"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."