Wow is this a great movie. It's scary as hell and has space marines with cool guns (who all die horribly to the Aliens, of course, but still). Plus I still have my thing for Sigourney Weaver to deal with. By the way, I just learned her first name is really Susan. I do like Sigourney better.

I feel a certain amount of kinship with her, as she was 5'10" at age 14 and got a lot of crap for it, and for being a nerd (!!!). I was 6'4" at age 14. We each grew one inch since then to our current heights. Of course, when a guy is freakishly tall in high school you get a certain amount of respect (it didn't last past my second month freshman year) but as a girl you are often seen as a freak. However, I feel a bit of her pain.

Anyway, the first Alien was done by Ridley Scott and was truly a horror movie, which is probably why I didn't dig it that much. Aliens was done by the great James Cameron (Avatar, Terminator and Terminator 2, etc) and was truly awesome. While it had horror elements it was more of a survival film and I love it for that in the same way that I love zombie movies.

Here is a link to that video of Alien done in bunny. I might have linked it before (actually I think it was Reservoir Dogs) but it is pretty good.

The original Alien design was inspired by horror artist HR Giger. I have always admired his work. He seems really disturbed, which is what makes a great artist in most cases. It is rare that anyone who grows up in a pristine Norman Rockwell home grows up to illustrate infants loaded into a gun as bullets (or if they do they come out as huge phonies, like a few people I could name from my art school days). Great art, in my opinion, is inspired by great pain (god that sounds pretentious).

This film is also home to one of the greatest movie lines of all time, "Game over, man! Game over!" Thank you Bill Paxton.