobody handles garbage better than we do."

"[repeated line] Pardon my French!"

"Damn it Valentine, you never plan ahead, you never take the long view, I mean here it is Monday and I'm already thinking of Wednesday... It is Monday right?"

"Well, there sure as hell ain't nothing to stop us now... everybody we know between here and Bixby's already dead."

"[To Val] Here's the plan. We don't even stop. Ride like hell. Tonight we keep right on going. We'll walk the horses."

"[To Melvin after he scares Earl by throwing his basketball at him] You little asswipe! You don't knock it off you're gonna be shittin' this basketball... pardon my French!"

"Melvin! One of these days someone's gonna kick your ass!"

"Run for it? Running's not a plan! Running's what you do once a plan fails!"

"No tracks, no sign, no spoor... you'd think after eating all those sheep they'd have to take a dump some place."

"[Burt Gummer, with his wife Heather at his side, berates the dead monster fought off with their "family arsenal"] Broke into the wrong God damn rec room, didn't ya you bastard!"

"[Burt Gummer looks at his bomb shelter for perhaps the last time] Food for five years, a thousand gallons of gas, air filtration, water filtration, Geiger counter. Bomb shelter! (long sigh) ...underground. God damn monsters."

"[handing out weapons and refusing to give Melvin one] I wouldn't give you a gun if it were World War Three!"

"Rhonda LeBeck: Did you notice anything weird a minute ago?"

"Walter Chang: Earl. Here's some swiss cheese and some bullets."

"I broke down and fell to the sidewalk, screaming to my pregnant wife, 'I can't believe I'm doing a movie about underground worms!"

"Kevin Bacon - Valentine "Val" McKee"

"Fred Ward - Earl Bassett"

"Finn Carter - Rhonda LeBeck"

"Michael Gross - Burt Gummer"

"Victor Wong as Walter Chang"

"Robert Jayne (credited as "Bobby Jacoby") as Melvin Plug"

"Richard Marcus as Nestor Cunningham"

"They say there's nothing new under the sun. But under the ground..."

"Once the world was big, and no man in his lifetime could circle it. But through the centuries, science has made man's lifetime bigger and the world smaller. Now the farthest corner of the Earth is as close as a pushbutton, and time has lost all meaning as manmade devices speed many, many times faster than sound itself. Here, near the top of the world, free men struggle with the elements to create some measure of defense to protect that selfsame freedom."

"Up to now, only one man had seen the bird and lived. Among those who knew of it, its existence was a closely guarded secret. But even as arrangements were made for an emergency meeting of the President, the Cabinet, the National Defense Board and the Joint Chiefs of Staff - even then, the bird revealed itself to the world at large, and complacency quickly turned to panic! Panic, terror and horror! No corner of the earth was spared the terror of looking up into God's blue sky and seeing not peace and security, but the feathered nightmare on wings."

"[to Sally] You keep your shirt on and I'll go get my pants on."

"Now, I don't don't care if that bird came from outer space or Upper Saddle River, New Jersey; it's still made of flesh and blood - of some sort - and vulnerable to bullets and bombs."

"By the time I get through with you, Mr. Electronics Engineer, you'll be lucky if they let you test batteries for flashlights."

"Jeff Morrow - Mitchell 'Mitch' MacAfee"

"Mara Corday - Sally Caldwell"

"Morris Ankrum - Lt. Gen. Edward Considine"

"Louis Merrill - Pierre Broussard"

"Edgar Barrier - Dr. Karol Noymann"

"Robert Shayne - Gen. Van Buskirk"

"Clark Howat - Maj. Bergen"

"I know where my husband is! He's with that woman!"

"You know everyone's seeing satellites these days."

"You know, you're going to flip your lid just one time too many with me, Nancy."

"Now you pulled a boner tonight and you know it."

"You know what our problem is? We both have the same disease: money, and happy ways of spending it."

"Ladies and gentlemen, this is KRKR-TV. And now, more news of high fliers. Nancy Archer, the former Nancy Fowler, heir to the Fowler fortune and the fabulous Star of India diamond, has joined the ever expanding international circle of satellite seers. Mrs. Archer claims not only to be seeing a sociable satellite, but also its inhabitant, a 30-foot giant. It seems that Mrs. Archer, who has been feuding with her husband, Handsome Harry, has found a man from out of this world, someone who will love her for who she is. Is he pink with big ears and tusks? Come, come, Mrs. Archer. Any man can resist a million dollars, but fifty million? That's too much to ask for, even from the man in the moon."

"Delivery Man: [at the Archer house] Four lengths of chain. Meat hooks. 40 bottles of plasma and an elephant syringe."

"Bernie Wolner (producer of Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman, directed by Nathan Juran) was having difficulty coming up with a one-sheet for the film. He wanted sexual content in it, yet none of his designs would pass the censors at that time, so he asked me to design the ad. I came up with Los Angeles area freeways during rush hour with cars running between Alison Hayes’ legs and the rest is history. That poster now hangs in the Museum of Modern Art in New York."

"A good friend of mine, Bernie Woolner, made Attack of the 50 Foot Woman and he wanted to have a somewhat sexual ad and the MPAA turned down every ad. He made three ads; they turned down three ads."

"A titanic beauty spreads a macabre wave of horror! A terrifying masterpiece of shock and chills!"

"See a female colossus... her mountainous torso, skyscraper limbs, giant desires!"

"Allison Hayes — Nancy Archer"

"William Hudson — Harry Archer"

"Yvette Vickers — Honey Parker"

"Roy Gordon — Dr. Isaac Cushing"

"Otto Waldis — Dr. Heinrich Von Loeb"

"Eileen Stevens — Nurse"

"Frank Chase — Deputy Charlie"

"Beware of the Blob! It creeps, and leaps, and glides and slides across the floor."

"How do you get people to protect themselves from something they don't believe in?"

"Dad, it isn't vandalism! Doctor Hallen is dead, and he was killed by some sort of a monster! Now, I know because I saw it, Dad."

"[About the blob's weakness] CO2 ... It's cold! That's why it didn't come in the ice box after us, it can't stand cold!"

"[On the phone] Kate? It's Dr. Hallen, I'm still at the office... something's come up. I need you back here right away. No, you've got to come back, Kate. There's a man here with some sort of a parasite on his arm, assimilating his flesh at a frightening speed. I may have to get ahead of it and amputate. No... I don't know what it is or where it came from."

"[Hysterical after they just escaped the Blob] Oh, Steve, our parents! They think we're home in bed asleep, sound and safe."

"My name is Jane. It's just Jane."

"Just because some kid smacks into your wife on the turnpike doesn't make it a crime to be 17 years old."

"[On the radio to Washington] I think you should send us the biggest transport plane you have, and take this thing to the Artic or somewhere and drop it where it will never thaw."

"Indescribable... Indestructible! Nothing Can Stop It!"

"Indescribable... indestructible... insatiable."

"The indestructible creature! Bloated with the blood of its victims!"

"It crawls... It creeps... It eats you alive!"

"The long quote by Dr. Hallen about the parasite "assimilating flesh" is sampled in Lazlo Hollyfield's song "Bones" on The Pacer Ep album"

"Steve McQueen — Steve Andrews (as Steven McQueen)"

"Aneta Corsaut — Jane Martin"

"Earl Rowe — Lieutenant Dave"

"Olin Howland — Old Man (final film role)"

"Elbert Smith — Henry Martin"

"Hugh Graham — Mr. Andrews"

"John Benson — Sgt. Jim Bert"

"If you were going to take over the world, would you blow up the White House, Independence Day style, or sneak in through the back door?"

"Guaranteed to jack you up!"

"You wouldn't have liked it here anyway."

"I always thought the only alien in this high school was me."

"Mix Invasion Of The Body Snatchers with The Thing. Throw in some Terminator, a spoonful of The Breakfast Club, and a pinch of The Stepford Wives, and you've got a big mess of a movie set in a school that’s being taken over by a conformist alien, one teacher at a time. You’ve got the very funny, occasionally scary, quite gory, and extremely entertaining 1998 Robert Rodriguez film called The Faculty"

"Elijah Wood - Casey Connor"

"Jordana Brewster - Delilah Profitt"

"Clea DuVall - Stokely 'Stokes' Mitchell"

"Laura Harris - Marybeth Louise Hutchinson"

"Josh Hartnett - Zeke Tyler"

"Shawn Hatosy - Stan Rosado"

"Salma Hayek - Nurse Rosa Harper"

"Famke Janssen - Miss Elizabeth Burke"

"Piper Laurie - Mrs. Karen Olson"

"Christopher McDonald - Mr. Frank Connor"

"Bebe Neuwirth - Principal Valerie Drake"

"Robert Patrick - Coach Joe Willis"

"Usher Raymond - Gabe Santora"

"Jon Stewart - Prof. Edward Furlong"

"Meet the Alien Generation."

"On December 25, School's Out Forever."

"Take me to your teacher."

"You will not be disrespectful this school year!"

"The students at Herrington High always suspected their teachers were from another planet... they were right!"

"The students at Herrington high will not only question authority... they'll have to destroy it."

"What if your teachers really were from another planet?"

"Think your teachers are aliens? You could be right."

"And you thought YOUR teachers were weird..."

"After what I just saw, procedure just went out the fucking window."

"I understand that it's felt like every man for himself. If we're going to get out of this... a little fucking solidarity goes a long way. We all want to survive, right?"

"There will always be law and you will pay for what you've done. Even if that means I have to pull the sick out of you."

"I'm gonna fucking carve you up!"

"I was younger than you when I first came onboard. Funny, I can't even remember what life was like before this flight began. It's all I have."

"I guess this thing does land itself. Doesn't float too well though, does it?"

"This... truly is Noah's Ark. This archive holds the world we are going to live in."

"You think I survived this long trusting strangers?"

"Oh, how the whole world cheered to the thunder of earth's mightiest creation—Elysium. One small spark to ignite the heavens for the heroes to venture farther and farther than any of mankind's machines! And we slept. We slept a slumber so deep that no one had dared before...as three little Indians were left to mind the store."

"Three little Indians with the burden to bear. No more law. Nothing left to care. Just three little souls whose destiny had become undone because there was chop chop chop chop... then there was only one. One little Indian left."

"One little Indian left, alone with all his doom. He refuses to go to bed, so what does he do? He decides to stay up and play in his room. What nasty little games he would play with his slumbering prey. He was slayer, he was master. He was both God and the Devil! See, that's what some would say. He would grow to manhood, a self-proclaimed king. Master of his own vessel. Home to his own sin. He just cast out all who had behaved. Just exiled to the cargo hold to fend amongst themselves...and scavenge, feeding off their own. Evil grew. The king no longer wanted to play. So he returned to his bed of slumber. And while the king slept, a whole new world of evil grew...as we wept."

"Question is, what would be more stupid? Trusting the ship will hold to see another day when it's kept me alive for all these years? Or trusting somebody who's desperate enough to say anything just when I'm about to carve a steak out of his girlfriend?"

"Dennis Quaid - Payton"

"Ben Foster - Bower"

"Cam Gigandet - Gallo"

"Norman Reedus - Shepard"

"Antje Traue - Nadia"

"Eddie Rouse - Leland"

"Cung Le - Manh"

"God help us."

"[after watching the original crew's final chaotic log] We're leaving."

"You can't leave... she won't let you."

"Where we're going, we won't need eyes to see."

"Do you see?"

"Lt Cmdr D.J.: (after playing a recording of the ship's log) I thought it said libera te me, save me. But it's not me. It's liberate tute me—save yourself. And it gets worse. (Plays recording) There. I think that says ex inferis. Save yourself... from hell."

"Laurence Fishburne - Captain Miller"

"Sam Neill - Dr. Weir"

"Joely Richardson - Lieutenant Starck"

"Richard T. Jones - Lieutenant Cooper"

"Jack Noseworthy - Ensign Justin"

"Jason Isaacs - Lieutenant Commander D.J."

"Sean Pertwee - Lieutenant Smith"

"Kathleen Quinlan - Lieutenant Peters"

"Peter Marinker - Captain Kilpack"

"Noah Huntley - Edward Corrick"

"When you hesitate, people die."

"Semper Fi, Motherfucker! Faithful to the Corps, John!"

"I'm not supposed to die!"

"Nothing goes back till everything on this planet is dead. We're going in hot."

"I didn't see shit. And I ain't paid to see shit."

"No one gets out alive."

"Hell Breaks Loose"

"Karl Urban - Staff Sergeant John "Reaper" Grimm"

"Dwayne Johnson - Gunnery Sergeant Asher "Sarge" Mahonin"

"Rosamund Pike - Dr. Samantha Grimm"

"Dexter Fletcher - Marcus "Pinky" Pinzerowski"

"Raz Adoti - Sergeant Gregory "Duke" Schofield"

"Deobia Oparei - Sergeant Gannon "Destroyer" Roark"

"Al Weaver - Private Mark "The Kid" Dantalian"

"Yao Chin - Private First Class Katsuhiko Kumanosuke "Mac" Takahashi"

"Richard Brake - Corporal Dean Portman"

"Ben Daniels - Corporal Eric "Goat" Fantom"

"Robert Russell - Dr. Todd Carmack"

"Vladislav Dyntera - Dr. Steve Willits"

"Daniel York - Lieutenant Hunegs"

"Sara Houghton - Dr. Jenna Willits"

"Brian Steele - Hell Knight (Baron of Hell)/Curtis Stahl"

"Doug Jones (actor) - Carmack Imp"

"Ian Hughes - Sanford Crosby"

"Sting as Baron Charles Frankenstein"

"Jennifer Beals as Eva"

"Clancy Brown as Viktor"

"Geraldine Page as Mrs. Baumann"

"David Rappaport as Rinaldo"

"Anthony Higgins as Clerval"

"Alexei Sayle as Magar"

"Veruschka von Lehndorff as Countess"

"Quentin Crisp as Dr. Zalhus"

"Cary Elwes as Captain Josef Schoden"

"Phil Daniels as Bela"

"Timothy Spall as Paulus"

"Hey, assholes!"

"This is what I call the speech, kid. It's the only one I got and I only give it once, so pay attention. 'Til now, it's all been fun and games. "Cops and robbers," Dunkin Donuts. But you're in the shit now. Metro Command is a war zone."

"[after riding in a limo with Big Willie's thugs, who smoke heavily] You know, you guys really gotta cut down..."

"Okay, pussyface, it’s your move!"

"Shit... why can't this guy stay on the ground?"

"[after killing the Predator, he finds himself surrounded by others] Okay... who's next?"

"Tony Pope, live with Hardcore, on the scene and in your face! it's like Dante's Hell down here - smoke, fire, oppressive heat - as Columbian and Jamaican drug fiends once again transform the streets of L.A. into a slaughterhouse! Who the hell's in charge down here?! The cops? Uh-uh! They're outmanned, outgunned, and incompetent! Mr. Mayor, on vacation at your home in Lake Tahoe: get off your butt, get down here, and declare martial law!"

"This is Tony Pope, live from L.A., the city of fear, where the psycho vigilante killer continues his daily diet for murder. Bodies strung out! Bodies with the skins ripped off! The hearts torn from the cadavers! And just recently, King Willie, the drug lord, the vicious drug lord, found in an alley just around the corner with his head cut off, and his spinal column torn from the body - a fitting demise to the Prince of Powder."

"Broad concept's the same. The difference is, this is a different individual. A different individual of the same species. As is a snake is a snake, but different snakes are different. Their colorings are different, different parts of their characteristics, their facial structures, subtle differences."

"Pull over, park, and pray."

"Lions! Tigers! Bears! Oh my!"

"He's in town with a few days to kill."

"Silent. Invisible. Invincible. He's in town with a few days to kill."

"Hunting season opens again..."

"The Ultimate Hunter."

"This time he's coming to a different kind of jungle."

"Silent. Invisible. Invincible. The Ultimate Hunter. This Time... Los Angeles, 1997."

"Kevin Peter Hall - The Predator"

"Danny Glover - Lieutenant Mike Harrigan"

"Gary Busey - Peter Keyes"

"María Conchita Alonso - Leona Cantrell"

"Ruben Blades - Danny Archuleta"

"Bill Paxton - Jerry Lambert"

"A man runs, someone shoots at him."

"Flag on the moon. How did it get there?"

"Nothing bothers some people, not even flying saucers."

"Always on the prowl. Looking for something or somebody to kill. Quench the killer's thirst."

"Boys from the city. Not yet caught by the whirlwind of Progress. Feed soda pop to the thirsty pigs."

"Touch a button. Things happen. A scientist becomes a beast."

"Twenty hours without rest and still no enemy. In the blistering desert heat, Jim and Joe plan their next attack. Find the Beast and kill him. Kill, or be killed. Man's inhumanity to man."

"Well, doctors can't help her. Maybe angels, but not doctors."

"Tor Johnson - Joseph Javorsky / The Beast"

"Coleman Francis - Narrator"

"Anthony Cardoza - KGB Driver / Helpful Neighbor"

"Douglas Mellor - Hank Radcliffe"

"Barbara Francis - Lois Radcliffe"

"Bing Stafford - Jim Archer"

"Larry Aten - Joe Dobson"

"Ronald Francis - Randy Radcliffe"

"Alan Francis - Art Radcliffe"

"[to Travis out in Hopman Bog] You're full of shit. [to David] He's full of shit."

"Hoo-fuckin'-yah. [repeated line]"

"[Last words] Fuck you for what you did."

"I'm not right, am I?"

"Come on, chief, I'm done. I'm gonna die here no matter what, so let it mean something. Let it mean that you two make it out, give me that."

"[After Curt Hamill] Just making sure."

"[To Judy, after Becca's coughing fit] I'm just saying, if she's sick, we don't want to be in the fucking car with her."

"[To Travis, regards to the crashed plane] You said it sounded like a plane, Trav? Shit, big plane, little plane? What? Come on now."

"[To David, threatening him with his gun] One. Two. Three. That's how many times I saved your life."

"A funny thing happened on the way to Cedar Rapids. Bastards spiked my tires."

"I hope you're right chief. I'm no world beater, but I had plans."

"I don't care what the calendar says. Opening day. That's the first day of spring."

"[to Judy, after evading the helicopter and driving into the car wash] What road can they not see? Tell me, what magic road can they not see? Tell me and I'll fucking go!"

"Do you wanna give up? You wanna sit here and die? Tell me and I will sit here and die with you."

"[To Travis] Travis you ask about that again and I will throw you out off the fucking boat."

"[To Russell, in reference to Bill Farnum] The same look Rory gave me. The same goddamn look."

"Did we or did we not request a transfer for him this morning?"

"Tell you what Kevin, don't ask me why I can't leave without my wife and I won't ask you why you can."

"Fear Thy Neighbor."

"Welcome to Ogden Marsh, the friendliest place on earth."

"Insanity is infectious. (UK tagline)"

"Timothy Olyphant - David"

"Radha Mitchell - Judy"

"Joe Anderson - Russell"

"Danielle Panabaker - Becca"

"Christie Lynn Smith - Deadra Farnum"

"Brett Rickaby - Bill Farnum"

"Preston Bailey - Nicholas"

"John Alyward - Mayor Hobbs"

"Joe Regan - Pvt. Billy Babcock"

"Glenn Morshower - Intelligence Officer"

"Larry Cedar - Bend Sandborn"

"Gregory Sporleder - Travis Quinn"

"On March 11, 2008, The government sealed off an apartment complex in Los Angeles. The residents were never seen again. No details. No witnesses. No evidence. Until now."

"Contain The Truth"

"Jennifer Carpenter - Angela Vidal"

"Steve Harris - Scott Pervical"

"Jay Hernandez - Jake"

"Johnathon Schaech - George Fletcher"

"Columbus Short - Danny Wilensky"

"Andrew Fiscella - James McCreedy"

"Rade Sherbedgia - Yuri Ivanov"

"Greg Germann - Lawrence"

"Bernard White - Bernard"

"Dania Ramirez - Sadie"

"Elaine Kagan - Wanda Marimon"

"Marin Hinkle - Kathy"

"Joey King - Brianna"

"Jermaine Jackson - Nadif"

"Sharon Ferguson - Jwahir"

"Dennis O'Hare - Randy"

"Stacy Chbosky - Elise Jackson"

"Jeannie Epper - Ms. Espinoza"

"Barry Sigismondi - Bob Orton"

"Ace Hatem - Wounded Woman"

"Christian Svensson - Armed Guard"

"Scott Donovan - Armed Guard"

"Michael Potter - Chief of Police"

"Jane Park Smith - News Reporter"

"Craig Susser - Hazmat Doctor"

"Bert Jernigan - Hazmat Guard"

"Doug Jones - Thin Infected Man"

"[to Big Bob, when he is singing.] Dad, I hate your singing."

"[pretending to be Lynn] I'll be right there honey."

"Thank God no one's watching us."

"It's not gonna be in a fucking trailer home."

"97% of nation wide service, and we get stuck in the 3%."

"[to Doug, before dying, when he puts a blanket at her.] You're so sweet, Doug."

"[to Brenda, when she says a bad word.] Hey, watch your fucking mouth."

"[to Bobby, talking about Doug.] Leave Doug alone. He's a democrat. He doesn't believe in guns."

"[when he's at an old rubbish outhouse] Thanks, Brenda...!"

"[after he scares Lynn] Could you give me a Twinkie?"

"You know how Freud would have interpreted "your obsession with rattlesnakes", "Mom?""

"Big Brain: [calling for Pluto] It's breakfast time!"

"Gas Station Attendant: [before he kills himself] I did the best I could. I'm sorry."

"Small Deformed Child: [to Doug] Mister, will you play with us?"

"The lucky ones die first"

"Aaron Stanford - Doug Bukowski"

"Kathleen Quinlan - Ethel Carter"

"Vinessa Shaw - Lynn Carter-Bukowski"

"Emilie de Ravin - Brenda Carter"

"Dan Byrd - Bobby Carter"

"Tom Bower - Gas Station Attendant"

"Billy Drago - Papa Jupiter"

"Robert Joy - Lizard"

"Ted Levine - Big Bob Carter"

"Desmond Askew - Big Brain"

"Ezra Buzzington - Goggle"

"Michael Bailey Smith - Pluto"

"Laura Ortiz - Ruby"

"It all makes sense. They're executing Code Red. Step 1: Kill the infected. Step 2: Containment. If containment fails, then Step 3: Extermination. Now they won't stop until everyone is dead."

":DLR Soldier: We are headed for the green-zone, our area of security and reconstruction, designated as District One. District One is located on the Isle of Dogs. Although the Isle of Dogs is completely safe, the surrounding area of London is not. There are a large number of bodies still left to be cleared from the original outbreak of infection. Rats and wild dogs are prevalent, as is disease. New arrivals are reminded, for their own safety, it is absolutely forbidden to cross the river and leave the security zone. You will be joining 15,000 civilians who are already resident in District One. As we approach your new home, you will notice a dramatically increased military presence. The U.S. Army is responsible for your safety. We will do everything we can do to make your repatriation as easy as possible. Inside District One, however, we believe you'll be pleasantly surprised. We have hot and cold running water, 24-hour electricity, a medical center, a supermarket, and even a pub."

"It All Begins Again"

"Warning! Maintain the quarantine Deadly force will be used to protect this area"

"It's Not Over"

"Are you safe?"

"When days turn to weeks..."

"Robert Carlyle - Don Harris"

"Rose Byrne - Scarlet"

"Jeremy Renner - Doyle"

"Harold Perrineau - Flynn"

"Catherine McCormack - Alice"

"Mackintosh Muggleton - Andy"

"Imogen Poots - Tammy"

"Idris Elba - Stone"

"Michael McMillian - Napoleon"

"Jessica Stroup - Amber"

"Jacob Vargas - Crank"

"Flex Alexander - Sarge"

"Lee Thompson Young - Delmar"

"Daniella Alonso - Missy"

"Eric Edelstein - Spitter"

"Reshad Strik - Mickey"

"Ben Crowley - Stump"

"Michael Bailey Smith - Papa Hades"

"Derek Mears - Chameleon"

"David Reynolds - Hansel"

"Jeff Kober - Redding"

"Jay Acovone - Wilson"

"Philip Pavel - Foster"

"Archie Kao - Han"

"Mrs. French's cat is missing. The signs are posted all over town. "Have you seen Honey?" We've all seen the posters, but nobody has seen Honey the cat. Nobody. Until last Thursday morning, when Miss Colette Piscine swerved her car to miss Honey the cat as she drove across a bridge. Well this bridge, now slightly damaged, is a bit of a local treasure and even has its own fancy name; Pont de Flaque. Now Collette, that sounds like Culotte. That's Panty in French. And Piscine means Pool. Panty pool. Flaque also means pool in French, so Colete Piscine, in French Panty Pool, drives over the Pont de Flaque, the Pont de Pool if you will, to avoid hitting Mrs. French's cat that has been missing in Pontypool. Pontypool. Pontypool. Panty pool. Pont de Flaque. What does it mean? Well, Norman Mailer, he had an interesting theory that he used to explain the strange coincidences in the aftermath of the JFK assassination. In the wake of huge events, after them and before them, physical details they spasm for a moment; they sort of unlock and when they come back into focus they suddenly coincide in a weird way. Street names and birthdates and middle names, all kind of superfluous things appear related to eachother. It's a ripple effect. So, what does it mean? Well... it means something's going to happen. Something big. But then, something's always about to happen."

"It's not the end of the world, it's just the end of the day."

"We're not talking, I'm drunk. This is how my last relationship ended."

"Oh, God. You're gonna eat me soon, aren't you?"

"Words lose their meaning when you repeat them."

"Shut up or die."

"Stephen McHattie – Grant Mazzy"

"Lisa Houle – Sydney Briar"

"Georgina Reilly – Laurel-Ann Drummond"

"Hrant Alianak – Dr. Mendez"

"Rick Roberts – Ken Loney"

"Boyd Banks – Jay (Osama)"

"Tony Burgess – Tony (Lawrence)"

"Open the hatch!"

"[last lines] No, I still have a choice. Maybe I can't destroy you, but if it's God's will, then so be it. If not, then I'll see you in hell!"

"Something is waiting"

"Beyond Rescue … Beyond Reason … Beyond Salvation"

"Will Bledsoe - Giles Stewart"

"Robert Sampson - Flynn Harding"

"Joe Turkel - Paxton Warner"

"John Diehl - Philip Jennings"

"Alan Blumenfeld - Dreyfuss Steiner"

"Camilla More - Lesli"

"Wendy MacDonald - Alex McInny"

"Ken Lesco - Michael C. Gotier"

"So the end was terrible, even for the good people like my father. So the purpose of all our suffering was just more suffering."

"For God's sake, Arthur, is that how you imagine me? A respected and admired figure? A devoted father? A loving husband? Well, I've also published nearly two papers a year for the last seven years and not a fundamental piece of work in the lot. I sit around the living rooms of other young married faculty members talking infantile masturbation: "Who's sucking up to the head of the department?" "Whose tenure is hanging by a thread?""

"It's just possible I'm not mad, you know! I'm asking you to make a small quantum jump with me, to accept one deviant concept. That our other states of consciousness are as real as our waking state. And that reality can be externalized."

"This is an all-bets-are-off sort of thing. We may be opening a black box that may scrap our whole picture of space-time. We might even have a link to another universe."

"Of all the God damn men in this world, why do I have to love this one? I can't get him out of me. Do you know how many men I tried to fall in love with this past year? But it won't work. No matter who I'm in bed with I have to imagine it's him or nothing happens. No matter who I'm eating with or walking with there's always this pain because it isn't him. I'm possessed by him."

"Sex is a mystical experience for you. You carry on like a flagellant which can be very nice, but l sometimes wonder if it's me that's being made love to. I feel like I'm being harpooned by some raging monk in the act of receiving God."

"You are a Faust-freak, Eddie! You'd sell your soul to find the great truth. Well, human life doesn't have great truths. We're born in doubt. We spend our lives persuading ourselves we're alive. And one way we do that is we love each other."

"He doesn't love me. He never loved me. I was never real to him. Nothing in the human experience is real to him."

"He's a truth lover. Reality to Eddie is only that which is changeless, immutably constant. What happened to Eddie tonight, that was Eddie's idea of love. That was consummation. He finally - got it off with God. He finally embraced the absolute, was finally ravished by truth and it goddamn near destroyed him."

"Defy it, Eddie. You made it real. You can make it unreal. If you love me... If you love me, Eddie, DEFY IT!"

"This one has everything: sex, violence, comedy, thrills, tenderness. It's an anthology and apotheosis of American pop movies: Frankenstein, Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Nutty Professor, 2001, Alien, Love Story. It opens at fever pitch and then starts soaring—into genetic fantasy, into a precognitive dream of delirium and delight. Madness is its subject and substance, style and spirit. The film changes tone, even form, with its hero's every new mood and mutation. It expands and contracts with his mind until both almost crack. It keeps threatening to go bonkers, then makes good on its threat, and still remains as lucid as an aerialist on a high wire. It moves with the loping energy of a crafty psychopath, or of film makers gripped with the potential of blowing the moviegoer's mind out through his eyes and ears. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Altered States."

"Altered States is one hell of a movie — literally. It hurls its characters headlong back through billions of years to the moment of creation and finds nothing there except an anguished scream of "No!" as the life force protests its moment of birth. And then, through the power of the human ego to insist on its own will even in the face of the implacable indifference of the universe, it turns "No!" into "Yes!" and ends with the basic scene in all drama, the man and the woman falling into each other's arms. But hold on just a second here: I'm beginning to sound like the movie's characters, a band of overwrought pseudo-intellectuals who talk like a cross between Werner Erhard, Freud, and Tarzan. Some of the movie's best dialogue passages are deliberately staged with everybody talking at once: It doesn't matter what they're saying, only that they're incredibly serious about it. I can tell myself intellectually that this movie is a fiendishly constructed visual and verbal roller coaster, a movie deliberately intended to overwhelm its audiences with sensual excess. I know all that, and yet I was overwhelmed, I was caught up in its headlong energy."

"The movie is based on a Paddy Chayefsky novel, which was, in turn, inspired by the experiments of Dr. John Lilly, the man who placed his human subjects in total immersion tanks — floating them in total darkness so that their minds, cut off from all external reality, could play along the frontiers of sanity. In Altered States, William Hurt plays a Harvard scientist named Jessup who takes such an experiment one step further, by ingesting a drug made from the sacred hallucinatory mushrooms of a primitive tribe. The strange thing about these mushrooms, Hurt observes in an easily missed line of dialogue in the movie, is that they give everyone who takes them the same hallucinatory vision. Perhaps it is our cellular memory of creation: There is chaos, and then a ball of light, and then the light turns into a crack, and the crack opens onto Nothing, and that is all there was and all there will be, except for life, which has its only existence in the mind. Got that? It hardly matters. It is a breathtaking concept, but Altered States hardly slows down for it. This is the damnedest movie to categorize. Just when it begins to sound like a 1960s psychedelic fantasy, a head trip — it turns into a farce."

"During the professor's last experiment, when he is disappearing into a violent whirlpool of light and screams on the laboratory floor, it is his wife who wades into the celestial mists, gets up to her knees in eternity, reaches in, and pulls him out. And this is despite the fact that he has filed for divorce. The last scene is a killer, with the professor turning into the protoplasm of life itself, and his wife turning into a glowing shell of rock-like flesh, with her inner fires glowing through the crevices (the effect is something like an overheated Spiderman). They're going through the unspeakable hell of reliving the First Moment, and yet as the professor, as Man, bangs on the walls and crawls toward her, and she reaches out, and the universe rocks, the Man within him bursts out of the ape-protoplasm, and the Woman within her explodes back into flesh, and they collapse into each other's arms, and all the scene really needs at that point is for him to ask, "Was it as good for you as it was for me?" Altered States is a superbly silly movie, a magnificent entertainment, and a clever and brilliant machine for making us feel awe, fear, and humor. That is enough. It's pure movie and very little meaning. Did I like it? Yeah, I guess I did, but I wouldn't advise trying to think about it very deeply."

"The scene in which the scientist becomes cosmic energy and his wife grabs him and brings him back to human form is straight out of my Dyadic Cyclone (1976) … As for the scientist's regression into an ape-like being, the late Dr. Craig Enright, who started me on K (ketamine) while taking a trip with me here by the isolation tank, suddenly "became" a chimp, jumping up and down and hollering for twenty-five minutes. Watching him, I was frightened. I asked him later, "Where the hell were you?" He said, "I became a pre-hominid, and I was in a tree. A leopard was trying to get me. So I was trying to scare him away." The manuscript of The Scientist (1978) was in the hands of Bantam, the publishers. The head of Bantam called and said, "Paddy Chayefsky would like to read your manuscript. Will you give him your permission?" I said, "Only if he calls me and asks permission." He didn't call. But he probably read the manuscript."

"If it is not wholly visionary at every juncture, it is at least dependably — even exhilaratingly — bizarre. Its strangeness, which borders cheerfully on the ridiculous, is its most enjoyable feature. The movie itself has many of the qualities of its chief character, who is obsessive, exciting, scary, wildly energetic, and a very odd bird indeed. Actually his leanings are more to the ape-like than the birdlike, and to call them leanings is to put it very mildly. … The movie, part joke and part nightmare, is the story of a man who experiments with hallucinogenic substances, searching for what he calls his unborn soul and longing to re-experience the birth of man. In the course of this adventure, he turns into an ape and scares the daylights out of everyone around him. Really, that's all you need to know. … The film is in fine shape as long as it revels in its own craziness, making no claims on the viewer's reason. But when it asks you to believe that what you're watching may really be happening, and to wonder what it means, it is asking far too much. By the time it begins straining for an ending both happy and hysterical, it has lost all of its mystery, and most of its magic."

"When he heard his cry for help it wasn't human."

"In the basement of a university medical school Dr. Jessup floats naked in total darkness. The most terrifying experiment in the history of science is out of control... and the subject is himself."

"William Hurt - Dr. Edward "Eddie" Jessup"

"Blair Brown - Emily Jessup"

"Bob Balaban - Arthur Rosenberg"

"Charles Haid - Mason Parrish"

"Thaao Penghlis - Eduardo Echeverria"

"Drew Barrymore - Margaret Jessup"

"Megan Jeffers - Grace Jessup"

"Miguel Godreau - Primal man"

"Dori Brenner - Sylvia Rosenberg"

"Peter Brandon - Alan Hobart"

"Charles White-Eagle - The Brujo"

"John Larroquette - X-Ray technician"

"George Gaynes - Dr. Wissenschaft"

"Jack Murdock - Hector Orteco"

"And we wouldn't want to break any rules, right? He said, drinking his beer as he drove the stolen Mercedes ridiculously over the speed limit. And look- no hands!"

"[On being 'chosen' as immune] I'm here and they're not."

"The rules are simple. At least that's how my brother sees it. One, avoid the infected at all costs. Their breath is highly contagious. Two, disinfect anything they've touched in the last 24 hours. Three, the sick are already dead, they can't be saved. You break the rules, you die. You follow them, you live. Maybe."

"[In a mock narration] Brian Green steps up to the tee. He needs a hole-in-one here to get to the Masters, but he's really worried about his people finding out that he's GAY! [Brian misses]Dude, my advice to you is to put the club down, wait 10 minutes... just never pick it up again."

"I drive, and wait for a storm to come and wash us all away. But it doesn't. It's a beautiful day. And it shouldn't be a beautiful day. I wait... but nothing happens to me. And for the first time, I feel like I am alone in the world. We made it. Two strangers with nothing left to say. Brian used to love this place. The hotel, the beach- they still look exactly the same. But they're just places now. I don't know what'll happen next. I don't know how long I'll live. But I know I will be alone."

"[Danny has just found out Bobby is infected, and is viewing a memorial at a gas station] Do you want to end up like them? We will if she stays."

"I don't know if there's anybody listening... but, my generator is dying. So, if there is someone out there, this my last call. This is Laura Merkin, last survivor of Corpus Christi, Texas, saying goodbye."

"The rules are simple. You break them, you die..."

"Lou Taylor Pucci - Danny"

"Chris Pine - Brian"

"Piper Perabo - Bobby"

"Emily VanCamp - Kate"

"Christopher Meloni - Frank"

"Kiernan Shipka - Jodie"

"Mark Moses - Doctor"

"When Michael Myers was six years old, he stabbed his sister to death. For years he was locked up in Smith's Grove Sanitarium, but he escaped. And suddenly, Halloween became another word for mayhem. One by one, he killed his entire family, until his nine-year-old niece, Jamie Lloyd, was the only one left alive. Six years ago, Halloween night, Michael and Jamie vanished. Many people believed them dead, but I think that someone hid them away. Someone who keeps Michael, protects him... and tries to control him. And if there's one thing I know, you can't control evil. You can lock it up, you can burn it and bury it and pray that it dies, but it never will. It just rests awhile. You can lock your doors, and say your prayers at night, but the evil's out there... waiting. And maybe... just maybe... it's closer than you think."

"My name's Tommy. I was only eight years old when I saw him. But I was one of the lucky ones. I survived."

"Michael's work isn't done in Haddonfield. And soon, very soon, there come home to kill again. But this time, I'll be ready."

"I'm across the street. I can see you. Beth, I want you to listen to me. Get Tim and get out of that house right now."

"Beth, look out! There's someone in the room! He's right behind you!"

"(last words before Michael finally killed her) You can't have the baby, Michael. You can't have the baby."

"After my stroke six years ago they practically had to hold a pistol to my head to get me to retire. But things are different now. I'm different. I've buried the ghosts, I've buried them in this manuscript. I don't want to practice medicine anymore."

"I've wanted to believe it. But I've felt Michael's presence, behind these walls, just like all those years ago. Plotting, staring, staring. Waiting for some signal. I can't go through this again, not alone. Please, as my colleague, as my friend. Help me."

"I suppose it was a ghost who did all of this, and a ghost on the radio last night, and a ghost being carried out of here now."

"Michael? It's over! It's finally over. It's all over."

"As far away from Haddonfield as possible."

"No, I have some business to attend to."

"That was six years ago, Sam. She died with him in that explosion, you know that."

"It's your game now, Doctor Loomis!"

"Michael. Michael's gone!"

"Six times the terror... Six times the fear... Six times the thrills..."

"Terror Never Rests In Peace!"

"Everyone knows his name. Now, everyone will know the truth."

"The only thing more terrifying than how it began, is how it will end."

"One has tracked His murderous past. The other is a student of the Black Arts. On Friday, September 29, a mystery will be revealed. The only thing more terrifying than how it began... is how it will END!"

"Haddonfield is ready to celebrate Halloween.... so is Michael Myers!"

"(credited as Paul Stephen Rudd) as"

"- Kara Strode"

"Devin Gardner - Danny Strode"

"- Tim Strode"

"- Debra Strode"

"- John Strode"

"- Barry Simms"

"Nurse Mary"

"Alan Echeverria - Dr. Bonham"

"- Mrs. Blankenship"

"The word "impossible," Mr. Booth, is only found in the dictionary of fools. [Napoleon Bonaparte]"

"Some cause must have created all this, but what caused that cause?"

"In, through... and beyond."

"If there's any justice at all, the black hole will be your grave!"

"These poor creatures are what's left of the crew...kept alive by means I don't pretend to understand."

"[badly damaged in a shootout with Maximilian] It's no use, V.I.N.CENT! My useful days are finished! But part of me goes with ya. You'll never be obsolete. [dying, his systems failing] Carry on the tradition. We're the best... [His systems die and so does he. V.I.N.CENT's eyes slowly look down at his comrade in arms, then turns towards the probe ship, turning his head backwards to look at B.O.B. once more as he leaves.]"

"A wolf remains a wolf, even if it has not eaten your sheep [Manchurian proverb]"

"A pint cannot hold a quart, Mr. Pizer. If it holds, the pint is doing the best it can. [Margaret Deland]"

"I don't mean to sound superior, but I hate the company of robots."

"To quote Cicero: rashness is the characteristic of youth, prudence that of mellowed age, and discretion the better part of valor."

"All sunshine makes a desert, so the Arabs say."

"[to Captain S.T.A.R. being damaged having lost a match] If One Dances...One Must Pay The Piper [Captain S.T.A.R. starts smoking while throwing a fit until overloading] If There's Anything I CANNOT STAND...It's A Sore Loser [Captain S.T.A.R. blows a fuse and collapses]"

"[to B.O.B.] They still haven't improved on our model. You can't modify perfection. We are the best."

"A journey that begins where everything ends"

"[from trailer] There is an inexorable force in the cosmos where time and space converge. A place beyond man's vision, but not his reach. It is the most mysterious and awesome point in the universe, where the here and now may be forever. It is unavoidable, moving through space, swallowing everything in its path, radio waves, light, even planets and stars. Now, man is about to enter...The Black Hole. A journey that begins where everything ends."

"Maximillian Schell - Dr. Hans Reinhardt"

"Anthony Perkins - Dr. Alex Durant"

"Robert Forster - Captain Don Holland"

"Joseph Bottoms - Lieutenant Charlie Pizer"

"Yvette Mimieux - Dr. Kate McCrae"

"Ernest Borgnine - Harry Booth"

"Tom McLoughlin - Captain S.T.A.R. ("Special Troops/Arms Regiment")."

"Roddy McDowall - Voice of V.I.N.CENT (uncredited)"

"Slim Pickens - Voice of Old B.O.B. (uncredited)"

"Weyland Corporation: Building Better Worlds. Hello, friends. My name is Peter Weyland. I am your employer. I am recording this 22 June 2091 — and if you are watching it, you have reached your destination, and I am long dead. May I rest in peace. There is a man sitting with you today — his name is David — he is the closest thing to a son I will ever have. Unfortunately he is not human. He will never grow old and he will never die — and yet he is unable to appreciate these remarkable gifts, for that would require the one thing that David will never have: a soul. I have spent my entire lifetime contemplating the questions "Where do we come from — what is our purpose — what happens when we die?" And I have finally found two people who have convinced me they're on the verge of answering them: Doctors Holloway and Shaw — if you would please stand. As far as you're concerned, they're both in charge. The Titan Prometheus wanted to give mankind equal footing with the gods — for that he was cast from Olympus. Well, my friends, the time has finally come for his return."

"The trick, William Potter, is not minding that it hurts."

"I was designed like this because you people are more comfortable interacting with your own kind. If I didn't wear the suit, it would defeat the purpose."

"Big things have small beginnings."

"How far would you go to get what you came all this way for — to get your answers? What would you be willing to do?"

"This man is here because he does not want to die. He believes you can give him more life."

"Good morning. I am Meredith Vickers, and it is my job to make sure you do yours."

"A king has his reign, and then he dies. It's inevitable."

"It's us — it's everything. What killed them?"

"Final report of the vessel Prometheus. The ship and her entire crew are gone. If you're receiving this transmission, make no attempt to come to its point of origin. There is only death here now, and I'm leaving it behind. It is New Year's Day, the year of our Lord, 2094. My name is Elizabeth Shaw, the last survivor of the Prometheus. And I am still searching."

"Look, I'm just a geologist. I like rocks. I love rocks! Now, it's clear you two don't give a shit about rocks. But what you do seem to care about is gigantic dead bodies. And as I don't really have anything to contribute in the gigantic dead body arena … I'm gonna go back to the ship. If you don't mind."

"The search for our beginning could lead to our end."

"They went looking for our beginning. What they found could be our end."

"Noomi Rapace — Elizabeth Shaw"

"Michael Fassbender — David"

"Guy Pearce — Peter Weyland"

"Idris Elba — Janek"

"Logan Marshall-Green — Charlie Holloway"

"Charlize Theron — Meredith Vickers"

"Rafe Spall — Millburn"

"Sean Harris — Fifield"

"Kate Dickie — Ford"

"Emun Elliott — Chance"

"Benedict Wong — Ravel"

"Your home tells me you're good folk, just like us. One of the haves. And your blue flowers tell me that you support the Purge. We want to treat you fairly, so listen closely. Let me introduce us. We are some fine... young... very educated... guys and gals. We have gotten gussied up in our most terrifying guises. As we do every year. Ready to violate... annihilate, and cleanse our souls. But things took a turn. Our target escaped us, and... Several of your dear neighbors informed us that you, the Sandins, have inexplicably given him sanctuary. Mr. and Mrs., the man you're sheltering is nothing but a dirty, homeless pig. A grotesque menace to our just society, who had the audacity to fight back, killing one of us when we attempted to execute him tonight. The pig doesn't know his place, and now he needs to be taught a lesson. You need to return him to us. Alive. So that we may Purge as we are entitled. Here's the plan, Sandins. You have until our provisions arrive, provisions which will help us break into your elegant home. If you don't... If you don't deliver him by the aforementioned time, we'll release the beast on him... And on you. And, um... we can enter any home we want. And we will want... as wanting is our will on this fine night. Don't force us to hurt you. We don't want to kill our own. Please, just let us Purge. Toodle-oo, Sandins. [leaves]"

"There you are. Thank you for accepting my invitation. Tell me, why haven't you delivered the filthy swine to me yet? Are you protecting him? I certainly hope not, Mr. Sandin."

"Our equipment is arriving soon. And we will get in. Send out he, or that... will be thee."

"I want all these barricades down! Get chains on every door and every window!"

"DEAR MR. AND MRS.! I'M SORRY TO TELL YOU THIS, BUT YOUR TIME IS ESSENTIALLY UP! AND YOU FAILED! YOU FAILED TO DELIVER THE HOMELESS SWINE! I'm very disappointed as you FINE FOLK SHOULD KNOW BETTER! THAT PIECE OF FILTH THAT YOU ARE PROTECTING EXISTS ONLY TO SERVE OUR NEED TO PURGE! So, I bid thee farewell, sweet Sandins. [loads his gun; to his gang] Release the beast, boys! Let the killing commence!"

"One night a year, all crime is legal. Survive the night."

"Reminder all emergency services will be suspended for a 12-hour period during the purge."

"Ethan Hawke - James Sandin"

"Lena Headey - Mary Sandin"

"Max Burkholder - Charlie Sandin"

"Adelaide Kane - Zoey Sandin"

"Edwin Hodge - Bloody Stranger"

"Rhys Wakefield - Polite Leader"

"Tony Oller - Henry"

"Arija Bareikis - Mrs. Grace Ferrin"

"Tom Yi - Mr. Cali"

"Chris Mulkey - Mr. Halverson"

"Tisha French - Mrs. Halverson"

"Dana Bunch - Mr. Ferrin"

"Peter Gvozdas - Dr. Peter Buynak"

"David Basila - George"

"Karen Strassman - Newscaster"

"Evil gets an upgrade."

"Kane Hodder as Jason Voorhees / Uber Jason"

"Lexa Doig as Rowan Lafontaine"

"Lisa Ryder as KM 14"

"Chuck Campbell as Tsunaron"

"Jonathan Potts as Professor Brandon Lowe"

"Peter Mensah as Sergeant Brodski"

"Melyssa Ade as Janessa"

"Melody Johnson as Kinsa"

"Phillip Williams as Crutch"

"Derwin Jordan as Waylander"

"Dov Tiefenbach as Azrael"

"Amanda Brugel as Geko"

"Kristi Angus as Adrienne Thomas"

"Yani Gellman as Stoney"

"Todd Farmer as Dallas"

"David Cronenberg as Dr. Wimmer"

"There's a pretty good chance I'm infected too. If that's the case, I've got just enough fuel left to drop out of orbit and burn up in the atmosphere. At least it'll be quick. You should get this in about 15 minutes, so, uh, I guess I'll be waiting. Five eleven Zulu, Aurora lander out!"

"You'll never get home."

"Liev Schreiber - Vincent Campbell"

"Elias Koteas - Charles Brunel"

"Johnny Harris - Robert Irwin"

"Romola Garai - Rebecca Lane"

"Goran Kostić - Marko Petrovic"

"Tom Cullen - Richard Harrington"

"Olivia Williams - Kim Aldrich"

"Yusra Warsama - Lauren Dalby"

"Patrick Joseph Byrnes - Flight Commander Ellis"

"Paul Warren - Infected Marko"

"[Every time somebody mispronounces his last name] It's "Tatopoulos!""

"That's a lot of fish."

"[after Godzilla discovers one of his dead offspring] He looks angry."

"[After the first fight between Godzilla and the military] What the hell's the matter with you people? You caused more damage than that goddamn thing did!"

"Running would be a good idea."

"Probably the most difficult aspect for Westerners to understand is that at heart Godzilla is considered a force of nature by Japanese and not just an oversized radioactive lizard. Lizards can be killed; but nature can only be dealt with. It was one of the reasons the Roland Emmerich-directed Godzilla [1998] was such a failure with the fans. Like a lot of Westerners, he just didn’t get it."

"[Americans] seem unable to accept a creature that cannot be put down by their arms."

"Amusingly in 1954, Toho made a giant lizard and called it a dinosaur. In 1998, Tristar re-designed Godzilla as a dinosaur, but called it a lizard. Of course that wasn’t the only thing Tristar did wrong. They tried to ruin the monster completely. They took away the only thing that worked in decades of sequels, the look of the monster itself. Then they took away everything that made Godzilla appealing to Kaiju fans, then they tied it down and shot it. Such disrespect. If you’re going to make a movie that already has a fan-base, and they are the ones who will decide whether your film will pay off, respect those fans and the story they’re paying to see."

"Throughout Godzilla, it feels as though Emmerich is embarrassed of his subject matter; the dumb jokes and one-liners ("We need bigger guns," "That's a lot of fish," and so on) are like cynical, condescending winks to the audience. It's also obvious he wants to avoid reminders of the old Japanese films - not only is the creature itself almost totally different, but scenes that the audience expects to see in a picture called Godzilla are missing. Where is Godzilla smashing buildings and incinerating entire city blocks? The fierce battles between Godzilla and the army? The monster rearing back and bellowing his high-pitched roar? The are a few Godzilla-like moments in the affair - for instance, when Godzilla hugs a skyscraper and wails into the night; why doesn't he push the edifice to the ground? Wasn't the point of making a mega-budget Godzilla the chance to relive these classical thrills with super-enhanced visual effects? Sure, a gigantic reptile jogging down Fifth Avenue is impressive, but the new Godzilla was just a way for Sony to make its own upsized, dumbed-down Jurassic Park without getting sued by Steven Spielberg. The experience leaves one wondering why they bothered, for the awe of seeing CGI dinosaurs for the first time is gone, and there's little else that's new. Emmerich tries vainly to create an atmosphere of dread by dowsing the movie with rain, but gloomy skies alone do not equal subtext. The original Godzilla was a harbinger of doom, but this one is a gutless wonder whose only desire is to eat fish and give New York the ultimate pest problem: a clutch of Baby Godzilla eggs."

"...it's not Godzilla, it doesn't have his spirit."

"When I heard that an American motion picture studio was going to produce a Godzilla film, I said, "Of course!""

"Size Does Matter"

"1998. The year of GODZILLA!"

"Something Big Is Happening"

"The city that never sleeps just got a wake-up call."

"Matthew Broderick — Nick"

"Jean Reno — Philippe"

"Maria Pitillo — Audrey"

"Hank Azaria — Animal"

"Kevin Dunn — Colonel Hicks"

"Michael Lerner — Mayor Ebert"

"Harry Shearer — Mr. Caiman"

"Arabella Field — Lucy"

"Vicki Lewis — Elsie"

"Doug Savant — Sergeant O'Neal"

"Malcolm Danare — Dr. Craven"

"Nancy Cartwright — Caiman's Secretary"

"Kurt Carley — Godzilla Mo-Cap Service"

"Frank Welker — Voice of Godzilla"

"[fumes at Japanese officials over him and Ford being caught at Janjira] You're not fooling anybody when you say that what happened 15 years ago was a natural disaster, all right? It was not an earthquake, it wasn't a typhoon, okay?! So stop... [sighs] I'm tired of talking to you about this. I want to see my son. I want to know that he's alright. [points to Japanese guard] This guy, this guy knows. Musuko wa, doko da? [Where is my son?] I want my son, and I want my bags, and discs, [stands up] and I want to talk to somebody in charge. [brushes off official's appeal] No, not you. I'm done talking to you! Alright? [to Dr. Serizawa and Dr. Graham] You're looking at me, right now, like I'm in a fish tank, right? That's fine, because I know what happened. You keep telling everybody that this place is a death zone, but it's NOT! You're lying. Because what's really happening, is that you're hiding something out there. I'm right, aren't I? MY WIFE DIED HERE! Something...killed my wife...AND I HAVE A RIGHT TO KNOW! I deserve answers! [later sits down; reacts to flickering lights] See? You see? There it is again! That is not a transformer malfunction, that is an electromagnetic pulse! It affects everything electrical from miles and miles, and it is happening again! This is what caused everything in the first place! Don't you see that?! And it's gonna send us back to the Stone Age! You have no idea what's coming!"

"The King will rise."

"The King arrives."

"The world ends, Godzilla begins."

"Aaron Taylor-Johnson — Ford"

"Ken Watanabe — Dr. Serizawa"

"Bryan Cranston — Joe"

"Elizabeth Olsen — Elle"

"Juliette Binoche — Sandra"

"Sally Hawkins — Dr. Graham"

"David Strathairn — Admiral Stenz"

"Carson Bolde — Sam"

"Richard T. Jones — Captain Hampton"

"Victor Rasuk — Sergeant Morales"

"T. J. Storm – Godzilla (motion-capture)"

"Matt Cross and Lee Ross — The MUTOs (motion-capture)"

"I can't say that either American film has done much in the way of social commentary. The 1998 film didn't even hint at any kind of social theme; it doesn't really take any discernible stance on anything. The 2014 film paid superficial lip service at best to the nuclear issue, but really there's almost nothing of substance there. Rather than offering caution about nuclear energy, the new film almost gives you the idea that nuclear weapons are actually the answer to everything. Despite the MUTO feeding off of radiation, owing their very existence to it, the humans decide using a nuclear blast is the way to go. And not only that, a nuclear blast in/near a major population center. And when that bomb actually detonates within a few miles of said population center, it's no big deal. No damage, no one is affected. And Godzilla himself is radioactive, the good guy, and not really a threat to people—he is linked to natural radiation. I guess it must be the good kind. So despite the throwaway dialogue about Hiroshima, it seems like radiation/nuclear weapons are not really a big deal to the makers of the film."

"I like Godzilla as much as the next guy. No, I like Godzilla more than the next guy! Since I was a little kid, I watched all those absurd rubber-suit movies thinking how cool it would be if we remade Gojira as a big budget block-buster. They failed to do that in 1985, when they brought back Raymond Burr. They failed to do that in 1998, with Tristar’s GINO (Godzilla In Name Only) and I’m sorry to say that they failed again with the latest attempt."

"During my first meeting with Gareth, I was struck by his deep understanding of the history of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as well as the situation in Japan since the massive earthquake and tsunami that struck on March 11, 2011. He also is well aware of the factors that led to the creation of the character Godzilla. Perhaps because he was born in England, which shares a more nuanced view of nuclear weapons, his understanding of the implications of the Godzilla tale is even more acute than that of my character, Dr. Serizawa. For instance, he had the insight to know that a creature like Godzilla could not be destroyed by nuclear weapons. Moreover, in the film, Godzilla and the fearsome creatures known as MUTOs [Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organisms] are not portrayed as being evil in any way, biologically speaking. Rather, the threat they pose to humanity is much like the danger of a natural disaster. I think that this outlook of the director contributed to the great sense of balance that the movie has."

"Doctor, the 200 million I've sunk into this company is due in great part of your research. But when the market opens Monday, despite my reputation, I don't like heights. Especially falling from them. I'm sorry, honestly."

"So here's the riddle. What does an eight thousand pound mako shark with a brain the size of a flat head V8 engine and no natural predators think about?"

"You think water moves fast? You should see ice. It moves like it has a mind. Like it knows it killed the world once and got a taste for murder. After the avalanche came, it took us a week to climb out. And somewhere, we lost hope. Now, I don't know exactly when we turned on each other. I just know that seven of us survived the slide... and only five made it out. Now we took an oath, that I'm breaking now. Swore we'd say it was the snow that killed the other two, but it wasn't. Nature can be lethal, but it doesn't hold a candle to man. Now you've seen how bad things can get and how quick they can get that way. Well, they can get a whole lot worse. So we're not going to fight anymore! We're going to pull together and find a way to get out of here! First, we're gonna seal off this pool-- [gets eaten by a shark] AAAAHHHHHHH!!!!!!! [another shark is seen tearing his upper body off]"

"By the end, all my father could do was ask why my mother wasn't at home. Each time I said she was dead, I watched him take the loss like a car wreck. What if you could end all that suffering with a single pill? Give me till Monday morning. 48 hours. My results will skyrocket your stock price... or I'll help you pack the lab myself. It's your call."

"You wait your whole life for a single moment... and then one day, it's tomorrow."

"[her last words] She may be the smartest animal on the planet, but she's still just an animal."

"Beneath its glassy surface...a world of gliding monsters."

"Sharks never get cancer, go blind or show loss of brain activity as they age. Unlike some people I know."

"We could all just dive in and see who makes it to the top. Isn't that the old Aquatica spirit, Dr. Susie? Just dive in? You could go first, just to lead by example."

"Who you gonna trust? Me, that's who. You trust me. You know why? Because I'm trustworthy."

"Did someone order the fish?"

"I don't make waves. I meet the terms of my parole. I'm not out to change the world, like the doc. I'm not out to wreck it either."

"That's the answer to the riddle. Because that's what an 8000 pound mako thinks about. About freedom. About the deep blue sea."

"I tell you, man...I quit this job."

"Exactly how many sticks of dynamite would you have to set off in your ears before your head would clear?"

"Sharks are the oldest creatures on the planet...from a time when the world was just flesh and teeth."

"If this is a lesson about the drinking, let's just say I've learned it. No need to get carried away, showing me your vengeful side. I know your wrath, Lord."

"This isn't happening. I'm not Daniel when he faced the lion! So I appreciate the irony, Lord! Cook dies in his own oven! But I've got other plans! [jumps out of upper oven and swims away, lights lighter] You ate my bird! [throws lighter into open oven and blows up the shark]"

"Even in death: Standards."

"Einstein's theory of relativity. Grab hold of a hot pan, a second can seem like an hour. Put your hands on a hot woman...an hour can seem like a second. It's all relative."

"Death is always useless, doctor."

"My name is Sherman Dudley...and if this message finds you, I did not survive, so this is my legacy. I have loved the pulpit and I have loved the bottle. I did my best to be a good husband, a father. I came up wanting. So what do I have to say to you? What mark do I have to leave behind? [beat] We'll begin with the perfect omelette, made with two eggs, not three. Amateurs often add milk for density. This is a mistake!"

"Brothers never make it out of situations like this. Not ever!"

"I hate to interrupt this moment of burgeoning intimacy, but can we get the fuck out of here?"

"Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil. For thou art with me. Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life. Because I carry a big stick and I'm the meanest motherfucker in the valley! Two sharks down, Lord! One demon fish to go! Can I get an Amen?"

"Thomas Jane Carter Blake"

"Saffron Burrows Dr. Susan McCallister"

"Samuel L. Jackson Russell Franklin"

"Jacqueline McKenzie Janice Higgins"

"Michael Rapaport Tom Scoggins"

"Stellan Skarsgård Dr. Jim Whitlock"

"LL Cool J Sherman "Preacher" Dudley"

"Aida Turturro Brenda Kerns"

"It wants us to run. That's how it hunts. This is its jungle. Its game. Its rules. We run, we die."

"[to Isabelle] You know what the difference between you and me is? We both do the same thing. You just do it for a country, so you don't have to admit you like it."

"You know what I was doing when I was taken? Ishak, my spotter. He was caught. I could have done something, but then I would have been slaughtered along with him. So, I hid. I watched him die. I wished I pulled that trigger."

"We're the monsters of our own world."

"We don't have a name for them. '87, Guatemala. A spec ops team went into the jungle. High end. Six men plus a CIA liaison. Only one made it out. In his debrief, he said they came in contact with something. He gave a detailed description. The thing on the totem. It wore some kind of camouflage that adjusted to ambient light. Made it nearly invisible in our spectrum. It could see in infrared. Heat signatures. He used mud to block his. That's how he beat it. It hunted and killed his team, one by one."

"I guess now you realize why they chose me. I was right in front of you guys the whole time. Just watching you. Earning your trust. You couldn't see me for what I really am. You see, back home, I'm a murderer. I'm a freak. But here, among the monsters, I'm normal. I like it here. I wanna stay."

"You know, man, if we ever make it home, I'm going to do so much fucking cocaine. I'm gonna rape so many fine bitches. I'll be like, "What time is it? After 5:00? Damn. Time to go rape me some fine bitches.""

"I'm ready to die. Are you?"

"Wound one man. Make him suffer. Make him bleed. Make him call out for help, and set a trap and kill those who come. I know because I have done this."

"[impaled by the Predator, and activates the bombs where both of them will die] Ну и рожа у тебя. (You are one ugly motherfucker.)"

"[to his imaginary friend] You see the sh*t you've gotten us into, man? I told you that. You never listen to me, though. Six more. Six more fucking mouths to feed. I can barely stand living with you. How am I gonna live with them, too?"

"Oh. Finally found me, huh, big dog? Well, what took you so long?"

"The Hunt Is On"

"The most dangerous killers on the planet... but this is not our planet."

"Adrien Brody - Royce"

"Alice Braga - Isabelle"

"Topher Grace - Edwin"

"Walton Goggins - Stans"

"Oleg Taktarov - Nikolai"

"Louis Ozawa Changchien - Hanzo"

"Mahershalalhashbaz Ali - Mombasa"

"Danny Trejo - Cuchillo"

"Laurence Fishburne - Noland"

"Derek Mears - Classic Predator"

"Brian Steele - Berserker & Falconer Predator"

"Carey Jones - Tracker Predator"

"I will never understand what joy a grown man gets using a $1,000 weapon to blow the face off a cute little deer."

"Grant looks like a squid, don't know where he's gonna hide... Seaworld maybe."

"I reckon Grant ain't got one of them puppy calendars on his desk. He just don't strike me as a real dog lover, is all."

"My easygoing nature is getting sorely fucking tested."

"Well, now that is some fucked up shit."

"Get the fuck out of the way, cocksucker!"

"Ladies and gentlemen, right after God invented this world of ours, he came unto Adam and he said that man should have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the Earth. Now, I believe when God said that, he was thinking of deer season in Wheelsy and how much damn fun it is to shoot a buck or two!"

"Praise Jesus? That's fucking pushing it. This shit's about as far from God as shit can get. Either of you ever seen anything like that? You ever heard of anything like that? Huh? Me neither. And I watch Animal Planet all the fucking time!"

"If I weren't about to shit my pants, I'd be fucking fascinated."

"Come on, baby, don't... Don't look at me like that."

"I'm sorry for trying to strangle you and all. I lost my head. I didn't mean to do none of them things I done. Not kill them pets. Not make Brenda a womb. But it's my nature, ain't it? How can you blame someone for acting according to his own nature? I wanted to tell you what was going on, but I was afraid you wouldn't love me no more. I never knew love, Starla..."

"You ain't gonna shoot me, Starla! I told you: You always needed me to protect you! You for damn sure ain't got the balls to--"

"Hey there, killer!"

"Open this door, you little whore! Don't mess with me, you little slut."

"It's all over, Starla. And I'll keep growing till I'm everywhere. Till I'm all that is! Then you'll know what it feels like to be betrayed. Won't you, sugarplum?"

"I've been around a billion years. You think you can fuck with me?"

"Starla Grant: When Darwin said "fittest," he didn't necessarily mean the strongest, or the most intelligent, or any one trait. He merely meant those organisms most well-suited to their environments. Now, we humans, we think we're more fit, more evolved, because we're smarter. But we're neophytes. We've only been on this Earth two million years, give or take. The cockroach, that fellow's been around 350 million years. So, based on that, which of us is the more successful species?"

"Brenda: [as the alien slugs tear her apart on the inside] Those little fuckers are tearing me apart!"

"Tourneur: He looks likes something that fell off my dick during the war."

"Kylie Strutemyer: His real face looks like a needle. But he's always got another. He goes from place to place, worids, planets, killing them. Some he gets pregnant, others he just takes over with his worms. And the rest he eats till they're gone. Now he's here."

"What's Gotten Into You?"

"Horror Has a New Face"

"Slug it out."

"Feed the fear."

"Nathan Fillion - William "Bill" Pardy"

"Elizabeth Banks - Starla Grant"

"Gregg Henry - Mayor Jackson "Jack" MacReady"

"Michael Rooker - Grantham "Grant" Grant"

"Tania Saulnier - Kylie Strutemyer"

"If you so much as touch that gun without my say-so, I will holster it in your ass."

"Any Christian woman would prefer dying to capture. Mr. Williams had time to reload...because his wife gave it to him. If it came to that... I hope you'd be strong enough to take care of your mother."

"Henry Victor would rather pull toes off the Sioux than follow the trail before us."

"We find the Utes; they lead us to the Burrower tribe; we kill the Burrowers; you get your girl; you build a cabin on the prairie and you play American."

"You wanna go face an Indian war party on your lonesome? Those blanketheads will peel you like an orange, boy."

"Yeah, well, I'd rather walk in the right direction than ride with my head up my ass."

"They wait... They hunt... They feed."

"Evil will surface."

"Clancy Brown - John Clay"

"William Mapother - William Parcher"

"Laura Leighton - Gertrude Spacks"

"Sean Patrick Thomas - Walnut Callaghan"

"Doug Hutchison - Henry Victor"

"Karl Geary - Fergus Coffey"

"Jocelin Donahue - Maryanne Stewart"

"[to Professor Tanabe] Professor Tanabe...I saw it! A creature from the Jurassic era!"

"Following Odo Island tradition, I propose for the time being that we call this creature Godzilla. We encountered Godzilla on Odo Island. This is a photo of its head. We can estimate that it stands approximately 165 feet tall. Why such a creature would appear in our territorial waters is the next question. It was probably hidden away in a deep sea cave, providing for its own survival, and perhaps others like it. However, repeated underwater H-bomb tests have completely destroyed its natural habitat. To put it simply, hydrogen-bomb testing has driven it from its sanctuary."

"Godzilla was baptized in the fire of the H-bomb and survived. What could kill it now?"

"All they can think of is killing Godzilla. Why don't they try to study its resistance to radiation? This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity."

"[last lines] I can't believe that Godzilla was the last of its species. If nuclear testing continues, then someday, somewhere in the world...another Godzilla may appear."

"[describing the Oxygen Destroyer] Just a small ball of this substance could turn all of Tokyo Bay into an aquatic graveyard."

"If used as a weapon, it could lead humanity to exctinction, just like the H-bomb. But I'm determined to find a use for the Oxygen Destroyer that will benefit society. Until then, I won't reveal its existence."

"Ogata...if the Oxygen Destroyer is used even once, the politicians of the world won't stand idly by. They'll inevitably turn it into a weapon. A-bombs against A-bombs, H-bombs against H-bombs. As a scientist - no, as a human being - adding another terrifying weapon to humanity's arsenal is something I can't allow."

"Ogata, men are weak animals. Even if I burn my notes, everything is still in my head. As long as I'm alive, who can say I wouldn't be coerced into using it again?"

"The legend begins..."

"The original, uncut Japanese version—never before released in the US!"

"AWESOME!—and then some!"

"It's Alive!"

"spewing flames that scorch the Earth!"

"Incredible, unstoppable titan of terror!"

"Mightiest monster! Mightiest melodrama of them all!"

"Civilization crumbles as its death rays blast a city of 6 million from the face of the Earth!"

"A monster of mass destruction!"

"The Shodai-Godzilla is popular with fans who prefer the first, serious-tone Godzilla film. This suit featured a heavy lower body, small arms and a large, round head. The face had pronounced brows while the eyes were completely round with tiny pupils, a feature unique to this costume. The suit also included several features particular to itself and to the Gyakushu-Godzilla: fangs, four toes, a rough underside for the tail and pointed tail tip, and staggered rows of dorsal plates (these features would reappear with the “second” series of Godzilla films from 1984 to present)."

"When someone mentions Godzilla and its Japanese origins, people often think of outdated visual effects, a clumsy man in a lizard suit, and a number of over-the-top actors who seem to be trying too hard to convince the audience of the creature’s dangers. That stereotype, however, was created by the 1956 American cut of the original Japanese film."

"But what really downsized the quality of the original motion picture, directed by Ishiro Honda, was the censorship of its explicit subtext, which dealt with the devastating effects of atomic weapons―effects to which the Japanese were introduced to a decade prior to the release of the original film. The original version became a landmark of kaiju―Japanese film genre featuring giant monsters as main antagonists. Having witnessed the destroyed city of Hiroshima one year after the atomic bomb was dropped, Honda became captivated with the idea of such destructive power in the hands of men."

"Apart from the two atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, many major cities including Tokyo were targets to extensive bombing campaigns that caused enormous material damage and the killing of between 241,000 and 900,000 people. All of Japan has seen its fair share of destruction and only nine years after the war, the scars were still fresh. This is why Honda’s film made such a huge impact. This metaphorical layer of Gojira sparked a debate on the potential dangers of scientific progress. In the film, a scientist character devises a weapon of such destructive power that he becomes scared of its misuse. Even though he lets the device be used on taking down the monster, he burns all of his notes and eventually commits suicide so that the weapon could never be used again. This act clearly illustrates Honda’s opinion on the use of science in military purposes that was shared by many of his countrymen. His decision to create a monster so cruel and unsympathetic towards anyone―including women, children, and the old―indicated that Godzilla was more of a god than a monster."

"Along with King Kong, Godzilla is one of the most celebrated movie monsters of all time, yet hardly anyone in this country has seen the original that sparked the phenomenon."

"When this original version was finally shown in America last year, people flocked to see it. They said it was an expression of nuclear anxiety to rank with Dr Strangelove Stanley Kubrick's 1964 black comedy starring Peter Sellers] and Hiroshima Mon Amour [directed by Alain Resnais in 1959]."

"With its images of panic and mass destruction - including spectacular nightly attacks on Tokyo - and its references to nuclear contamination, black rain, bomb shelters and the incineration of Nagasaki, Godzilla struck a chord of terror with Japanese audiences traumatized by recent history and still living with the fear of radiation poisoning."

"Seen in context, Godzilla is not really a futuristic sci-fi fantasy, it's a very real reflection of contemporary terror drawn from contemporary events."

"You might be tempted to laugh at what, by today's standards, are primitive special effects, but very soon this haunting, elegiac mood takes hold of it and you can't just laugh. It is ultimately quite sobering."

"During the U.S.-led occupation, which lasted until 1952, there was a moratorium on any press coverage dealing with the atomic aftermath in any in-depth way. The thinking was that too much attention to the atomic bombings would derail democratization efforts and would undermine U.S. authority, particularly since the U.S. had already begun using Japanese territory as a base from which to launch bombing raids on Vietnam. With the end of the occupation, some activists and journalists started to deal directly with the atomic bombings, but they were not getting much traction. People were more interested in trying to rebuild. But then there was a real game-changer. The U.S. conducted a nuclear test over the Bikini atoll and a Japanese fishing ship, the Lucky Dragon, its crew, and all their fish were exposed to the fallout radiation. When this hit the newspapers, it ignited an enormous scare, as people throughout the country feared that they had been exposed to nuclear radiation through consuming tainted fish. That was in March 1954, shortly before the release of Gojira, the opening scene of which features a fishing crew exposed to an unexplained, destructive flash of light. So, when that hit the big screens, it touched a real nerve with the Japanese public."

"The basic premise of Gojira, the original 1954 version, is that nuclear testing in the Pacific has awakened a terrible dinosaur which, in its wrath, is bent on destroying Tokyo. But, as Barak Kushner and others have noted, the film isn’t so much about destruction as it is about fear. Look at any screenshot of the movie, and pretty much every single person wears an expression of utter terror. This is true whether you’re talking about the scene where the radio reporter is declaiming into his microphone right up to the moment when the monster crushes him, or you’re talking about quieter scenes with the scientist in his lab."

"It was a sober allegory of a film with ambitions as large as its thrice-normal budget, designed to shock and horrify an adult audience. Its roster of frightening images — cities in flames, overstuffed hospitals, irradiated children — would have been all too familiar to cinemagoers for whom memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were still less than a decade old, while its script posed deliberately inflammatory questions about the balance of postwar power and the development of nuclear energy."

"Though the makers of “King Kong” had used stop-motion to create their monster, visual and special effects guru Eiji Tsuburaya knew that method would take too long for the tight production schedule of “Gojira.” The suit his team created, which blended elements of dinosaurs like Tyrannosaurus, Iguanodon and Stegosaurus, featured charcoal-colored skin with fibrous scarring similar to that of victims of the atomic explosion. Haruo Nakajima, who played Gojira, based the monster’s movements on his observations of bears, elephants and other zoo animals. Now 85 years old, the actor recently talked to the Wall Street Journal about wearing the famous suit during the film shoot, which took place in the summer: “The temperatures inside reached 140 degrees.”"

"About 9.6 million Japanese flocked to the theaters to see “Gojira” when it was released, out of a population of 88 million. Though initially critics panned the film as too Hollywood-esque, it became an increasingly popular hit, and would go down in history as one of Japan’s greatest movies. Produced near the beginning of a golden age in Japanese film—the same decade saw the release of classics like “Seven Samurai,” “Ikiru” and “Rashomon”—“Gojira” marked Japan’s return to the international stage after World War II, paving the way to its hosting of the Olympics in 1964 and the economic boom that would make it a major player on the world stage again."

"The original 1954 Japanese film, Gojira was iconic, and only made a couple mistakes of any significance. (1) They killed him in the end, and we saw his body turned to skeleton. Not the best way to begin 60 years worth of sequels. (2) Godzilla was depicted as a dinosaur, and was associated with living trilobites. Even if there was some sort of ‘realm that time forgot’ out in the Pacific somewhere, Trilobites were already extinct before the first dinosaurs, and Godzilla was clearly no dinosaur. The conceptual artists reportedly referenced illustrations of dinosaurs, but that’s not what they rendered. All bi-pedal dinosaurs [Therapods] were digigrade, walking on their toes, like birds, and usually only three or four digits. Godzilla was plantigrade and pentadactyle, (having five digits and walking on the whole foot) just like lizards. It even looks like a lizard, apart from the fact that no reptile has an actual nose or external ears. In a sense, what Toho pictures created was actually an oriental dragon. These tend to mix reptilian and mammalian traits. Amusingly in 1954, Toho made a giant lizard and called it a dinosaur. In 1998, Tristar re-designed Godzilla as a dinosaur, but called it a lizard. Of course that wasn’t the only thing Tristar did wrong. They tried to ruin the monster completely. They took away the only thing that worked in decades of sequels, the look of the monster itself. Then they took away everything that made Godzilla appealing to Kaiju fans, then they tied it down and shot it. Such disrespect. If you’re going to make a movie that already has a fan-base, and they are the ones who will decide whether your film will pay off, respect those fans and the story they’re paying to see."

""Godzilla" is Mr. Honda's most personal film by far. And you can see the imprint that the war left on him. He worked personally on the script, you know, and he spoke many, many times over the years about how his desire for this film, while it was an entertainment film, by and large, but his desire was to send a message, not an indictment of America, the monster really - that's another difference between "Godzilla" and American monster movies of the same time period. The American monsters usually are stand-ins, as I said, for Cold War enemies. Godzilla is not really a stand-in for America. It is more of an indictment of the nuclear age. And Honda's hope was that somehow this film would inspire people to think about disarmament. I think today if he were still alive, he'd be very disappointed that, you know, nuclear weapons are possessed by more nations than ever before."

"Godzilla was the most masterful of all dinosaur movies because it made you believe it was really happening."

"Godzilla, both the character and the film, are a reflection on the Japanese experience at the end of World War II: destruction beyond imagining, and a lurking sense that “We brought this on ourselves” somehow, even without meaning to. In the film we see both the guilt, the feeling that the punishment perhaps outweighs the sin, and the striving for redemption, all of which are typical for such stories. In some ways, there’s a similar arc in the origin of Spider-Man: radioactive accidental origin, great power used without regard for consequence (personal profit for Spidey), punishment out of proportion (the death of Uncle Ben), and eventual redemption as a hero."

"Take Godzilla - from a narrative point of view, its origin was other giant beast movies, like King Kong or some of Ray Harryhausen's work. The first Godzilla film was a very dark, deep piece of filmmaking - almost disturbing in a way. But the love the country and the kids felt for the creature literally evolved Godzilla into a national hero."

"In the original, surprisingly solemn “Godzilla,” the monster was bottom-heavy. “It was the first costume they made, so they really hadn’t worked out the technology of it,” Mr. Tsutsui said in a phone interview. The costume’s framework was wire and bamboo strips, with latex around those elements. “There wasn’t much expressive possibility in that early monster, which I think captured some of the majesty of Godzilla.” With dorsal fins and a large tail, the creature was clearly threatening. Mr. Tsutsui said his makers were influenced by illustrations of dinosaurs, including an article in Life magazine. And Godzilla’s skin reminded Mr. Tsutsui of the scar tissue on the victims of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs. In writing the new screenplay, Max Borenstein was influenced by the original. “It had all these really deep and resonant themes about nuclear disaster and the fears of the atomic bomb, which were very present only nine years after World War II,” he said by phone. “I thought, ‘We need to do what they did, use this creature as a metaphor for a fear that’s very primal.' ”"

"The movie served as a strong political statement, representative of the traumas and anxieties of the Japanese people in an era when censorship was extensive in Japan because of the American occupation of the country after the war ended, Tsutsui said. The screen depicted what many could not explicitly say."

"“As the Americans did with many Japanese soldiers coming back to the homeland, they had them land in Hiroshima so the Japanese soldiers would see how thoroughly defeated Japan had been,” Tsutsui said. “It had a lifetime impact on him the horrors of what he saw, and he decided that he had an opportunity with this movie to set an important political message.”"

"When the monster Godzilla, or “Gojira,” appeared before Japanese movie audiences in 1954, many left the theaters in tears. The fictional creature, a giant dinosaur once undisturbed in the ocean, was depicted in the original film as having been aggravated by a hydrogen bomb. Its heavily furrowed skin or scales were imagined to resemble the keloid scars of survivors of the two atomic bombs that the U.S. dropped on Japan nine years earlier to end World War II. American audiences, however, had the opposite reaction, finding comedic value in what many interpreted as a cheesy monster movie. “Most Americans think if you left the movie in tears, it was just because you laughed so hard,” William Tsutsui, author of “Godzilla on My Mind: Fifty Years of the King of Monsters,” told NBC Asian America. The stark contrast reflects how Hollywood took the Japanese concept and scrubbed it of its political message before presenting it to American audiences to deflect from the U.S. decision to drop the bombs, critics say."

"When outlets like The New York Times reviewed the film in 1956, it was described as “in the category of cheap cinematic horror-stuff and it is too bad that a respectable theatre has to lure children and gullible grown-ups with such fare.” The deliberate aesthetic choices that the original filmmakers made on the creature’s keloid-like scars were even interpreted as low-budget Japanese filmmaking with critics at the time likening the monster to a “miniature of a dinosaur made of gum-shoes and about $20 worth of toy buildings and electric trains.”"

"Hollywood ultimately sought to sanitize the movie and deflect blame from the U.S. bombings, Tsutsui said. “Certainly all the pieces that were in any way, could in any way be construed as critical of the United States or atomic testing, were really stricken from the film,” Tsutsui said. “So the deep political meaning and a lot of the heart of the original 'Godzilla' was cut out for American audiences.” Kazu Watanabe, head of film at the Japan Society, had similar thoughts, saying that the U.S. adaptation contributed to the distorted, skewed views that Americans had of Japan at the time. “These 'Godzilla' films were not received in the same way in general — in Japan the early films were big budget, major studio films featuring some recognizable stars, while in the U.S. they were more like lowbrow B-movie Japanese monster movie genre fare with funny dubbing that fed into an Orientalist understanding of Japanese culture in America at large,” he said. The way in which the movie went through another layer of censorship before it was presented to American audiences, Tsutsui explained, shows just how sensitive people were to the inherent inhumanity of the atomic bombings. “They worked hard to protect the American public from the truth that really the Americans who watched the film never had a chance to respond to it in a meaningful way.”"

"Your favorite fire-breathing monster…Like you've never seen him before!"

"The Legend Is Reborn."

"Ken Tanaka — Goro Maki"

"Yasuko Sawaguchi — Naoko Okamura"

"Yosuke Natsuki — Professor Makoto Hayashida"

"Keiju Kobayashi — Prime Minister Seiki Mitamura"

"Shin Takuma — Hiroshi Okamura"

"Eitaro Ozawa — Minister of Finance Kanzaki"

"Hiroshi Koizumi — Professor Minami"

"Mizuho Suzuki — Minister of Foreign Affairs Seiichi Emori"

"Taketoshi Naito — Chief Cabinet Secretary Takegami"

"Yoshifumi Tajima — Minister of the Environment Hidaka"

"Kenpachiro Satsuma — Godzilla"

"For the rebirth of the Godzilla legend, Toho decided to once again portray the King of the Monsters as an evil creature. Thus the 1984 Godzilla would possess the general appearance of the 1954 Godzilla (from Godzilla, King of the Monsters) and the facial expression of the 1964 Godzilla (from Godzilla vs. the Thing), the latter incarnation being arguably the most evil-looking version of Godzilla up to that time. The 1984 Godzilla suit therefore possessed features previously seen only on the 1954 and 1955 (Godzilla Raids Again) suits; fangs, four toes, ears, staggered rows of dorsal plates, and a rough underside of the tail. The detailing in the legs for the 1984 Godzilla was very good, but the musculature for the chest and shoulders were less well-defined, thus diminishing the costume’s overall image of power. The dorsal plates were very well-detailed, but also appeared to be more numerous compared to the 1954 and 1955 costumes. The largest dorsal plate was placed at waist level, which had not been done before or since. The tail was longer than any previous version, the neck was short and the head was fairly large in proportion to the body. The 1964-style eyes, with red-brown irises, looked suitably evil. The 1984 costume also boasted a new feature for a Godzilla suit; the upper lip could curl up in snarl. It was so advanced, one might think it could even read a 3D barcode."

"We went back to the theme of nuclear weapons, since that was the theme of the original film. Japan has now learned three times what a nuclear disaster is, but at that time Japan had already had two. The problem was Japanese society was gradually forgetting about these disasters. They were forgetting how painful it had been. Everyone in Japan knew how scary nuclear weapons were when the original movie was made, but it wasn't like that by the 1980s. So in those meetings, we decided to remind all those people out there who had forgotten."

"One thing I was against was having the white of Godzilla's eye visible between the iris and his lower eyelid to make him look scary. Godzilla had been a hero for a while, but even a hero needs a taste of sadness. Even if he's a villain, I wanted a bit of sorrow in his eyes. I didn't want his eyes to be obviously scary."

"When you and the monster meet, be sure you tell him all about your corn problems."

"The motion picture screen beckons you to adventure that thrills the emotions with shock and terror!"

"The Two Mightiest Monsters Of All Time!"

"The most colossal conflict the screen has ever known!"

"The Battle of the Century!!"

"Now an all-mighty all-new motion picture brings them together for the first time in the colossal class of all time!"

"Mighty King Kong! Mighty Godzilla!"

"Tadao Takashima — Osamu Sakurai"

"Kenji Sahara — Kazuo Fujita"

"Yu Fujiki — Kinsaburo Furue"

"Ichirō Arishima — Mr. Tako"

"Mie Hama — Fumiko Sakurai"

"Jun Tazaki — General Masami Shinzo"

"Akiko Wakabayashi — Tamiye"

"Akihiko Hirata — Prime Minister Shigezawa"

"Somesho Matsumoto — Onuki, doctor"

"Akemi Negishi — Chikiro's Mother, Faro Island native"

"Senkichi Omura — Konno, TTV translator"

"Sachio Sakai — Obayashi, Mr. Tako's assistant"

"Haruya Kato — Obayashi's assistant"

"Nadao Kirino — General's aide"

"Yoshio Kosugi — Faro Island Chief"

"Shin Otomo — ship captain"

"Harold Conway — scientist on submarine"

"Shoichi Hirose — King Kong"

"Haruo Nakajima — Godzilla"

"One of the most popular Godzilla designs, the Kingoji was radically different from any Godzilla suit before or since. The costume was more reptilian in appearance and the build was very stocky, especially in the lower half. The head was small and streamlined, with a strange combination of human-like eyes placed on the sides of the head in a reptilian manner. Other distinctive features for the Kingoji included large hands with spike-like claws and thumbs nearly as large as the three other fingers. The Kingoji also had several features that would be common to all Godzilla suits until the rebirth of the Godzilla series in 1984. These were a lack of ears, no fangs, three toes, smooth underside for the tail, and one main row of dorsal plates flanked by two small rows."

"If they play around with cells, genetic engineers might well create their own Chimera—a new life form, totally alien, totally different to what God intended for Earth. Frightening, don't you think?"

"[to Dr. Shiragami] So you did do it. You amalgamated one of Godzilla's cells together with the plant's cells. Are you proud of this? What kind science do you call this?"

"Miki Saegusa; she's the best channeler of ESP that we have at the Mental Science Exploitation Center. It has been shown through a number of experiments over the years that plants have their own fields of mental energy, so it's no surprise that we've found somebody who can communicate with them."

"Japan has suffered devastation brought by nuclear bombs, and now there's Godzilla. It is only right we should have a weapon that can protect us from our enemies."

"Godzilla and Biollante aren't monsters. It's the unscrupulous scientists who create them that are monsters."

"[last lines] How long have we been living in such an age? Maybe it started when man first stepped out of the garden of Eden and left his innocence behind. Man would do well to remember this day, forever."

"The Super-Beast Battle of the Century"

"The most terrifying monster of all time is back in his greatest movie ever"

"The ultimate battle has only just begun."

"Kunihiko Mitamura — Kazuhito Kirishima"

"Yoshiko Tanaka — Asuka Okouchi"

"Masanobu Takashima — Colonel Sho Kuroki"

"Megumi Odaka — Miki Saegusa"

"Koji Takahashi — Doctor Genichiro Shiragami"

"Toru Minegishi — Lt. Goro Gondo"

"Toshiyuki Nagashima — Director Seiichi Yamamoto"

"Ryunosuke Kaneda — Seido Okouchi"

"Kazuma Matsubara — Super X II coordinator"

"Yasunori Yuge — Prime Minister"

"Yoshiko Kuga — Owada, Prime Minister's wife"

"Yasuko Sawaguchi — Erika Shiragami"

"Brien Uhl — SSS9"

"Koichi Ueda — General Hyodo"

"Kōsuke Toyohara — Super X|Super X II controller"

"Kurt Cramer — John Lee, Bio-Major spy"

"Derrick Homes — Michael Low, Bio-Major spy"

"Demon Kakka — himself"

"Abdallah Helal — Saradian scientist"

"Manjot Beoi — Saradian plant director"

"Haruko Sagara — T. V. reporter"

"Kenpachiro Satsuma — Godzilla"

"Masashi Takegumi — Biollante"

"The 1989 Godzilla featured a triangular build, with stocky legs recalling the 1962 Godzilla. The chest and shoulders featured pronounced musculature, which gave the 1989 Godzilla a very powerful appearance. The number of dorsal plates was reduced, but oddly the largest plate placed at shoulder level. The tail was shorter than the previous suit and the underside was smooth, in common with all Godzilla suits from 1962 to 1975. The other features of the 1984 Godzilla, such as the fangs, ears and four toes were all retained. The neck of the 1989 Godzilla was longer and the size of the head reduced. The face was changed radically, and featured a fierce expression with several new features; a feline-like upper lip, multiple rows of shark-like teeth and eyes with large, brown irises and very little white showing. The new face added much to Godzilla’s evil personality, making the King of the Monsters appear fiercer and more dragon-like than before. It also made him look more intelligent, as it seems like he would even know how to make a QR code."

"That film was such a leap forward in creativity and focused a lot on Godzilla vs humanity, which I actually like more than Godzilla battling other monsters. The film has a lot of weak points, but all the new ideas and techniques were exciting to see."

"I don't know much about the score for GODZILLA 1985. However, my impression of GODZILLA VS. BIOLLANTE is a negative one, both in terms of the direction and the music. For example, the music that is heard while the scenes that take place in Saradia are shown is just ridiculous. The composer used European music instead of some modern Arabic music. By the way, during the production of GODZILLA VS. BIOLLANTE, Toho asked for permission to use some of my music in the film. I said that I would allow its use as long as it was not turned into popular music. Toho agreed to that, but just before GODZILLA VS. BIOLLANTE was completed, a Toho representative came to me and said, "Well, your music was turned into popular music." By that time, it was too late to do anything about the situation. After GODZILLA VS. BIOLLANTE was released, my daughter came to me and said, "No matter how much you try to escape from Godzilla movies, Toho always uses your name and your melodies, so why don't you just score the next Godzilla film yourself?" That is why I agreed to work on GODZILLA VS. GHIDRAH."

"As in the original 1954 Godzilla, there is a brilliant scientist who has the unique ability to create a new super-weapon that will supplant nuclear bombs. This then poses the moral dilemma: The new weapon will put Japan ahead of the two former superpowers and likely incite significant international tension. At the same time, the new weapon is essential to defend Japan from Godzilla. Ultimately, the scientist does implement the weapon against Godzilla, but dies, taking the dangerous secret with him. Viewed in closer detail, though, important differences between the 1954 and 1989 handling of this theme illustrate a generational change in attitude towards Japan's position in the world. While the first Godzilla series exhibited an optimism born out of Ishiro Honda's political beliefs, the new series reflected a modern, morally complex sensibility."

"The original idea was to find something that could match Godzilla's power and terror if we were bringing back Godzilla. But simply letting the monsters fight each other had been done many times and, clearly, there was a limit to it. So in order to bring back Godzilla properly we had to create an opponent that can fight properly. If there was something equivalent to the terror of nuclear power it must be the bio-technology which human beings would manipulate life, because it can be very dangerous if it goes the wrong way, ethically, I guess. That's where I found the connection, so the idea of a monster was created by biotechnology was born."

"I felt that the costume I used in Godzilla 1985 controlled me, but that I controlled the one used in Godzilla vs. Biollante."

"Nothing Like This Ever On the Screen!"

"WHAT IS IT…How much terror can you stand?"

"SEE the armies of the world destroyed! SEE the BIRTH of the world's most terrifying monster! SEE the war of the GIANTS!"

"Akira Takarada — Ichiro Sakai"

"Yuriko Hoshi — Junko Nakanishi"

"Hiroshi Koizumi — Professor Miura"

"Yū Fujiki — Nakamura"

"The Peanuts, Emi and Yumi Ito — the Shobijin"

"Yoshifumi Tajima — Kumayama"

"Kenji Sahara — Jiro Torahata"

"Jun Tazaki — Murata, chief editor"

"Kenzo Tabu — politician"

"Yoshio Kosugi — Infant Island Chief"

"Akira Tani — head villager"

"Susumu Fujita — Japanese SDF Officer"

"Ikio Sawamura — priest"

"Ren Yamamoto — sailor"

"Katsumi Tezuka, Tadashi Okabe, Kozo Nomura — soldiers"

"Koji Uno — journalist"

"Senkichi Omura — villager"

"Yutaka Sada — school principal"

"Miki Yashiro — school teacher"

"Haruo Nakajima — Godzilla"

"Widely regarded as the best Godzilla suit of all time, the Mosugoji was as different from the Kingoji as the Kingoji was from its two predecessors. The body of the Mosugoji was sleek and bell-shaped with a pronounced breast bone and knees. The hands featured slender, sharp claws with the fingers held apart, which looked like they could tear the nicest high-rise OC apartments to ribbons. The dorsal plates were nearly identical to those of the Kingoji. The head was well proportioned to the body and the facial features were chillingly defined, with pronounced brows and splendidly evil eyes."

"[on the disappearance of the princess] Yes, I think she survived because she fell into a gap between dimensions. You may not be aware of this...but there are other dimensions besides those we know. And there's a whole other world therein. The explosion created a gap between the two worlds. She was saved when she fell into it."

"The Three-Headed Monster battles Godzilla, Mothra and Rodan for the world!"

"Yosuke Natsuki — Detective Shindo"

"Yuriko Hoshi — Naoko Shindo"

"Hiroshi Koizumi — Professor Miura"

"Akiko Wakabayashi — Princess Selina Salno of Selgina"

"Takashi Shimura — Dr. Tsukamoto"

"Hisaya Ito — Malness, Chief assassin"

"Akihiko Hirata — Chief Detective Okita"

"Kenji Sahara — Kanamaki, Naoko's editor"

"The Peanuts — Shobijin"

"Somesho Matsumoto — UFO expert"

"Ikio Sawamura — Fisherman"

"Kozo Nomura — Murai's Assistant"

"Susumu Kurobe, Kazuo Suzuki Toru Ibuki — Assassins Malness henchman"

"Haruya Kato — journalist"

"Shin Otomo — leader of the Assassins Malness boss"

"Senkichi Omura — Hat Retriever"

"Eisei Amamoto — Wu, Butler"

"Yutaka Nakayama — tourist (lost hat)"

"Yutaka Oka — meteorite scientist"

"Yoshio Kosugi — Chief of Infant Island"

"Heihachiro Okawa — astronomer"

"Yoshifumi Tajima — ship captain"

"Haruo Nakajima — Godzilla"

"Masaki Shinohara — Rodan"

"Shoichi Hirose — King Ghidorah"

"Our actions are controlled by electronic computers, not by human emotions. When that law is violated, the offender is eliminated."

"Fools! Our computers are always invincible. Adjust them to normal!"

"[in a note] Dear Glenn: When you receive this letter I shall have been eliminated for disobeying the directives of our computers. But I have no regrets. With you I have found a love beyond all computation."

"Not as popular as its two predecessors, the Daisenso-Godzilla featured a head slightly larger than that of the Mosugoji, with a round face and jaws. The body was thin and had no defined shape, appearing sack-like and unnatural. The fingers were not held apart like the Mosugoji but were grouped together, with the claws becoming less menacing; all following Godzilla suits until the 84 Godzilla would have this feature. On the plus side, the dorsal plates and the tail of the Daisenso-Godzilla were nicely detailed and the eyes were movable."

"Nick Adams — Astronaut Glenn"

"Akira Takarada — Astronaut Fuji"

"Kumi Mizuno — Namikawa"

"Jun Tazaki — Dr. Sakurai"

"Akira Kubo — Tetsuo Torii"

"Keiko Sawai — Haruno Fuji"

"Yoshio Tsuchiya — Controller of Planet X"

"Takamaru Sasaki — Chairman of Earth Committee"

"Gen Shimizu — Minister of Defense"

"Yoshifumi Tajima — General"

"Nadao Kirino — Military aide"

"Kenzo Tabu — Commander from Planet X, Earth Unit"

"Koji Uno — Namikawa's associate"

"Somesho Matsumoto — Buddhist priest"

"Haruo Nakajima — Godzilla"

"Masaki Shinohara — Rodan"

"Shoichi Hirose — King Ghidorah"

"Monsters of mass destruction."

"The Battle Cry that Could Save the World!"

"The Monsters are in revolt. And the world is on the brink of destruction!!"

"Akira Kubo — Captain Katsuo Yamabe"

"Jun Tazaki — Dr. Yoshido"

"Yukiko Kobayashi — Kyoko Manabe"

"Yoshio Tsuchiya — Dr. Otani"

"Kyoko Ai — Kilaaks Queen"

"Andrew Hughes — Dr. Stevenson"

"Kenji Sahara — Nishikawa, Moon Base Commander"

"Seishiro Kuno, Wataru Omae, Naoya Kusakawa, Yasuhiko Saijô — SY-3 astronauts"

"Kazuo Suzuki, Toru Ibuki, Susumu Kurobe, Minoru Ito — Kilaakian controlled staffers"

"Seishiro Hisano, Ken Echiyo — SY-3 engineers"

"Keiko Miyauchi, Atsuko Takahashi, Yoshio Miyata, Ari Sagawa, Kyoko Mori, Midori Uchiyama, Wakako Tanabe, Michiko Ishii — Kilaakian"

"Haruo Nakajima — Military advisor"

"Metal meets monster."

"Battle to save the Earth!"

"From a black hole in space…they came to conquer Earth…!"

"Katsuhiko Sasaki — Akira Ichinose"

"Tomoko Ai — Katsura Mafune"

"Akihiko Hirata — Dr. Shinji Mafune"

"Katsumasa Uchida — Jiro Murakoshi, Interpol agent"

"Goro Mutusmi — Mugal, black hole alien leader"

"Toru Ibuki — Tsuda, black hole alien lieutenant"

"Kenji Sahara — General Segawa"

"Tadao Nakamaru — Chief Interpol Tagawa"

"Akinori Umezu — boy #1"

"Toru Kawai — Godzilla"

"Ise Mori — Mechagodzilla"

"Tatsumi Nikamoto — Titanosaurus"

"My original version of the script focused on Katsura Mafune, the girl who had been turned into a cyborg by aliens from outer space. Even after she had been altered, she had emotions. As long as this idea was not removed from the script, I didn't care all that much about what was done with it."

"Leave that alone and get out of here!"

"There must be a way back. God knows there's a way back! If only they'd leave me alone..."

"All right, you fools. You've brought it on yourselves! Everything would've come right if you'd only left me alone. You've driven me near madness with your peering through the keyholes and gaping through the curtains, and now you'll suffer for it! You're crazy to know who I am, aren't you?! All right! I'll show you! [removes his false nose] Here's a souvenir for you! [removes his glasses] And one for you! [starts unravelling his bandages] I'll show you who I am, and what I am! [laughs madly]"

"[as he takes off his clothes] They've asked for it, the country bumpkins. This will give them a bit of a shock, something to write home about. A nice bedtime story for the kids, too, if they want it."

"Are you satisfied now, you fools?! It's easy, really, if you're clever. A few chemicals mixed together, that's all, and flesh and blood and bone just fade away! [lifts a bottle filled with a serum] A little of this injected under the skin of the arm every day for a month. An invisible man can rule the world! Nobody will see him come, nobody will see him go. He can hear every secret! He can rob, and wreck, and kill! [laughs madly]"

"Just a scientific experiment at first, that's all. To do something no other man in the world had done. But there's more to it than that, Kemp - I know now. It came to me suddenly. The drugs I took seemed to light up my brain. Suddenly I realized the power I held. The power to rule, to make the world grovel at my feet! [laughs] We'll soon put the world right now, Kemp, you and I."

"I must have a partner, Kemp. A visible partner, to help me in the little things. You're my partner, Kemp. We'll begin with a reign of terror. A few murders here and there. Murders of great men, murders of little men, just to show we make no distinction. We might even wreck a train or two - just these fingers around the signalman's throat, that's all..."

"Put a warm rug in the car. It's cold outside when you have to go about naked."

"The secret of invisibility lies there in my books. I shall work in Kemp's laboratory till I find the way back. There is a way back, Flora! And then I shall come to you. I shall offer my secret to the world, with all its terrible power! The nations of the world will bid for it - thousands, millions! The nation that wins my secret can sweep the world with invisible armies!"

"Power, I said! Power to walk into the gold vaults of the nations, into the secrets of kings, into the Holy of Holies. Power to make multitudes run squealing in terror at the touch of my little invisible finger. Even the moon's frightened of me! Frightened to death! The whole world's frightened to death!"

"Thank you, Kemp, for opening the window. You're a true friend, Kemp. A man of trust. I've no time now, but believe me, as surely as the moon will set and the sun will rise, I shall kill you tomorrow night. I shall kill you even if you hide in the deepest cave of the Earth. At ten o'clock tomorrow night, I shall kill you."

"[his last words] I knew you would come to me, Flora. I wanted to come back to you. My darling... I failed. I meddled in things... that man must leave alone..."

"Constable Jaffers: He's invisible, that's what's the matter with him. If he gets the rest of them clothes off, we'll never catch him in a thousand years."

"Dr. Cranley: I think we must tell the police that Griffin has disappeared."

"H.G. Well's Fantastic Sensation"

"Catch me if you can!"

"Claude Rains — Dr. Jack Griffin"

"Gloria Stuart — Flora Cranley"

"William Harrigan — Dr. Arthur Kemp"

"Henry Travers — Dr. Cranley"

"Una O'Connor — Jenny Hall"

"The thing that impresses me the most is the complete and utter silence. You can almost hear it."

"Archaeologists are underpaid publicity agents for deceased royalty."

"In archaeology all things are possible."

"It's the light! Their eyes can't tolerate the light!"

"In this thin air it's possible to imagine anything."

"Terrifying monsters from a lost age!"

"From a Lost Age... HORROR Crawls from the Depths of the Earth!"

"John Agar — Dr. Roger Bentley"

"Cynthia Patrick — Adad"

"Hugh Beaumont — Dr. Jud Bellamin"

"Alan Napier — Elinu, the High Priest"

"Nestor Paiva — Prof. Etienne Lafarge"

"Phil Chambers — Dr. Paul Stuart"

"Rodd Redwing — Nazar"

"Robin Hughes — First Officer"

"Frank Baxter — himself"

"None of the ants previously seen by man were more than an inch in length - most considerably under that size. But even the most minute of them have an instinct and talent for industry, social organization, and savagery that makes man look feeble by comparison."

"We may be witnesses to a Biblical prophecy come true - 'And there shall be destruction and darkness come upon creation, and the beasts shall reign over the Earth.'"

"A horror horde of crawl-and-crush giants clawing out of the earth from mile-deep catacombs!"

"Kill one and two take its place!"

"The Amazing New Warner Bros. Sensation!"

"James Whitmore — Sgt. Ben Peterson"

"Edmund Gwenn — Dr. Harold Medford"

"Joan Weldon — Dr. Pat Medford"

"James Arness — FBI Agent Robert Graham"

"Roger came to me and said, 'I want to make a picture called 'Attack of the Giant Crabs,' and I asked, 'Does it have to be atomic radiation?' He responded, 'Yes.' He said it was an experiment. 'I want suspense or action in every scene. No kind of scene without suspense or action.' His trick was saying it was an experiment, which it wasn't. He just didn't want to bother cutting out the other scenes, which he would do."

"I had just read 'The Silent World' by Jacques Cousteau and found it to be new and exciting. So when that picture came along, I wrote all the underwater stuff and went to Roger and told him I’d direct all the underwater parts for $100. He said 'okay.' If I had just asked, he would have said 'no.' I had to put it in a way that he would jump at. So I directed all that stuff and it was rather funny. I’d be down at the bottom of the tank at Marineland trying to get actors to do something while (director of photography) Floyd Crosby was hammering at the glass window trying to get them to do something else. It was all pretty silly."

"Richard Garland — Dale Drewer"

"Pamela Duncan — Dr. Martha Hunter"

"Russell Johnson — Hank Chapman"

"Leslie Bradley — Dr. Karl Weigand"

"Mel Wells — Jules Deveroux"

"I can transport matter — anything — at the speed of light, perfectly. Of course this is only a crude beginning, but I've stumbled on the most important discovery since man sawed off the end of a tree trunk and found the wheel. The disintegrator-integrator will change life as we know it. Think what it means. Anything, even humans, will go through one of these devices. No need for cars or railways or airplanes, even spaceships. We'll set up matter-receiving stations throughout the world, and later the universe. There'll never be famine. Surpluses can be sent instantaneously at almost no cost, anywhere. Humanity need never want or fear again. I'm a very fortunate man, Hélène."

"God gives us intelligence to uncover the wonders of nature. Without the gift, nothing is possible."

"The more I know, the more sure I am I know so little. The eternal paradox."

"The search for the truth is the most important work in the whole world — and the most dangerous."

"No, Helene and Andre believed in the sacredness of life. They wouldn't harm anything... not even a fly."

"You've committed murder just as much as Helene did. You killed a fly with a human head. She killed a human with a fly head."

"Help! Help me! Please help me! Help me!"

"The monster created by atoms gone wild."

"She had to kill the thing her husband had become—but could she?"

"If she looked upon the horror her husband had become... she would scream for the rest of her life!"

"David Hedison — Andre Delambre"

"Patricia Owens — Helene Delambre"

"Vincent Price — Francois Delambre"

"Herbert Marshall — Inspector Charas"

"Kathleen Freeman — Emma"

"Dave, if it is a meteorite, the chances are it's been hurtling around our universe for a good many centuries. The answer to your question lies buried in those centuries. We'll just have to dig for it."

"You've got to remember, Dave, when this hit our atmosphere, it burned at such a fantastic temperature, that its metal-bearing compounds could have been altered - left ready to activate, to grow!"

"Narrator: From time immemorial the Earth has been bombarded by objects from outer space. Bits and pieces of the Universe piercing our atmosphere in an invasion that never ends. Meteor, the shooting stars on which so many earthly wishes have been born! Of the thousands that plummet toward us, the greater part are destroyed in a firey flash as they strike the layers of the air that encircle us. Only a small percentage survives. Most of those fall into the water which covers two-thirds of our world. But from time to time from the beginning of time a very few meteors have struck the crust of the Earth and formed craters - craters of all sizes sought after, poured over by scientists of all nations for the priceless knowledge buried within them. In every moment of every day they come from planets belonging to stars whose dying light is too far away to be seen. From infinity they come. Meteors! Another strange calling card from the limitless regions of space - its substance unknown, its secrets unexplored. The meteor lies dormant in the night - waiting!"

"Martin Cochrane: The desert's full of things that don't belong. Take the salt here. Used to be an ocean bed. Now that ocean knew that the middle of a desert was a pretty silly place for it to be, so it just dried up and went away."

"Joe Higgins: Look at the dog - it's as hard as a piece of granite!"

"From Outer Space They Came - Meteor Borne, Meteor Strange!"

"Stranger Than Anything Science Had Ever Discovered As Thrill Crowds Upon Thrill!"

"The most startling science fiction concept ever brought to the screen!"

"Now The Amazing Monolith Monsters Reveal Powers Shocking Beyond Belief!"

"Grant Williams — Dave Miller"

"Lola Albright — Cathy Barrett"

"Les Tremayne — Martin Cochrane"

"Trevor Bardette — Professor Arthur Flanders"

"[to June] Dan McCormack, as you knew him, was doomed the first day he came into this laboratory."

"[to Dr. Rigas] With all the constructive things to be done, why do you concentrate on destruction?"

"The most amazing monster the world has ever known."

"THE TOUCH OF DEATH!"

"Lionel Atwill — Dr. Paul Rigas"

"Lon Chaney, Jr. — Dan McCormick"

"Anne Nagel — June Lawrence"

"Frank Albertson — Mark Adams"

"w:Samuel S. Hinds as Dr. John Lawrence"

"William B. Davidson — Ralph Stanley, the district attorney"

"Ben Taggart — Detective sergeant"

"Constance Bergen — Nurse"

"Ivan Miller — Doctor"

"Chester Gan — Wong"

"George Meader — Dr. Bruno"

"Frank O'Connor — Detective"

"John Dilson — Medical examiner"

"Ah, the human female in the perfect state - helpless and silent."

"Co-ed beauty captive of man-monster! Campus terror! Students victims of terror-beast!"

"Chills! Thrills!"

"Arthur Franz — Prof. Donald Blake"

"Eddie Parker — Prof. Donald Blake as a Monster"

"Joanna Moore — Madeline Howard"

"Judson Pratt — Lt. Mike Stevens"

"Nancy Walters — Sylvia Lockwood"

"In all the kingdom of the living, there is no more deadly or voracious creature than the praying mantis."

"I'm convinced that we're dealing with a Mantis in whose geological world the smallest insects were as large as man, and now failing to find those insects as food, well... it's doing the best that it can."

"The female is larger than the male and invariably destroys her mate when he's fulfilled his function in life."

"Maybe there's an ordinary explanation to what happened, but I wouldn't take any bets."

"Narrator: [a volcano near Antarctic erupts, causing an ice flow in the Arctic, which releases the Deadly Mantis] For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction."

"A Thousand Tons of Horror! From A Million Years Ago ..."

"The most dangerous monster that ever lived!"

"This Was the Day That Engulfed the World in Terror!"

"Out of a million years ago ... a thousand tons of horror!"

"Craig Stevens — Col. Joe Parkman"

"William Hopper — Dr. Nedrick 'Ned' Jackson"

"Alix Talton — Marge Blaine"

"Donald Randolph — Gen. Mark Ford"

"Pat Conway — Sgt. Pete Allen"

"Florenz Ames — Prof. Anton Gunther"

"Paul Smith — Corporal, Parkman's Clerk"

"Phil Harvey — Lou, Radar Man"

"Floyd Simmons — Army Sergeant"

"Paul Campbell — Lt. Fred Pizar"

"Helen Jay — Mrs. Farley"

"As we all know, there's a hypothesis that Godzilla's power source, which is equal to the heart in a man, is nothing but a power reactor. Apparently, something is happening there, in the reactor, in Godzilla's heart. Look at this. I have here a thesis which accurately analyzes it from every point of view. It came through the Internet from a Japanese college boy. It's an interesting and certainly unusual opinion about Godzilla."

"It's a major monster meltdown!"

"I was surprised that Godzilla was going to die on land instead of in the ocean, which was his cradle. I think it's natural for Godzilla to die because he is a living thing, but I envisioned his death differently. My idea was based on the legend of the tomb of elephants. According to the legend, when a clownfish begins to feel that he is going to die, he secretly goes to the tomb. I envisioned Godzilla returning to the South Pacific when he began to feel that his end was coming. There then would have been some implication that Godzilla had died."

"I had to wear an oxygen mask both in the water and on land because of the carbon monoxide. I fainted four times during the first day of filming. We were shooting the scene in which Godzilla emerges from the water as he approaches Hong Kong. I wasn't warned about the carbon monoxide, so I wasn't wearing an oxygen mask. We were shooting in water, so nobody could just run up to me when they saw me acting strangely. We were filming a long shot, so nobody was very close to me. The members of the staff didn't realize I'd fainted that first time until they started opening up the costume so I could get out."

"No human being could eat that poisonous meat and live!"

"Rick, if there's no way out, use that gun on Louise."

"[finding a human skeleton] Radek ate him!"

"The water! He's afraid of the water!"

"Man created him and God destroyed him, He brought the rain and the clean air."

"Radek: -I just can't help it, I have this uncontrollable urge to eat meat. Red... raw... meat-"

"Rick: There might be an entirely new set of laws, Jim, that we know nothing about."

"The terrifying story that COULD COME TRUE!"

"ATTACKED... by a creature from hell!"

"Human emotions stripped raw!"

"A new high in naked shrieking terror!"

"Richard Denning — Rick"

"Lori Nelson — Louise Maddison"

"Adele Jergens — Ruby"

"Mike Connors — Tony Lamont"

"Paul Birch — Jim Maddison"

"Raymond Hatton — Pete"

"Paul Dubov — Radek"

"Jonathan Haze — a Contaminated Man"

"Paul Blaisdell — the Mutant"

"Chet Huntley — Narrator"

"I'll kill you Alligator Man! Just like I'd kill any four-legged gator!"

"Dirty, stinkin', slimy gators!"

"Louann, the maid: Miz Hawthorne, she deal with the Evil One."

"The alligator people will make your skin crawl!"

"Her Honeymoon...Shattered by an Unbelievable Horror!"

"Terror in the Bayou!"

"Her honeymoon turned into a nightmare of horror!"

"Nerve-shattering terror!"

"Beverly Garland — Joyce Webster"

"Bruce Bennett — Dr. Eric Lorimer"

"Lon Chaney Jr. — Mannon"

"George Macready — Dr. Mark Sinclair"

"Nick Adams — Dr. James Bowen"

"Tadao Takashima — Dr. Ken'ichiro Kawaji"

"Kumi Mizuno — Dr. Sueko Togami"

"Yoshio Tsuchiya — Captain Kawai"

"Even the Sharknados are tougher in New York."

"I know you're scared. I'm scared too. They're sharks. They're scary. No one wants to get eaten. But I've been eaten. And I'm here to tell you it takes a lot more than to bring a good man down. A lot more than that to bring a New Yorker down. Let's go show them what it means to be a hero. Let's go show them what it means to be a New Yorker! Let's go kill some sharks!"

"Because we shot these two in such close proximity—unlike most theatrical tentpoles, where you have two years between them—it kind of feels like we were still making the first movie. Sure, we took it to a point in the last one where Ian [Ziering] gets swallowed by a shark and survives, but that allowed us to have even more fun going into the second movie. There are no more rules. We basically blew them up at the end of the last movie, and that allowed us to amp it up that much more. A big part of that is approval. Because all those elements went over so well in the first movie, everybody across the board was a little more willing to let us do more of that."

"Ian Ziering — Fin Shepard"

"Vivica A. Fox — Skye"

"Mark McGrath — Martin Brody"

"Kari Wuhrer — Ellen"

"Tara Reid — April Wexler"

"This is a submarine, John. If it can go underwater, it can go under ships, too. This is a deep channel. Better run below if you don't wanna get wet."

"The next time I cruise in these waters I'm going to have torpedoes with warheads on them."

"Do you mind if I make a mental comment upon the nature of women?"

"Narrator: From her beginnings on a Navy drawing board, through the months of secret field experiments out on the Western desert, then through the desperate search for new metals with the properties she needed, she was designed to be the nation's greatest weapon of the seas - the atom-powered submarine. Her engines were to be a miracle of speed and power, her sides strong enough to withstand any blow, her armament and fire power of greater force than the worst enemy she might encounter. The mind of man had thought of everything - except that which was beyond his comprehension!"

"Out of primordial depths to destroy the world!"

"IT CRUSHES! KILLS! DESTROYS!"

"Havoc! Chaos! Destruction!"

"Can IT Be Stopped?"

"Kenneth Tobey — Commander Pete Mathews"

"Faith Domergue — Professor Lesley Joyce"

"Donald Curtis — Dr. John Carter"

"Ian Keith — Admiral Burns"

"Dean Maddox Jr. — Admiral Norman"

"Chuck Griffiths — Lieutenant Griff"

"Richard W. Peterson — Captain Stacy"

"Harry Lauter — Deputy Bill Nash"

"Tol Avery — Navy Intern"

"William Bryant — Helicopter Pilot"

"Del Courtney — Naval Asst. Sec. Robert David Chase"

"Roy Engel — Control Room Officer Ordering Drop Nets"

"Eddie Fisher — McLeod"

"A long time ago, in a far-off land, I saw a real-live dinosaur. You don't know about this dinosaur, you don't know what it was like, but I certainly do. He is close by, and he watches over all of us. I'm not sure where he hides, but he can see us, and if we ever become helpless and desperate, the dinosaur will come back to us and save us from tragedy and disaster, just as it did before on that doomed World War II battlefield we once faced. You think that there is absolutely nothing to fear. Our country is peaceful and you think that nothing could possibly happen to us, but we're in danger. You must prepare yourselves for what will happen."

"On Makin and Likiep Islands, all 66,000 of our brave soldiers fought valiantly. They fought to the very last man without giving up. They will go down in Japanese history as true defenders of the motherland. Tomorrow, at dawn, we are going to launch an all-out attack against the American forces and show them just how strong we are. You all know, of course, that the Americans greatly outnumber us, but that does not matter. Even up to the last moment, each of us fights. We still have to believe in our final victory over the enemy. We shall fight for our country right up to the end. We shall prove worthy of our great motherland. Persevere! Our deaths shall be the blood and flesh of an even greater and much stronger Japan."

"[addressing the wounded Godzillasaurus] We deeply regret that we must leave our savior behind. We pray that he will never hold it against us in his heart. Please forgive us, for we are helpless. There's nothing that we can do. We can't carry you, we cannot take you to safety. We hope your wounds heal quickly, and that you'll recover full health. We, the Lagos Garrison of the Japanese Army will never forget how you saved our lives. Never!"

"[last words while talking on the phone and looking at Godzilla] I nearly died on Lagos Island, along with my entire Garrison, but the dinosaur saved us all. Now, all of that prosperity I built is now being destroyed by the same dinosaur at this moment, and there's nothing I can do about it. Very ironic, don't you think? [chuckles]"

"Godzilla has disappeared, and now King Ghidorah has taken his place."

"Kōsuke Toyohara as Kenichiro Terasawa"

"Anna Nakagawa as Emi Kano"

"Megumi Odaka as Miki Saegusa"

"Katsuhiko Sasaki as Professor Mazaki"

"Akiji Kobayashi as Ryuzo Dobashi"

"Tokuma Nishioka as Takehiko Fujio"

"Yoshio Tsuchiya as Yasuaki Shindo"

"Kiwako Harada as Chiaki Morimura"

"Kenji Sahara as Takayuki Segawa"

"So Yamamura as the Prime Minister (final film role)"

"Chuck Wilson as Wilson"

"Richard Berger as Grenchko"

"Robert Scott Field as M-11, an android"

"Koichi Ueda as Masukichi Ikehata, Lagos Island Veteran"

"Kenpachiro Satsuma as Godzilla"

"Hurricane Ryu as King Ghidorah"

"Godzilla is back! This time, it's for good!"

"Viewers at the time would not escape the connection to real-world debates over "Japan, Inc." References to Japan buying entire continents merely exaggerate existing fears about the Japanese economic powerhouse. By the early 1990s, many American commentators were already suggesting that although the Allies were the military victors of the Second World War, Japan had staged a successful economic victory. Omori plainly makes this connection by depicting the architect of Japan's postwar economic prosperity as a commander of the Imperial Army in the war. Shindo loses the battle in 1944, but wins it five decades later."

"Released just as Japan's "bubble economy" period of the late 1980s - in which the country sailed to the forefront of world economic powers - was ebbing, the film is bogged down by crass moralizations about Japan's role in the world community and its tenuous relations with other nations. The implication seems to be that Japan is smarter and richer than everybody else, and political tensions over trade issues are borne out of being left behind the coming century."

"The year is 1992 AD. In order to try to counter the threat posed to the planet's survival by Godzilla, Japan's Counter G bureau recruited the most brilliant scientific brains in the world to build a fighting machine. The first machine was called Garuda, but its fighting capabilities were limited. A far more powerful machine was required. They salvaged a robot from the future, Mecha-King Ghidorah, in order to study its advanced technology. Its components were used to build a weapon to fight Godzilla. They called it Mechagodzilla."

"Masahiro Takashima as Kazuma Aoki"

"Ryoko Sano as Azusa Gojo"

"Megumi Odaka as Miki Saegusa"

"Yusuke Kawatsu as Professor Hiroshi Omae"

"Akira Nakao as General Aso"

"Kenji Sahara as Segawa"

"Daijiro Harada as Takuya Sasaki"

"Koichi Ueda as General Hyodo"

"Kenpachiro Satsuma as Godzilla"

"Wataru Fukuda as MechaGodzilla"

"Hurricane Ryu as Baby Godzilla"

"After this battle, it will all be over."

"I've had nightmares in my time, but I've never dreamed of anything like this."

"You better tell them we're in a hurry and to roll up the red tape and put it into a drawer until this thing is over!"

"Why is it always, always so costly for Man to move from the present to the future?"

"Incredible! The creature has to be taken alive!"

"I guess I frightened it as much as it frightened me."

"Doc, this is like a parachute. It's got to work the first time!"

"Get that elephant out of there!"

"Narrator: Great scientific advances are oftentimes sudden accomplished facts before most of us are even dimly aware of them. Breathtakingly unexpected, for example, was the searing flash that announced the atomic age. Equally unexpected was the next gigantic stride when Man moved out of his very orbit to a point more than 20 million miles to Earth."

"Marisa Leonardo: Caught me unprepared. I've been cooking over a hot creature all day."

"Monster from outerspace runs wild!"

"Space nightmares!"

"Greatest Monster Since King Kong Ravishes the Earth!"

"All the World Feared the Monster from Outer Space!"

"Thousands Flee in Terror Before the Death-Dealing Monster from Outer Space!"

"Out-Of-Space Creature Invades the Earth!"

"William Hopper — Robert Calder"

"Joan Taylor — Marisa Leonardo"

"Frank Puglia — Dr. Leonardo"

"John Zaremba — Dr. Judson Uhl"

"[opening narration] This was the planet Mars as my crew and I first saw it. Dangerous, treacherous, alive with something we came to know only as Death. This is what we faced when our spaceship cracked up and landed just six months ago in January of this year, 1973. But it seems as if six centuries passed before rescue ship arrived. For today of all my crew, I, Col. Edward Carruthers of the United States Base Command, am the only one alive. Now I will be going back to face my superiors on Earth. In Washington. And perhaps there, too, I will find another kind of death."

"[telling his story to Ann] We were all outside the ship exploring the southern tip of syrtis major. Suddenly a sandstorm came up and we started back. I was driving the jeep. Sand was so thick we could barely see. We were almost back to the ship when Cartwright just disappeared. One minute he was there and the next minute he was gone as if something had just plucked him out of the jeep like... candy out of a box."

"So I decided after one bad marriage to bury myself in science."

"There's only one kind of a monster that uses bullets."

"Ladies and gentlemen of the press: As you know, the first attempt to send a spaceship to the planet Mars was made six months ago. We knew that that ship, the Challenge 141, had reached its destination, but that's all we knew. Teleradio communication with Mars ceased immediately and we were forced to assume that the ship and crew had been lost. The man in charge of this expedition was a man who had become known to the world as the first man to be shot into space, the man who pioneered interplanetary space travel - Col. Edward Carruthers. Two months ago, we sent a second ship to Mars to learn the fate of Col. Carruthers and his crew. The President has asked me to pass onto you this significant news: Col. Edward Carruthers has been found alive on Mars. But there's a tragic side to this history-making event: Col. Carruthers was the sole survivor of this first expedition. One hour ago we received a teleradio communication from Col. Van Heusen, commander of the second spaceship. This ship is now ready to take off for its return trip to the Earth from Mars, and Col. Carruthers is being brought back for a court martial, to face trial for the murders of the rest of the crew."

"You have been called here again to receive further information about the story which you didn't hear last night. I will read you the text of a teleradio message received from the Challenge 142 less than an hour ago: "This is Eric Royce talking. Of the 19 men and women who have set foot upon the planet Mars, six will return. There's no longer a question of murder but of an alien, an elemental life force, a planet so cruel, so hostile, that Man may find it necessary to bypass it in his endeavor to explore and understand the universe. Another name for Mars is Death"."

"Lt. James Calder: Mars is almost as big as Texas. Maybe it's got monsters."

"Eric Royce: It has to kill us or starve and we've got to kill it or die."

"Mary Royce: Every bone in his body must be broken, but I'm not sure that's what killed him. That shriveled up effect, it... I'll have to do an autopsy."

"It Breathes. It Hunts. It Kills!"

"IT! ... Reaches through space! ... Scoops up men and women! ... Gorges on blood!"

"The revelation shocker of things to come!"

"$50,000 by a world renowned insurance company to the first person who can prove that "It" is not on Mars now!"

"Marshall Thompson — Col. Edward Carruthers"

"Shirley Patterson — Ann Anderson"

"Kim Spalding — Col. Van Heusen"

"Dabbs Greer — Eric Royce"

"Paul Langton — Lt. James Calder"

"Robert Bice — Maj. John Purdue"

"Richard Benedict — Bob Finelli"

"Ann Doran — Mary Royce"

"Richard Hervey — Gino Finelli"

"Thom Carney — Joe Kienholz"

"Ray Corrigan — It"

"Don Sullivan as Chase Winstead"

"Fred Graham — Sheriff Jeff"

"Lisa Simone as Lisa"

"Shug Fisher — Old Man Harris"

"Bob Thompson — Mr. Wheeler"

"I always figured a policeman wasn't really a human being."

"The scream that shocks the screen with 300,000 volts of horror! Inhuman! Invincible! Inescapable!"

"300,000 Volts of Horror!"

"The Screen's 300,000 Volt SHOCKER!"

"Lon Chaney Jr. — Charles 'Butcher' Benton"

"Max Showalter — Police Lt. Dick Chasen"

"Marian Carr — Eva Martin"

"Ross Elliott — Paul Lowe"

"The tingler exists in every human being, we now know. Look at that tingler, Dave. It's an ugly and dangerous thing-ugly because it's the creation of man's fear; dangerous because... because a frightened man is dangerous."

"Ladies and gentlemen, please do not panic! But SCREAM! Scream for your lives!"

"Ladies and gentlemen, just a word of warning. If any of you are not convinced that you have a tingler of your own, the next time you're frightened in the dark... don't scream."

"William Castle: I am William Castle, the director of the motion picture you are about to see. I feel obligated to warn you that some of the sensations—some of the physical reactions which the actors on the screen will feel—will also be experienced, for the first time in motion picture history, by certain members of this audience. I say 'certain members' because some people are more sensitive to these mysterious electronic impulses than others. These unfortunate, sensitive people will at times feel a strange, tingling sensation; other people will feel it less strongly. But don't be alarmed—you can protect yourself. At any time you are conscious of a tingling sensation, you may obtain immediate relief by screaming. Don't be embarrassed about opening your mouth and letting rip with all you've got, because the person in the seat right next to you will probably be screaming too. And remember—a scream at the right time may save your life."

"When the screen screams you'll scream too...if you value your life!"

"Fright-Filled SHOCK Thriller!"

"Ghastly Beyond Belief!"

"Amazing NEW TERROR Device Makes You A Living Participant in the FLESH-CRAWLING ACTION! PERCEPTO!"

"In Screamarama"

"Do you have the guts to sit in this chair?"

"Can You Take PERCEPTO?"

"BRING YOUR DATE AND WATCH HER TINGLE!"

"SEE - The screen's first BLOOD BATH IN COLOR!"

"Vincent Price — Dr. Warren Chapin"

"Judith Evelyn — Mrs. Martha Ryerson Higgins"

"Darryl Hickman — David Morris"

"Isabel Stevens Chapin — Patricia Cutts"

"Pamela Lincoln — Lucy Stevens"

"Philip Coolidge — Oliver 'Ollie' Higgins"

"Here passes from this earth Helene Delambre, widow of my brother, Andre, whom I loved deeply, hopelessly. She was destroyed in the end by dreadful memories, a recollection of horrors that did not dim as the years went on, but instead grew monstrously, and left her mind shocked and unsteady, so that death, when it came, was a blessed release."

"Put him in the cabinet quickly."

"Out of the World of Atomic Mutation It Rises - With the Dread Curse of the Father Upon It!"

"Blood-curdling giant fly creature runs amuck!!!"

"One second ago it was human!"

"Human Monster created by atoms gone wild!"

"The horror is back!"

"All new and more horrific than before!"

"Vincent Price — Francois Delambre"

"Brett Halsey — Philippe Delambre"

"David Frankham — Ronald Holmes / Alan Hinds"

"John Sutton — Inspector Beecham"

"You're not going to poison any more kids!"

"Why don't you make like a hockey stick, and puck off!"

"Time to die!"

"Hey, didn't anybody ever tell you to knock before entering a room? [shoots Westly's secretary]"

"It rotted their bodies. It corrupted their minds. And thats's the good news."

"Readin'...writin'... and radiation!"

"Janelle Brady - Chrissy"

"Gil Brenton - Warren"

"Robert Prichard - Spike"

"James Nugent Vernon - Eddie"

"Pat Ryan Jr. - Mr. Paley"

"Brad Dunker - Gonzo"

"Gary Schneider - Pete"

"Theo Cohan - Muffey"

"Rick Howard - Spud"

"Gary Rosenblatt - Greg"

"Mary Taylor - Judy"

"Lauren Heather McMahon - Taru"

"Sir Francis Stevens, and the great Dr. Benet from the University of Paris. What do they know? What will they ever know? I'll take them somewhere they've never been. Back into time. It will work well tonight. I'm sure and I'm ready. They'll never laugh at me again."

"You ask me to join forces with you? But you forget I have no standing with your scientific congress. I believe I have even been called unorthodox."

"You observe: those finger marks cannot be seen in the light!"

"I believe that this city is at the mercy of a madman whose body is an engine of destruction."

"Diana, my dear, there are no such things as curses!"

"He shan't reach out of his grave and spoil our lives!"

"The universe is very large, and there are some secrets we are not meant to probe."

"He is wrong to demonstrate to these people! Who are they? Pygmies that scoff at a giant, who have said that he is only a visionary, unscientific, a charlatan - ha! He's greater than all of them. He sent for them. If he had waited, one day they would have begged, begged to come to him."

"My son. You have broken the first law of science."

"In his brain - the world's most powerful secret!"

"Destruction to all he touched or looked upon!"

"Delving into new, strange fields of mystery!"

"Boris Karloff — Dr. Janos Rukh"

"Bela Lugosi — Dr. Felix Benet"

"Frances Drake — Diana Rukh"

"Frank Lawton — Ronald Drake"

"Violet Kemble Cooper — Mother Rukh"

"Walter Kingsford — Sir Francis Stevens"

"Beulah Bondi — Lady Arabella Stevens"

"Frank Reicher — Professor Meiklejohn"

"Paul Weigel — Monsieur Noyer"

"Georges Renavent — Chief of the Sûreté"

"DON'T BE ASHAMED TO SCREAM - IT HELPS TO RELIEVE THE TENSION"

"We defy you not to get a genuine case of the horrors when you see "The Black Scorpion"!"

"Every horror you've seen on the screen grows pale beside the horror of "THE BLACK SCORPION""

"SHOWN UNCUT! Every terror exactly as filmed!"

"NOTE: The management reserves the right to put up the lights any time the audience becomes too emotionally disturbed!"

"We urge you not to panic or bolt from your seats!"

"HE GET YOU SCARED STIFF!"

"SHOWN UNCUT! ALL ITS HORROR EXACTLY AS FILMED!"

"THE HIDEOUS INHUMAN BEING THAT DEFIED EVERY LAW OF NATURE!"

"EARTHQUAKE RELEASES NEW MONSTER HORROR!"

"Out of the volcano they come..."

"The management reserves the right to put up the lights any time the audience becomes too emotionally disturbed. We urge you not to panic or bolt from your seats."

"Richard Denning — Dr. Hank Scott"

"Mara Corday — Teresa Alvarez"

"Carlos Rivas — Dr. Arturo Ramos"

"Mario Navarro — Juanito"

"Police Commissioner Taro: This is Jungle - lush, green, alive with incredible growth - as young as day, as old as time. I, Taro, Police Commissioner of Itman County, which borders the Amazonas River, know it as well as any man will ever know it. Isn't it beautiful? But I have also learned that beauty can be venomous, deadly, something terrifying, something of prehistoric ages when monstrous superstitions ruled the minds of men, something that has haunted the world for millions of years rose out of that verdant labyrinth. Let me tell you how the jungle itself took the law into its own hands. This was Van Gelder Manor, built to stand against the searing sun, built to shelter generations of Van Gelders, it also has become prey to the powers of the jungle, that terrifying strength that arose to punish a man for his crimes."

"Dr. Viet: White people shouldn't live too long in the jungle. Brings out their bad side, their jealousies and impatience."

"A Blonde Beauty and a Savage Beast... alone in the Jungle!"

"Her marriage vows were more than fulfilled!"

"Her clothes torn away, screaming in terror!"

"Raymond Burr — Barney Chavez"

"Lon Chaney Jr. — Police Commissioner Taro"

"Barbara Payton — Dina Van Gelder"

"Tom Conway — Dr. Viet"

"If you have to be isolated for your work you sure picked a lonely little island."

"Why, that's as big as a full-grown wolf!"

"Don't let their head get under! They'll flip us over!"

"Looks like a rat, smells like a skunk - some call them bone-eaters."

"Their available food on ze island is nearing depletion!"

"Any unusual experiment produces unusual results."

"You're a strange man, Thorne. I never met anyone like you. You seem so disinterested in everything. Aren't you the least bit curious? Don't you wonder about the unusual things around here? The guns. The fence. The shattered windows. My accent. Anything?"

"Narrator: Those who hunt by night will tell you that the wildest and most vicious of all animals is the tiny shrew. The shrew feeds only by the dark of the moon. He must eat his own body weight every few hours - or starve. And the shrew devours everything: bones, flesh, marrow... everything. In March, first in Alaska, and then invading steadily southward, there were reports of a new species: the giant, killer shrew."

"'Rook' Griswold: Automatic pilot can't play Dixieland jazz on them banjos like I can!"

"They had to eat 3 times their body weight each day... OR STARVE!"

"Your skin will crawl with fear at their nearness"

"All that was left after...THE KILLER SHREWS!"

"James Best — Captain Thorne Sherman"

"Ingrid Goude — Ann Craigis"

"Ken Curtis — Jerry Farrell"

"Gordon McLendon — Dr. Radford Baines"

"Baruch Lumet — Dr. Marlowe Craigis"

""Judge" Henry Dupree - Rook Griswold"

"Alfred DeSoto - Mario"

"Joan: I expected to be frightened on my wedding night, but nothing like this."

"Colonel: Our job is to prevent a possible nation-wide panic by keeping the information from the public."

"They Threatened The World Until Some Hep Youngsters Took Over!"

"CREEPING HORROR... from the depths of time and space!"

"SEE teenagers vs. the saucer men!"

"SEE disembodied hand that crawls!"

"SEE the night the world nearly ended!"

"SEE Earth attacked by flying saucers!"

"Steven Terrell — Johnny Carter"

"Gloria Castillo — Joan Hayden"

"Frank Gorshin — Joe Gruen"

"Raymond Hatton — Farmer Larkin"

"Narrator:: The heavens. Once an object of superstition, awe, and fear. Now a vast region for growing knowledge. The distance of Venus, the atmosphere of Mars, the size of Jupiter, and the speed of Mercury. All this and more we know. But their greatest mystery the heavens have kept a secret. What sort of life, if any, inhabits these other planets? Human life, like ours? Or life extremely lower in the scale? Or dangerously higher? Seeking the answer to this timeless question, forever seeking, is the constant preoccupation of scientists everywhere. Scientists famous and unknown. Scientists in great universities and in modest homes. Scientists of all ages."

"David Maclean: Please God, let them find Mom and Dad before something bad happens. I don't want them to die too."

"NATURAL or SUPERNATURAL?"

"Mankind's oldest fear comes to life!"

"Murderous Martian creatures from out of space!"

"From out of space... came hordes of green monsters!"

"Mankind's oldest fear...The Alien's last conquest"

"Helena Carter — Dr. Pat Blake, MD"

"Arthur Franz — Dr. Stuart Kelston"

"Jimmy Hunt — David Maclean"

"Leif Erickson — George MacLean"

"Hillary Brooke — Mary MacLean"

"Morris Ankrum — Col. Fielding"

"Walter Sande — Police Sgt. Mack Finlay"

"Max Wagner — Army Sgt. Rinaldi"

"Milburn Stone — Army Capt. Roth"

"Douglas Kennedy — Police Officer Jackson"

"Charles Cane — Police Officer Blaine"

"Bert Freed — Police Chief A.C. Barrows"

"Prof. R. E. Walgate: What have I unleashed?"

"Maj. Cummings: It's as if some mental vampire were at work."

"Prof. R.E. Walgate--- "The brain. It's gone! Sucked out like an egg between these two holes!""

"New Horrors! Mad Science Spawns Evil Fiends! ...Taking form before your horrified eyes!"

"Marshall Thompson — Major Jeff Cummings"

"Kynaston Reeves — Professor R. E. Walgate"

"Michael Balfour — Sergeant Kasper"

"Kim Parker — Barbara Griselle"

"Terry Kilburn — Captain Al Chester"

"Shuddery things from beyond the stars, here to breed with human women!"

"Is it possible? Is it true? Can humans mate with MONSTERS?"

"The bride wore terror!"

"Tom Tryon — Bill Farrell"

"Gloria Talbott — Marge Bradley Farrell"

"Peter Baldwin — Officer Frank Swanson"

"Robert Ivers — Harry Phillips"

"I find that people are always jumping to conclusions about nuclear reaction. Science fact and science fiction are not the same thing, not the same thing at all."

"From the instant they're born, they're hungry."

"We must remember that these creatures can travel over land, too."

"Dr. Tad Johns: As far as we know, in a man that age, only two things can cause stroke: violent anger, or fear."

"Crawling up from the depths... to terrify and torture!"

"A new kind of terror to numb the nerves!"

"In glorious black & white"

"Distinctly chilling. So real that it is nearly incredible."

"Instant terror ... Just add water!"

"Tim Holt — Lt. Cmdr. John "Twill" Twillinger"

"Audrey Dalton — Gail MacKenzie"

"Hans Conried — Dr. Jess Rogers"

"Harlan Warde — Lt. Robert "Clem" Clemens"

"Max Showalter as Dr. Tad Johns"

"Barbara Darrow — Jody Simms"

"One thing is sure. Something has happened here that isn't in the book. Something came out of the ocean and now has gone back into."

"This is very impressive, but I'm not going to perform surgery... I'm going to cut a fish."

"Dr. Sampson: Oh, it's heading for the Thames. They always made for the freshwater rivers to die. That's where their skeletons have been found - some irrestible instinct to die in the shallows that gave them birth. You know, all my life I hoped this would happen. Ever since childhood I expected it. I knew these creatures were alive somewhere, but I had no proof, scientific proof, and I had to keep it to myself, or my colleagues would have all laughed at me. See, no form of life ceases abruptly, and all those reports of sea serpents - well, what can they be?... The tall, graceful neck of paleosaurus. He can stay underneath the surface for an age, and now he comes to the top."

"The Biggest Thing Since Creation!"

"SEE the Beast that shakes the Earth! LIVE in a world gone mad! WATCH the chaos of a smashed civilization! FLEE from the mightiest fright on the screen! NOTHING so Big as Behemoth!"

"Gene Evans — Steve Karnes"

"André Morell — Prof. James Bickford"

"John Turner — John"

"Leigh Madison — Jean Trevethan"

"Jack MacGowran — Dr. Sampson, the Paleontologist"

"Maurice Kaufmann — Mini Submarine Officer"

"Henri Vidon — Thomas Trevethan"

"Leonard Sachs — Scientist"

"TERROR STRIKES!... FROM BENEATH THE SEA"

"Up from the forbidden depths comes a Tidal Wave Of Terror!"

"Anne Kimbell — Julie Blair"

"Stuart Wade — Steve Dunning"

"Dick Pinner — Dr. Baldwin"

"Wyott Ordung — Pablo"

"Inez Palange — Tula"

"Jonathan Haze — Joe"

"Roger Corman — Tommy"

"[approaching Earth] I need this world. From millions of light-years away I approach your planet. Soon my spaceship will lands on Earth. I need your world. I feed on fear, live on human hatred. I, a strong mind, without flesh or blood, want your world. First the unthinking, the birds of the air, the animals of the forest, then the weaker of men, shall all do my bidding. They shall be my ears, my eyes, until your world is mine. And because I see your most secret acts, you will know me as "The Beast with a Million Eyes"!"

"We thought it was all over... [pause] It's just beginning."

"Prepare for a close encounter of the terrifying kind!"

"Screaming Terror!"

"An unspeakable horror... Destroying... Terrifying!"

"Paul Birch — Allan Kelley"

"Lorna Thayer — Carol Kelley"

"Dona Cole — Sandy Kelley"

"Dick Sargent — Larry"

"Chester Conklin — Old Man Webber"

"Bruce Whitmore - The Beast (voice only)"

"Earth attacked!"

"The last word in science-fiction thrills!"

"INVASION FROM ANOTHER PLANET!"

"Attack by monsters from another planet!"

"Strange creatures from another world attack planet earth!"

"It's a nuclear nightmare!"

"Peter Graves — Dr. Douglas Martin"

"Frank Gerstle — Dr. Curt Kruger"

"James Seay — Col. Banks"

"Steve Pendleton — FBI Agent Briggs"

"Freezing horror! Hideous atomic mutant strikes from the depths!"

"From the depths of the sea...Horrifying!...Terrifying!"

"FRREZING HORROR... as a living nightmare strikes from the depths of the sea!"

"Terror is about to surface!"

"Sheer horror as a living nightmare stalks the ocean floor!"

"Kent Taylor — Dr. Ted Stevens / Ted Baxter"

"Cathy Downs — Lois King"

"Michael Whalen — Prof. King"

"Helene Stanton — Wanda"

"Phillip Pine — George Thomas"

"Rodney Bell — William S. 'Bill' Grant"

"Let me assume you, for want of your own understanding, that man's boasting pride in his alleged advancement is based on one hollow precept that is his ego."

"The world's gone completely mad. Sometimes I think I'm the only rational being left in it... one person telling a fairy tale and the other one believing it."

"George Oakes: By golly, it's gotta be the biggest mountain lion this side of Noah's Ark!"

"State Police Chief: [after shooting at the monster] Winged him! It's a big country but too small for that bird!"

"Dr. Ross Harkness: He tampered with things beyond his province... beyond what any man should do... and if it was madness, well... those whom the gods would destroy... they first make mad!"

"What primitive passions...what mad desires drove him on...? He held them all in the grip of deadly terror...nothing could keep him from the woman he claimed as his own!"

"HALF MAN...HALF BEAST...He held them all in the grip of deadly terror...nothing could keep him from this woman he claimed as his own!"

"Robert Shayne — Prof. Clifford Groves"

"Joyce Terry — Jan Groves"

"Richard Crane — Dr. Ross Harkness"

"Doris Merrick — Ruth Marshall"

"Richard Anderson — Dr. Paul Mallon"

"Elaine Edwards — Tina Enright"

"Adele Mara — Maria Fiorello"

"Luis Van Rooten — Dr. Carlo Fiorello"

"Attention. This is a special bulletin. Civil defense authorities have declared a state of emergency for all London areas within three miles of the River Thames."

"Bridge is gone! One of London's oldest landmarks smashed like matchwood! Nothing has stopped this beast so far, nothing!"

"Picadilly. The heart of London. Words can't describe it. There's been nothing like it, not even the worst of the Blitz! This section is complete shambles. People running, mad with fear."

"We prayed for a miracle. Maybe our prayers have been answered. A great city, overwhelmed, exhausted, lies helpless under the immeasurable power and ferocity of this towering apparition from before the dawn of history. Yet, as disdaining the pygmies under her feet, she turns back! Turns with her young, leaving the prostrate city, leaving the haunts of man, and leaving man himself to ponder the proud boast that he alone is lord of all creation."

"Neither Bombs, Bullets, Jets or Rockets Can Stop Gorgo...But This Little Boy Knew His Secret!"

"It's Alive!"

"Like nothing you've ever seen before!"

"This is the Big One!"

"Bill Travers — Captain Joe Ryan"

"William Sylvester — Sam Slade"

"Vincent Winter — Sean"

"Christopher Rhodes — McCartin"

"I've so little to say, and nobody who'll listen."

"If you take things as they come, if you do them step by step, we're going to be all right."

"You mean you'd exile one-third of the human race?"

"Betsy Jones-Moreland — Evelyn Gern"

"Antony Carbone — Harold Gern"

"Robert Towne — Martin Joyce"

"Lise Martens: If Reptilicus is hit, you'll never find all the pieces underwater. He'll regenerate, Mark!"

"Gen. Mark Grayson: A good thing there's no more like him!"

"Invincible...Indestructible! What was this awesome BEAST born 50 million years out of time?"

"SEE: MISSLES AND ATOM BOMBS POWERLESS!"

"SEE: CIVILIZATION RIOTING WITH FEAR!"

"SEE: A MIGHTY CITY TRAMPLED TO DESTRUCTION!"

"A prehistoric beast born 50 million years out of time!"

"See a mighty city trampled to destruction! See missiles and atom bombs powerless! See civilisation rioting with fear!"

"Carl Ottosen — General Mark Grayson"

"Ann Smyrner — Lise Martens"