Practicalmadness

Watching the Alien Quadrilogy box set, it occurs to me to wonder: what happens to those aliens when they get blown out into space through the airlock? Do they just float out there for all eternity? What would happen if some ship just happened to run into the alien from the first movie, and it grabbed hold of their hull like the gremlin from that episode of The Twilight Zone?

Thinking of this, I find a new admiration for the bastard children of the Alien franchise, the third and fourth movies, because even Aliens -- which raised the ante for the series in every other way -- had to resort to the old "blow the alien out the airlock" trick for an ending. Granted, James Cameron saw Ridley Scott's airlock and raised him a little girl, an android and a power loader, but still.

I have a confession: I actually like Alien 3 and Alien Resurrection. They're deeply flawed movies, and Alien 3 gets a little worse every time I see it, but in them you get all the benefit of some really visionary directors given their first big break in Hollywood to make a b-movie about monsters with acid for blood. It's like the prototypical Hollywood situation: you've made your name making smaller, artful, more adult work, and now it's time to debut onto the world stage. So what do they offer you but the standard monsters-with-acid-for-blood movie?

And I love how each movie covers a totally different genre, so that you can have both a classical horror movie (the original) and a somewhat campy adventure movie (_Resurrection_), and they're all more or less valid takes on the franchise.