Alien (DVD)

*** INTRODUCTION *** Alien is a 1979 sci-fi horror film directed by Brit Ridley Scott. It stars Sigourney Weaver in her first lead role and, as a result of the film's success, catapulted the actress into the public consciousness and did so virtually overnight. Briefly, the film centres on a small, terrified crew who, one-by-one, are picked off by an incredibly vicious predator. The premise was later to be used as the basis for the popular BBC1 show, The Apprentice, but I digress. This review is based on the single-disc DVD version of the movie but it is also available in numerous box-sets, collector's editions, limited editions, ...  Read the complete review

This is a review of the Alien film on the UMD format, this fomat uses a much smaller disk and is viewed on a Sony PSP, this fact should not really alter the review by about the movie itself and would only really affect the sound and picture portions of the review. Movie: I have owned Alien (and others in the series) in many guises, from VHS Tapes, The Alien Legacy boxset and the Quadrilogy Boxset through to now having the movie in UMD Format for the PSP, so yes you could say I am a fan of the films, and although the subsequent sequels (bar Aliens) has diminished in quality, I still enjoy each and every one of them. It was on the year of ...  Read the complete review

Science fiction films traditionally offered us glimpses of a golden future age, all high tech gadgetry, silver domed cities, vast space ships and the promise of great things. Even films such as Star Wars for all its good verse evil struggle is an innocent pantomime set in a simplistically polarised, clean and clear cut world. The bad guys are bad through choice, the good guys serve a higher power and everything is easily divided into its camps. Then in 1979 a film came along that changed the way science fiction looked forever. With Aliens this naïve view of the future was replaced by a darker vision, a vision of a world no better or worse than the one we live in, ...  Read the complete review

If I were asked to write down a list of my top ten Sci-fi movies this would easily get in, if I were to write a top ten list of Horror movies I would also include this. There have been lots of horror movies that have used science fiction themes right back to the classic 'Frankenstein' films of the 30's or a minor movie classic 'The Fly' (1958), there have also been plenty of sci-fi films that have used devices borrowed from the horror genre to pep up the plot; mutated plants, animals or people or grotesque looking aliens but I can think of only one film before 'Alien' that really managed to straddle the two genres 'Planet of the Vampires' (1965) by Italian ...  Read the complete review

‘Alien’ is a well-known classic, a hybrid of suspense horror and science fiction which has thrilled audiences ever since its release in 1979. With the DVD release we can finally approximate the quality of the cinematic print in our own home and see the film in its full scope widescreen glory. And when the extras are considered too, what we have here is a very impressive DVD package indeed. Whether you buy the Alien DVD on its own, or as part of the ‘Alien Legacy’ boxset (which also contains ‘Aliens’, ‘Alien3’, and ‘Alien Resurrection’ as well as a bonus documentary disc) as I did, this is what you get… ...  Read the complete review