DRIVE IN SATURDAY

DRIVE IN SATURDAY

MOMMY DEAREST!

Edouard Dauphin

The Dauph’s favorite story about the 1979 film Alien goes like this. I’m watching it for the second time, sardined into an overflow dross palace on 42nd Street. The seat next to me is occupied by a total stranger, a brutal looking, jewelry-laden pimp packing a Saturday night special and part of a sword. When the alien makes its appearance, bursting out of actor John Hurt’s belly like a lobsterin-the-box, my seatmate shrivels down to the floor in terror, digging his fingernails frantically into my arm. When the sequence is over, he straightens up, looks at The Dauph apologetically and explains: “I just got scared, man.” This fellow is in white slavery, he buys and sells women for a living and because of an image on a bit of celluloid, he ‘‘just got scared, man." Yep, Alien was that kind of film.

Now it’s seven years later and Aliens, the sequel, is that kind of film too. If you recall the original, it pitted the crew of a spaceship against an elusive extraterrestrial that was downright cranky about humans snooping around. (But, let's face it, what we remember most about the picture is Sigourney Weaver in her underwear—now that was a performance!) The accent in Alien was on suspense; here it’s on action, but then what did you expect from James Cameron, the director who steered Arnold Schwarzenegger (or Mr. Shriver, as I prefer to call him) through his grunts in The Terminator? Aliens may also be the only film in history that devotes five pages of its production notes to a discussion of weapons. Bingo! The Dauph’s kind of movie.

Aliens picks up the action 57 years later. Sigourney as Warrant Officer Ripley has been drowsing in hypersleep (something The Dauph does in the morning after a drinking bout at Kio’s Colonial Lounge) along with her tabby cat, Jonesy, who you may remember, was the only being in the original film with the knack for tracking the alien. When she wakes up back at the space station, Sigourney learns that a mission is being assembled to go back to the alien planet to wipe out the vicious critters once and for all. Sigourney is asked to lead.

She returns to find that the planet’s colony of humans has been wiped out except for one overly cute child even the bloodthirsty aliens, probably thought was too annoying to eat. Naturally, Sigourney takes the whelp under her wing, and, supported by her weapon-toting goons, resolves to get revenge on the nasty beasts. Get ready, kids, the fun is about to begin.

The original movie was gruesome, but there was essentially only one monster. Not so anymore. The alien has been breeding like an outer space Jerry Hall. There are so many aliens that the brigade of marines is helpless to combat them. Soon they have been reduced to a quivering bunch of cowards who begin dropping like flies, leaving Sigourney, ,her glowering love interest (Michael Biehn), the brat, and a good natured android who winds up getting halved like a soft boiled egg, with milky scum running out of him but the smile never vanishing from his mechanical lips. The Dauph almost expected him to break into a chorus of “Say You, Say Me” as his legs roiled off into the sunset.

Eventually, it all comes down to Ripley against the supreme alien, otherwise known as Mom. This is the beast that has hatched all the baby buggers that have been keeping the Alien series alive through two movies. We even get to see the birth process, as the eggs come down a long tubelike structure from the mother that looks like a cross between an elephant’s trunk and Iggy Pop’s" most celebrated body part. Clad in army fatigues and a tight, sweaty t-shirt, Sigourney takes on Mom, looking like a determined Rambo with boobs.

See Aliens—it’ll turn you off to shrimp and boiled eggs for the rest of your life!