Alien³

David Fincher, USA, 1992, 110 minutes

Poor Ripley. It's a shame for her. If having all her shipmates messily massacred, and discovering her employers were behind it, in Alien wasn't bad enough, she was returned to Earth to find out her daughter had grown old and died in the fifty odd years she drifted before Aliens. In that film she was so haunted by her experiences that she had to go out again to fight a whole colony of them. Her employers then tried to incubate one in her and she up having to fight the mother alien, one bitchy piece of slime.

Without giving away the start of Alien3, suffice to say that it's A Real Bummer for her. She shortly finds herself on the prison colony Fury 161, home to an all-male sect of violent repeat offenders who have turned to religion in their own twisted way. Things are bad enough, for she is a kind of alien here. Then a couple of horrible deaths provide the premonition, and yap, one of them nasty slimy sorts is around. Transport? None. Weapons? The odd kitchen knife. Couple of fire axes. This is a prison, remember. Just as things are hitting an all-time low, Ripley finds out something even worse.

Despite the title's promised two new dimensions of acid-blooded terror, Alien3 is much more like the original, with a single alien creeping around those omnipresent ventilation ducts. Yuck value is provided by several close-up injections, bits of dog, and large pieces of churning machinery. Ripley's relationship with several inmates is interesting, fleshing her out beyond the butch "woman's woman" stereotype. Also worth a mention is the unusually high "fuck" count. First-time director David Fincher has stamped his own style on this film and it's worth watching. Check it out, but be careful what you sit beneath.

Review by Gavin Inglis
Taken from EUFS Programme 1992-93