Alien Covenant - a quick review...

What's it about?
The crew of a colony ship bound for a new world are woken from their hypersleep early and follow a mysterious, scrambled message to a planet that was once home to an ancient civilisation. Naturally, they encounter biological beasties galore.
Who would I recognise in it?
Michael Fassbender, Katherine Waterston, Billy Crudup, Danny McBride, Demian Bichir, Guy Pearce.
Great/Good/Alright/Shite?
Prometheus had a few flaws and divided audience opinion. Some loved it, some hated it (I'm in the former camp). Its weighty ideas of mankind's origin and the earliest ancestors of the infamous xenomorph made for grand scale, intelligent sci-fi. With Alien: Covenant, however, Ridley Scott & Co have listened too much to their Prometheus detractors and scurried back to xenomorph territory - despite Scott having previously been quoted as saying that said beastie had been seen enough on the silver screen!

A familiar story unfolds before the viewer as a group of unlucky space explorers encounter grisly ends, but at least Scott hasn't abandoned all his higher-minded ideas. A rich theme of creator/creation antagonism runs throughout (dovetailing with the Engineer/Human relationship in the previous film), even if it skews into 'simply confusing' instead of 'well explained' territory on occasion...

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We Should Eat Ice Cream Too (Short Story)

As mentioned in my previous post, "We Should Eat Ice Cream Too" is now available to read HERE. I hope you enjoy it.

Creepozoids (David DeCoteau, 1987) DVD Review

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“More acid, more megatons – it ain't over yet.” David DeCoteau's low budget creature feature has aspirations walking in the footsteps of Aliens (James Cameron, 1986), but let's be honest, those are far out of reach. However, influenced at the time by the last dregs of Cold War nuclear paranoia, Creepozoids – with its bleak world view and gooey practical effects – provides a charming dose of VHS era sci-fi horror. The year is 1998 and World War III has turned planet Earth into a nuked-out husk where nomads and survivors populate the wastelands as the fighting rages on...

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Contamination (Luigi Cozzi, 1980) Blu-Ray/DVD Review

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“They invade your body … control your mind … blow you apart!” If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Ridley Scott and Dan O'Bannon (the Director and Writer of 1979's Alien) must have been blushing like schoolgirls when Luigi (Starcrash) Cozzi's gut-busting spin on their 'haunted house in space' shocker exploded onto the exploitation scene. Taking a handful of iconic images from Scott's film – including the alien eggs and the chest-burster scene – Contamination dispenses with subtlety and goes for spectacular slow-mo splatter...

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Galaxy of Terror (B.D. Clark, 1981) Review

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“ALIEN Was Just The Beginning … Hell Has Just Been Relocated!” Produced by Roger Corman – on a relatively handsome budget of $700,000 – if Battle Beyond The Stars (1980) was New World Pictures' answer to 1977's Star Wars, then Galaxy of Terror was clearly their less-than-subtle take on Ridley Scott's Alien (1979). Swapping out H.R. Giger's iconic xenomorphs for – among other things – a giant and rapacious worm-thing – and sticking with the basic setup (oblivious crew sent to a hostile planet to investigate suspicious goings on), Bruce D. Clark's sci-fi horror nonetheless throws up some pleasing surprises...

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Prometheus 3D (spoiler-free) review...

What's it about?
Ridley Scott directs this sort-of-prequel to his legendary 1979 sci-fi/horror masterpiece Alien, which sees a group of late-21st-century scientists working for the Weyland Corporation seeking the answer to the biggest question facing mankind - where did we come from? Following a series of star maps, the most recent found as a 35,000 year-old cave painting in Scotland, the crew of Prometheus (the white collars, compared to the blue collars of Alien) set down on LV-223 (not LV-426 as you might have originally expected from the teaserific trailers) and begin to discover who these giant human-like "engineers" were, and why they were stationed on this far flung planet. Naturally, things don't go all that smoothly for all involved...
Who would I recognise in it?
Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender, Charlize Theron, Idris Elba, Rafe Spall, Guy Pearce.
Great/Good/Alright/Shite?
Having inspired an onslaught of fanboy theories and discussion, the teaser trailers managed to re-arrange numerous elements of the film, only seen in snippets, to appear differently to how they actually come-to-pass in the film itself. It kept the mystery alive, but it could also lead to a few scratched heads with some viewers exiting the cinema a bit disappointed, or wrong-footed, by what they were expecting.

Speaking of expectations, try to ignore them. The idea of the 'DNA of Alien' being present in the film is indeed here - we are in the same universe after all - but the references don't come as thick, or fast, as some reviews curiously suggested, and indeed the plot is far more interested in exploring fresh territory. Big questions - the biggest of all - are asked routinely, and are mixed with deep moral and ethical outlooks. As David (the ship's android, played brilliantly by Fassbender) says to star-gazing scientist Charlie Holloway (Marshall-Green), how far are you willing to go? Such are the intricate and morally ambiguous discussions, and disparate intentions, of the main pro/antagonists.

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