Science Fiction Horror Films

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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?"

"“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!’”"

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"[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.""

"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.’”"

"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.”"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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 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."

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

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

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

"The Bitch Is Back"

"[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."

"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!"

"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."

"Kei, here comes the sun."

"Kanata Hongō - Young Sho"

"Etsushi Toyokawa - Luka"

"Anne Suzuki - Hana"

"You Kurosaki - Jun"

"Zeny Kwok - Yi-Che"

"Susumu Terajima - Shinji"

"Taro Yamamoto - Toshi"

"Leehom Wang - Son"

"Hyde - Kei"

"Gackt - Sho"

"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..."