Alien Quadrilogy

[Blog Owner's Note: This entry will cover the four films in the Alien series — Alien, Aliens, Alien3, and Alien: Resurrection.]

This great boxed set contains all four Alien films before they started throwing Predators into the story and mucking everything up. Each film is included in two versions: the original theatrical cut and a "director's" cut, which is a total misnomer here.

In fact, Ridley Scott writes in the liner notes about how the original Alien was his vision, and any subsequent cuts were done at the request of the studio many years later, and created an altogether different experience.

James Cameron, on the other hand, seized the opportunity to recut Aliens at one point, and added about 20 minutes to the film.

The last two films in the series, the two most forgettable (but I'm still committed to watch), were recut without the involvement of David Fincher and Jean-Pierre Jeunet.

For this project, I'm watching the films theatrically, as the directors intended -- except for James Cameron's preferred director's cut.

I saw Alien on TV when I was maybe 10 years old, which was the only time I've ever been able to watch the first facehugger spring out of the egg and latch on to John Hurt's face. And I only watched it then because I didn't know what was coming. Now I do, and I can't watch that scene. This remains the only part of any film that freaks me out to the point I can't watch. It's the scariest thing I've ever seen. None of the sequels were a fraction as scary. My god, the acidic blood ate through two floors, and my god, the look on the crew's faces when the chest burster shows up...this is such amazing writing.

The name of this set is really too bad. A compound work made up of four distinct works should be called a "tetralogy," but some marketing genius decided people were too dumb to know what that was and made up a word: "quadrilogy." See, even dumb people know what "quad" means, right? And an "ilogy," well, we all know about trilogies. So this is just one louder.