Forumer Chat Thread

[Tirin]

I also watched a couple of horror movies for Halloween: The Satanic Rites of Dracula (an insanely campy 70s Christopher Lee Dracula movie) and Tucker and Dale versus Evil, which is more like a horror comedy sorta thing. Would recommend checking out either, though Tucker and Dale was more my speed.

 

[Colonel Thunder]

Tucker and Dale deserves more love. It's great on a re-watch too, there are many small details.

This might possibly sound just a little bit edgy, but I remember my dad sitting me down to watch Alien when I was like 15 or so, and after it was over I said that I wouldn't have even known it was supposed to be a horror movie if nobody ever told me. That's how not scary it was.

It's not really a horror movie until like, the last 45 minutes of the film. Up until that it's mostly just a movie about space trucking. Keep in mind how insanely good the effects were (are, honestly), that we'd landed on the moon less than a decade earlier, and that most of the suspense comes from not knowing what the alien looks like (no lasting shots till near the very end).

Also, imagine being an expectant parent seeing that film. Fucking mortifying.

 

[Tirin]

I have to say, I thoroughly enjoyed it. The jokes were varied and generally landed pretty well, some of the deaths were gnarly, and it combined the comedy and horror aspects nicely. Would watch again at some unspecified date far in the future.

Honestly, I think that while Alien is conceptually a good horror movie in how it was written and shot, the way that xenomorphs have permeated pop culture make the original not fuckin' scary at all. No amount of suspense is really gonna make you THAT worried about something you've seen before to the point of making jokes about it. The effects were great for what was... the 70s, where it was competing with like, roughly contemporary Star Wars and stuff. It's just the kind of thing that doesn't hold up in its effect if you don't see the original before absorbing it in other media.

Definitely pretty gross expecting a kid when first watching that movie, though. That'd be gnarly.

 

[Regis]

But I'll bet the worst movie to watch when expecting a kid is Eraserhead.

 

[The Hound]

Little late to this but I wouldn't say Alien is a horror movie it's a suspense movie. It feeds from tension, not outright horror. Watching it alone at night in a dark room will definitely get you on edge. I'm a big fanboy for the Alien series, even though so many of the movies in it have suuuuuuuuuuuucked.

 

[Colonel Thunder]

Little late to this but I wouldn't say Alien is a horror movie it's a suspense movie. It feeds from tension, not outright horror. Watching it alone at night in a dark room will definitely get you on edge. I'm a big fanboy for the Alien series, even though so many of the movies in it have suuuuuuuuuuuucked.

Please rank them for us!

 

[The Hound]

Alien
Aliens

Don't watch the rest... Prometheus is pretty but insultingly stupid, A3 is goddamn trash and the less said about AVP the better.

Oh and Alien Resurrection is better than A3 but still not great. I still haven't gotten around to the 2017 Alien movie but that's mostly because I completely forgot about it.

 

[Colonel Thunder]

I agree with your top two rankings, but I would still recommend seeing Resurrection. I haven't seen A3 so I can't judge on that, but AR works pretty well as a film so long as you watch it as sci-fi comedy/horror. The film very much has an awareness that they are pushing this series past its limits.

It's also more fun when you learn that Joss Whedon wrote the script (which explains the whimsical tone and fun space pirates as a precursor to Firefly), but he very much disliked how they executed that script.

That, and you have to hand it to the Alien franchise for having incredible world-building that stays consistent throughout the series, even as it switches genres with every slightly-worse installment.

My understanding is it goes:

Alien: Sci-fi Horror
Aliens: Sci-fi Action
A3: Sci-fi Drama
A4: Sci-fi Horror/Comedy
Prometheus: Mystery
Covenant: (Don't know, haven't seen it)

EDIT: Bonus point to AR for including a version of the "kill me" scene that was deleted from Alien, as well as killing the hybrid with what was supposed to be Lambert's death in Alien.