Preview Post 22/10/2020

Alright readers?

Fresh off of my Out of Reach viewing, I’m looking forward to the next film I’ll be writing about. You see, I’m sure it hasn’t escaped your notices that it’s Spooktober*, and Halloween is a mere week-and-a-half away. In honour of this, instead of your usual instalment of bad film badness, next week will be a special blog post: a Halloween special focusing on ‘Aliens’!

Long time readers of the blog will remember that, as a reward for sitting through 9 terrible films, the tenth film I watched for the blog was ‘Alien’, which I rather liked. In order to do this, I bought a boxset of the first four Alien films, meaning I already have Aliens good to go. Some people tell me they prefer this film to the first and I gather that it is quite different in tone to the original. Directed by James Cameron the film is a thematic and narrative continuation of the story of the first. But where the first was like a Sci-Fi horror film, akin to a Ghost story, a little research suggests this film is framed more like an action film- specifically a War movie. Indeed, the tagline reads: ‘This time, it’s War’.

So yes, I’m looking forward to seeing how this plays out! There can be little doubt that its a good movie- plenty of reviews both professional and from my friends suggest an all time classic. What will be more interesting to me is whether I like it more or less than the first, and to see whether I spot the weightier themes the experts say are littered throughout. I’m excited to see the return of Sigourney Weaver as Ridley, and to get to know some of the other elements of the Alien canon like the Power-Loaders, the Marines’ Weaponry and the immortal, infinitely parodied lines: ‘Game over Man, game over!’ and ‘Get away from her you BITCH’.

I’ll have the review up by Monday 2nd November. Until then, here’s some amusing content related to the blog:

Firstly I invite you to look at this poster for Steven Seagal/ Van Dam film Sniper: Special Ops. This was shown to me by a friend whilst I was writing about Out of Reach and was too good not to share. The longer you look at it, the sillier it is:

Next, and the last bit of Seagal-content (Seagaltent?) for a while, I promise, is this old SNL sketch which riffs on Action Movies pretty effectively. Also Jay Pharoah’s Denzel Washington impression is very, very funny:

Until next week readers!

-Tom

*Side note- Where did ‘Spooktober’ come from. I’m sure I’d never heard it before this year. Maybe we needed something extra goofy to help us through another month of 2020? Dunno.