Memory: Origins of Alien

This year marks the 40^th anniversary of Ridley Scott’s seminal sci fi horror masterpiece, Alien. It was only Scott’s second major film, and yet he managed to make a movie that has stayed in the public consciousness for four decades and has spawned eight other big screen movies, as well as countless video games, comic books, novels, and toys. I can walk into any Target in America today and buy an action figure of the xenomorph, the terrifying, phallic apex predator alien of the film’s title. Got that? I can still buy brand-new toys from a film made when I was five years old. That, my friends, is pop culture staying power. 

The story, of course, follows the crew of the Nostromo, a tugboat in space making its way back to earth after a long mission. The crew members are awakened from their deep sleep by the ship’s computer reporting a potential distress signal. They land on a rocky, forbidding moon to investigate and discover the signal is coming from the remains of a marooned alien ship. Inside, they find a chamber filled with hundreds of egg-like objects. A crew member touches one only to have it open and have a combination of a spider, a witch’s hand, and my worst nightmare jump out and attach itself to his face. This frightening violation leads to one of the most memorable and shocking deaths in movie history when it becomes apparent that the face hugger planted an egg in the crew member that then gestates and is “born” when a baby alien bursts out of his chest in spectacularly gory fashion while everyone is eating dinner. The rest of the crew, especially our protagonist, Ellen Ripley as played by Sigourney Weaver, spends the rest of the film trying to kill and then just survive the unstoppable killing machine that’s been unleashed on their ship.

The whole film is atmospheric, strung with electrified tension wires, and speckled with the sweat of desperation. The cinematography, production design, sound design, script, and performances are powerful and still perfect after all these years. If you haven’t ever seen the original Alien or you just want to be good and scared, you should screen it tonight. 

 If you’re a fan from way back, another film you may want to consider is the 2019 documentary Memory: The Origins of Alien. It’s not a behind-the-scenes or making-of so much as it is a meditation on where some of the major story points and images came from. Rather than focusing on the production itself or, say, Ripley’s role as a feminist icon, Memory focuses on Dan O’Bannon, the writer whose love for horror, comics, and H.P. Lovecraft eventually became a story that became a script that became a film that became the cultural juggernaut that is Alien. Memory also highlights the contributions of H. R. Giger, the Swiss painter whose nightmarish, techno-sexual designs inspired the truly alien aspects of the xenomorph and the ship where it originates. The film features interviews with the now-deceased O’Bannon’s wife along with actors like Veronica Cartwright and Tom Skerritt who appeared in the film and a variety of producers and intellectuals who touch on Alien’s subversive, controversial undertones dealing with male rape and impregnation. They shed interesting light on some of what has given Alien such unsettling staying power.

The documentary’s focus is quite tight in the sense that it really does zero in on the origins of the story, the images, and the infamous chest burster scene with John Hurt. Some would argue this makes the film myopic or shallow, but I choose to think of it as one specific chapter in the much larger collection of things written and filmed about Alien over the last forty years. It’s stylishly filmed and edited, and is a nice addition to the body of work about Ridley Scott’s influential film.

So to sum up, Memory: The Origins of Alien is good, but 1979’s Alien is truly great.   

The Addams Family

Charles Addams published his first cartoon in The New Yorker in 1932 when he was just 20 years old. By the time he died in 1988 at the age of 76, he had published over 2500 cartoons in a variety of magazines and had released 10 books of his work. His cartoons regularly featured spouses doing away with each other in assorted ways, children happily playing with poison and knives, and various ghouls and creeps talking to one another like suburban neighbors. What Addams work did not feature a lot if is the Addams family. Over the course of his entire career, he only created about 150 cartoons that featured characters we know as Gomez, Morticia, Wednesday, Pugsley, and Fester. That measly six percent of his work has spawned two live action tv shows, three live action films, an animated tv series, a Broadway musical, and now most recently, a full-length animated feature called, naturally, The Addams Family. 

 I was a huge fan of the tv show that ran from 1964 to 1966. I’m not saying I had a giant crush on Carolyn Jones as Morticia and her figure-hugging vampira dress – but I’m not saying I didn’t. The distinctive element of the television show and Addams original cartoons is how this family was utterly loving and devoted to one another in their own gleefully perverse, macabre way. Morticia and Gomez were doting parents. Wednesday and Pugsley were sweet, obedient kids. Everyone loved everyone, and the only differences between them and Ozzie and Harriet were the guillotines, explosives, evil spirits, disembodied limbs, and terrifying, zombie-like butler.

The new animated film attempts to bring the Addams Family into the 21^st century. In this iteration, their possessed, haunted mansion sits atop a hill overlooking a meticulously planned community called Assimilation. Obviously, the film isn’t going to win any points for subtlety. A reality tv home-makeover personality named Margaux Needler has built the entire town (complete with hidden cameras for her own uses) and needs to sell every house in order to not lose her tv show. The Addams family house is an eyesore and their various ghoulish relatives coming for a visit threaten Assimilation’s marketability. It’s a flimsy conceit that creates an all-too-easy, us-versus-them heavy handed metaphor about non-conformity, xenophobia, and just being yourself, man. There is also a subplot about Pugsley, voiced by Stranger Things’ Finn Wolfhard, approaching the Addams family equivalent of a bar mitzvah, a ceremony marking his transition into manhood. It involves him dancing with a sword, and he is disappointed that he’s not able to use TNT which is his weapon of choice. The story is actually the least interesting part of the film.

Visually, it is the closest adaptation of Addams’ actual drawings thus far. Gomez, voiced by Oscar Issac, looks like a gleeful ghoul, and Morticia, voiced by Charlize Theron, is elongated, paler than pale, and even more wasp-waisted than Carolyn Jones was. Their house is a delightfully dilapidated combination of rococo, Victorian, and Tim Burton. It’s fun to see Charles Addams work up on the big screen looking very much as it did on the page.

Most of the performances are just fine with one notable exception. Charlize Theron has done wonderfully evocative voice work before in her career, but here her choices seem odd. Rather than paying homage to the Morticias of the past or creating her own new take on the character, she mostly seems to be channeling Lady Mary Crawley from Downton Abbey. She sounds haughty and aristocratic and lacks the steely joy of Carolyn Jones and the impish remove of Angelica Houston. Her performance was distracting and slightly annoying.

If this new Addams Family movie introduces young people to the work of Charles Addams, the 60s tv show, or even the Barry Sonnenfeld movies of the 90s, it will have been worth it. Otherwise, wait to see it when it comes out on disc or streaming.  

Life After Flash

If you are a sci-fi nerd of a certain age, chances are 1980’s Flash Gordon is important to you. The art-deco-inspired rocketships and floating palaces; the skimpy, borderline fetishistic costumes; Flash and Dale as wholesome and bland as two of slices of Wonderbread; the terrifying, metal-faced villain Klytus; the wicked Ming the Merciless. Growing up, my brothers and I watched it dozens of times, renting it from Country Time Video in American Falls, Idaho almost weekly. It was so different from our other rockets-and-rayguns touchstone, Star Wars, but we loved it as much, just in a different way. Based on the weekly newspaper comic strip created by Alex Raymond, directed by Mike Hodges, produced by the infamous Dino Delaurentis, and featuring an incomparable soundtrack by Queen, Flash Gordon is a campy, over-the-top space opera. Its plot is so basic, it’s almost laughable. Ming, ruler of the universe and evil-for-evil’s sake bad guy, decides to destroy the Earth, simply because he’s bored and needs something to do. Flash Gordon, quarterback for the New York Giants, just happens to find his way onto a rocketship headed for Mongo where he intends to save his home planet and, indeed, the universe. 

The film initially wasn’t seen as a success. While it cleared its 20 million dollar budget by a good bit, compared to both Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back which producers wanted to emulate, it was a dismal failure. Critically, it received mixed reviews and was generally seen as an uneven, love-it-or-hate-it oddity.

The ironic thing is that the only reason George Lucas made Star Wars in the first place is he couldn’t buy the rights to Flash Gordon. Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader exist only because ol’ George couldn’t afford Flash and Ming. The other aspect of the Flash Gordon film that often goes underappreciated is how close it stays to the source material. Critics made a lot out of the outlandish set and costume designs and the bright, garish colors throughout. All of those things are part of what makes the film such a faithful adaptation. The original comic strips were beautifully bright and colorful, and Alex Raymond’s designs were sleek, sexy, and often kind of ridiculous. Flash Gordon is more faithful than almost any comic book adaptation from the last 15 years. 

 Just this year, the documentary Life After Flash got a wide release and is now available on streaming. Part nerd-hymn of praise, part behind-the-scenes expose, the film features interviews with Sam J. Jones the big slab of beef who played Flash along with Melody Anderson who played Dale Arden, and the actors who played Vultan, Klytus, a variety of tree men and hawk men, and even a brief bit with Brian May of Queen. Life After Flash is at its most entertaining when it examines Flash Gordon as a cultural artifact. The artists, filmmakers, and comedians who talk about the film’s impact are funny and insightful, and their affection for the movie just sort of runs out of the screen at you. Brian Blessed, the classically trained Shakespearian actor who played Vultan, king of the Hawkmen, is a complete riot. His bluster and joyful arrogance made me laugh out loud repeatedly.

Supposedly the film’s main concern is telling Sam J. Jones’s story. In 1980, he was handsome, famous, and rich, but excessive partying and on-set altercations cost him the career he might have had as well as his first marriage and a lot of peace of mind. Now in his mid-60s, Jones is a born-again Christian who operates his own security company and crisscrosses the country making appearances at comic book conventions. At peace with his past, he seems to take genuine pleasure in meeting fans of a movie he made almost 40 years ago. Honestly, Life After Flash sags the most when Jones is on the screen, but overall, it’s an enjoyable, watchable film that will hit a chord of nostalgia with sci fi nerds everywhere.