Aliens (1986) Director: James Cameron Cast: Sigourney Weaver, Michael Biehn, Bill Paxton Best quote: ‘Game over, man. Game over!’ The Big Idea: The pneumatic loader, which allows Weaver to go toe-to-toe with a pissed-off 30-foot alien queen. Two bad mothers Almost three decades on, ‘Aliens’ still looks like some kind of miracle. How did James Cameron, the veteran of precisely two films (one of which was unwatchable) manage to match, some would say improve upon, one of the most inventive sci-fi movies ever made? Where did that script spring from, so streamlined and propulsive yet at the same time so sharp and quotable? And how, on a budget that would barely have covered the on-set sandwich trolley for ‘Avatar’, did he manage to create such an all-encompassing world, such dangerously droolsome hardware, such repulsively believable xenomorphic monsters? Admittedly, there are a lot of borrowed ideas in ‘Aliens’: the creatures, corridors, corporations and kick-ass heroine from the first movie, the sympathetic android from ‘Blade Runner’, militaristic dialogue straight from a Vietnam flick, costumes and weapons torn from the pages of countless comic books. But Cameron doesn’t just use these tropes, he develops them at every turn: Weaver’s Ripley becomes a maternal figure grappling with loss; Bishop the android is glassy and self-mocking, comfortable with his artificial existence; the hapless grunts are more than just meat, they’re fully-fleshed characters. Cameron has never managed to repeat the trick. There are great moments in his later movies, but like his ‘Alien’ antecedent Ridley Scott, Jim did his best work in his second and third films. If all he’d left us was ‘Aliens’, he’d still be a legend: here is one of the most effortlessly entertaining, endlessly rewatchable movies of all time, the work of a filmmaker blazing like rocket fuel. Tom Huddleston Watch on Amazon Watch on iTunes READ MORE ADVERTISING 4 please log in to view this image Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) Director: Steven Spielberg Cast: Richard Dreyfuss, François Truffaut, Melinda Dillon Best quote: ‘This means something. This is important.’ The Big Idea: Tension without threat, spectacle without violence – Spielberg pulls a trick no other filmmaker has managed in the past fifty years. The power and the glory For those of us who don’t bow down to any big, bearded spirits in the sky, the discovery of alien life might be the closest we’ll ever come to having a religious experience. And if that’s the case, then ‘Close Encounters’ might be our Old Testament. Steven Spielberg’s film manages to get its point across without resorting to intimidation or cheap scare tactics. This is one of the few movies in history to appeal almost exclusively to what Abraham Lincoln called, ‘the better angels of our nature’: creativity, community, discovery and the capacity for wonder. With the arguable exception of ‘ET’, this tale of benevolent alien contact is Spielberg’s most personal statement. It’s the heartfelt cry of a boyish 31-year-old who can’t rationalise his own self-centred ambitions with the demands of family and responsibility. Possessed by a creative compulsion he can’t understand, everyman hero Roy Neary (Dreyfuss) alienates his wife and comes close to mental breakdown before discovering the source of the visions in his head. Spielberg has said that if he made the film today he wouldn’t allow Roy to abandon his loved ones at the end – and yet this final, painfully human act of selfishness is what gives the film its aching power. Well, that and the breathtaking special effects. The appearance of the mothership over the mountain is one of the great visual punches in cinema. And the gloriously unflashy performances – Truffaut and Bob Balaban make a perfect nerdy double-act. Oh, and let’s not forget John Williams’s pounding, experimental soundtrack. How many non-musicals feature their score so prominently? The result is pure joy distilled onto celluloid. Maybe God does have a beard, after all. Tom Huddleston Watch on Amazon Watch on iTunes READ MORE 3 please log in to view this image Alien (1979) Director: Ridley Scott Cast: Sigourney Weaver, John Hurt, Ian Holm Best quote: ‘I admire its purity. A survivor, unclouded by conscience, remorse or delusions of morality.’ The Big Idea: The crew themselves, a grouchy gang of blue-collar workers in crumpled old jumpsuits bickering about their bonuses. Creature from the Id Space isn’t all about glamorously cavorting across the galaxy, swashbuckling your way around undiscovered planets and canoodling with saucy green-skinned, many-breasted alien females. Space can also be a bleak, functional hellscape – just another workplace. And so it is in Ridley Scott’s gruesome horror epic, which pits a team of disgruntled space jockeys against a single, drooling, utterly vicious and single-minded critter. ‘Alien’ was the film that turned the ‘Star Wars’ template on its head, keeping the cutting-edge effects and sense of a used universe, but making it so much more real, gritty and, ironically, more human. The result is a grey, sombre affair filled with grotesque, uncomfortably Freudian imagery – phallic creatures, pulsating eggs, a computer named MUTHUR, that nightmarish birth scene… But it’s also a masterclass in cinematic tension. Artist HR Giger’s creature is a gothic nightmare of a foe, kept hidden for most of the film, leaving audiences to scour the corridors of the starship Nostromo themselves, constantly waiting for ol’ two-mouths to come leaping out. It’s a grim haunted-house movie that has rarely been equalled, so filthy and industrial that we feel like we’re stuck on this hulking rust bucket too, surrounded by panicky engineers, backstabbing androids and a monster from the very depths of our nightmares. Eddy Frankel Watch on Amazon Watch on iTunes READ MORE Now Showing 2 please log in to view this image Blade Runner (1982) Director: Ridley Scott Cast: Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young Best quote: ‘I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe…’ The Big Idea: Through artificial eyes, Scott explores what it means to be human. The flying cars are pretty cool too… I think therefore I am… but what am I? We’re so accustomed to cinema being behind the political and cultural curve, that when a truly groundbreaking work arrives, no one’s sure how to deal with it. ‘Blade Runner’ was viewed as a disaster upon first release: here was a glum, grimy, neon-in-the-rain vision of the near future, complete with a taciturn anti-hero whose own moral compass seemed marginally less functional than the Replicant ‘villains’ he was assigned to hunt down. It’s a film that, upon first viewing, feels almost unbearably harsh and claustrophobic, lingering on images of cruelty, decay and exploitation. It was only years later – abetted enormously by the film’s ‘Director’s Cut’ reissue, stripped of its clunky voiceover and crass happy ending – that we began to realise exactly what ‘Blade Runner’ was offering alongside its spectacular visuals. This wasn’t just a grim dystopian action flick, but a meditation on the meaning of life, morality, memory, creation, procreation, nature, nurture – the whole shebang. If Harrison Ford’s Deckard is himself a Replicant – and the film strongly implies that he is – then how do any of us know which aspects of our psyche are ‘real’ and which ‘created’? If the robots are programmed with more soul and compassion than the humans, how do you tell the difference? And does it matter? ‘Blade Runner’ is the kind of spectacle that science fiction was invented for: immersive other worlds that can be explored to reflect our own fears, doubts and disturbances. And it succeeds flawlessly. Tom Huddleston Watch on Amazon Watch on iTunes READ MORE ADVERTISING 1 please log in to view this image 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) Director: Stanley Kubrick Cast: Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood, William Sylvester Best quote: ‘I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.’ The Big Idea: In a movie exploding at the seams with fascinating new ideas, the image of a computer driven mad by its own programming stands out. From simians to supercomputers, the whole span of human ambition And so we reach the top of our list (by a galactic margin), a film that scrapes the farthest edge of cinematic achievement. By 1963 and his fearsomely brilliant ‘Dr. Strangelove’, Stanley Kubrick was already the most scientific mind to ever step behind a camera. It made sense, then, that he would dive into an unprecedented four-year production process to bring sci-fi up to his exacting standards. The results were staggering: a poetic yet brainy conception by legendary author Arthur C Clarke, who bridged the ‘dawn of man’ to the brink of the unknowable; sets and designs that outdid NASA for realism; and a waltzing mood that inspired awe and mass sales of Johann Strauss. Secretly, ‘2001’ is also the subtlest of dark comedies, one that pits grand human ambitions against HAL 9000’s murderous automated impulses. (Douglas Rain’s placid voice performance as the supercomputer is Kubrick’s craftiest piece of direction.) The film was impressively open-ended for a mass entertainment, allowing for plenty of speculation. In a cultural moment when the future seemed impressively at hand, Kubrick dared to suggest that we weren’t ready for it as a species. The way ahead is full of stars – we only need the minds to take in the view. Joshua Rothkopf As voted for in Time Out. Very hard to disagree with any of that
Psycho (1960) Director: Alfred Hitchcock Cast: Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh What would mother think? A few years back, David Thomson’s book ‘The Moment of Psycho’ argued that Alfred Hitchcock’s blackly comic serial killer masterpiece didn’t just change cinema, but society itself. By confronting audiences with everyday horrors; by knowingly manipulating them into sympathising with a murderer; by offering an amoral, adulterous heroine then bumping her off so savagely; by mocking Freudian psychology and the pompous stuffed-shirts who practice it; by pushing an image of America as a trap-laden labyrinth populated by creepy cops and nice-as-pie psychopaths; and by implying that women (brace yourself now) actually use the toilet sometimes, Hitch helped pave the way for all the cultural earthquakes and moral rebalancing acts that the coming decade had to offer. And he did it all with a wink and a smile. Now that’s showbusiness. Tom Huddleston READ MORE ADVERTISING 4 please log in to view this image Alien (1979) Director: Ridley Scott Cast: Sigourney Weaver, John Hurt, Ian Holm The miracle of birth Talk about above and beyond: Ridley Scott was hired by Twentieth Century Fox to make ‘“Jaws” in space’, and came back with one of the most stylish, subversive, downright beautiful films in either the horror or sci-fi genre. The masterstroke, of course, was hiring Swiss madman HR Giger as the film’s chief designer – his work brings a slippery, organic grotesquerie to what could’ve been a straight-up bug hunt (© ‘Aliens’). But let’s not overlook Dan O’Bannon’s script, which builds character without assigning age, race or even gender – plus one of the finest casts ever assembled. Tom Huddleston READ MORE Now Showing 3 please log in to view this image The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) Director: Tobe Hooper Cast: Gunnar Hansen, Marilyn Burns Sounds like the neighbours are doing DIY again‘Who will survive… and what will be left of them?’ It’s a question that applies as much to the audience for Tobe Hooper’s relentless stalk-and-saw shocker as to its doomed, hapless characters. Horror had never been this raw before, and it could be argued that it hasn’t since, the sheer grimy ugliness of the piece leading some to walk out, others to cry sadism and many more to acclaim the film as a modern masterpiece; horror in its purest, most unforgiving form. Sequels and remakes have come thick and fast, but nothing will ever match your first encounter with the original and its brutal, hammer-over-the-head power. Tom Huddleston READ MORE 2 please log in to view this image The Shining Director: Stanley Kubrick Cast: Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall Do not disturb The scariest moments in ‘The Shining’ are so iconic they’ve become in-jokes: Jack Nicholson leering psychotically from posters on the walls of student bedrooms everywhere... ‘Here’s Johnny’. Even so, Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece of execution and claustrophobia still retains the power to frighten audiences out of their wits. Nicholson is Jack Torrance, a writer working as a caretaker at the isolated Overlook Hotel in the Colorado mountains over winter. Stephen King, on whose novel the film was based, was famously unimpressed. The problem, he said, was that ghost-sceptic Kubrick was ‘a man who thinks too much and feels too little’. He resented Kubrick for stripping out the supernatural elements of his story. Torrance is not tortured by ghosts but by inadequacy and alcoholism. And for many, it’s as a study of insanity and failure that ‘The Shining’ is so chilling. Cath Clarke READ MORE ADVERTISING 1 please log in to view this image The Exorcist Director: William Friedkin Cast: Ellen Burstyn, Linda Blair, Jason Miller, Max von Sydow Forty years of sucking cocks in hellBy the ’70s, horror had divided into two camps: on one hand, there were the ‘real life’ terrors of ‘Psycho’ and ‘Night of the Living Dead’, films that brought horror into the realm of the everyday, making it all the more shocking. On the other, there were the more outrageous dream-horrors popular in Europe, the work of Hammer Studios in the UK and Mario Bava and Dario Argento in Italy, films that prized artistry, oddity and explicit gore over narrative logic. The first film to attempt to bring the two together was ‘Rosemary’s Baby’, but Polanski’s heart clearly belonged to the surreal. The first to achieve that blend with absolute certainty was ‘The Exorcist’ – which perhaps explains its position as the unassailable winner of this poll. In cutting from the clanging bazaars of Iraq to the quiet streets of Georgetown, in blending dizzying dream sequences with starkly believable human drama, Friedkin created a horror movie like no other – both brutal and beautiful, artful and exploitative, exploring wacked-out religious concepts with the clinical precision of an agnostic scientist. And make no mistake: ‘The Exorcist’ is most definitely a horror film: though it may be filled with rigorously examined ideas and wonderfully observed character moments, its primary concern is with shocking, scaring and, yes, horrifying its audience out of their wits – does mainstream cinema contain a more upsetting image than the crucifix scene? That it still succeeds, almost four decades later, is testament to Friedkin’s remarkable vision. Tom Huddleston Agree with most of that, bar the chainsaw massacre.
Aliens was a cracking film, as an action/adventure thing. Alien was brilliantly atmospheric. The one in the penal colony was so-so, but the last one with the mutants was ace. I have the box set but, like Goodfellas, I always watch them when they're on TV.
As a kid, absolutely nothing scared me more than when I first saw the original Fly with Vincent Price. I first saw The Exorcist when I was 19 after coming home from a nightclub @ 3am (I'd hadn't copped-off, yet again). This video shop had opened on Eaton Rd, and my sister had got it out. Maybe it was because I watched it on my own with everyone in bed, and in the dark and all that - I totally pissed myself laughing (especially at the 'Sucks Cocks in Hell) thing, that I woke up my dad. Somehow, Exorcist II was ****ing worse. I did, however, really enjoy - and was more scared - by Exorcist II with George C Scott.
Donga started it. I just continued it in true derail fashion The less said about the Palace game the better
