Tag Archives: Aliens

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Throwback Thursday: the sentry guns scene in “Aliens” (1986)!

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No, you are not suffering from the Mandela effect if you saw “Aliens” in the theater in 1986 and remember a really cool scene with some automatic remote sentry guns placed in a corridor — against which waves and waves of monsters launched an attack.  And you aren’t insane either.

The scene was in the movie when it originally played in theaters, according to my sources on Reddit and Youtube.  But it was not included on the VHS version (whether it’s referred to the “theatrical cut” or not). 

Variations of the scene can be found in different subsequent cuts of the film, according to fans online — like the director’s cut or the special edition, or versions appearing on television. 

Some include dialogue we remember from 1986.  (“Next time they just walk right in,” or something like that.)  And at least one includes the shots of the aliens being cut to pieces in the corridor.  (Notably, the scene below does not.)

Anyway, I am linking to the totally awesome Alien Fire Team Elite on Youtube for the video.  Semper fi, gentlemen.

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Throwback Thursday: the trailer for “Aliens” (1986)!

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I was one of the lucky (and old, I suppose) people who saw “Aliens” (1986) in the theater.  (I am linking here, by the way, to Grindhouse Movie Trailers.)

This trailer had one of the greatest taglines in history too — “Aliens: This Time, It’s War.”

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My Facebook friends wanted me to make a meme out of my Ellen Ripley post.

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So here it is.

Okay … in a deleted scene for “Aliens” (1986), Ripley is shown to have had a child, blah, blah, blah. But deleted scenes are not canon, My Dudes.

Postscript —  my fellow nerds know that this message works equally well with Ms. Selina Kyle.

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Throwback Thursday: this 80’s-era fake wood paneling!

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People on the “I Found This Online” Facebook page are joking about this weird faux-wood paneling from the 1980’s.  (It got 96,000 “likes.”)  There is even a Reddit page about them!  These walls were everywhere in my rural/suburban New York neighborhood.

I love them!  Sure, you couldn’t hang anything up because you couldn’t get a thumb-tack in.  But they’re dark and rustic, and they take me right back to the 1980’s.  Gimme a basement with these walls, a plush rug, a television, an Atari 2600 and a stack of 80’s horror films on VHS ands I’ll be very happy.  (Hopefully the movies will include 1986’s “Aliens” and 1982’s “The Thing.”)

Better yet, leave out a couple of liters of soda and some chips, and let me invite a couple of Longwood High School friends over.

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Throwback Thursday: “Raiders of the Lost Ark” (1981)!

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This is it, folks.  This is the greatest movie of all time.  It’s better than “Blade Runner” (1982), better than John Carpenter’s “The Thing” (1982), better than “Aliens” (1986).  And those movies were all … perfect.  (Man the 1980’s really were a golden age for pop culture, weren’t they?)

I was eight years old when I saw this in the theater, and I thereafter was a bit of an Indiana Jones cultist.  It wasn’t just the action figures and board games and comic book and posters and role-playing games.  I actually resolved to become an archeologist (or a paleontologist), and I thought the best way that I could prepare for that as a third grader was to gain experience “in the field.”

So I would lead my friends on “digs” or “expeditions” in the forests around my neighborhood.  We would often arbitrarily pick a spot in the middle of nowhere and then just dig there, with a shovels we borrowed from my family’s garage.  We were hoping to find … anything of interest, I guess :buried treasure, dinosaur bones, Indian arrowheads, whatever.  (We never did.  About the only thing we “discovered” was that tree roots are a real bitch when you’re trying to dig a hole.)  I even kept maps and journals of our “adventures.”  These are the kinds of things that boys do before they discover girls.

I tried to look the part, too.  I had a brown cowboy hat that I hoped could pass for a fedora, an (empty) binocular case and a prop bullwhip snagged from a Levi’s jeans display at the local mall.  My older brother called me “Idaho Bones” because I essentially was a cheap, skinny knockoff of the character I wanted to emulate.  I hated it at the time, but as an adult, I kinda can’t dispute his assessment.

Oh, well.  We all had fun.  Every other boy in the neighborhood who spotted that bullwhip wanted to try it, so there’s that.

To this day, “Raiders” is still my favorite movie ever.

By the way, I am linking below to the Rotten Tomatoes Classic Trailers Youtube channel.

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Poster for “Aliens” (1986)

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20th Century Studios.

aliens

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“KITCHEN MISHAPS” Season 1, Episode 1

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Eric’s Epic Detrimental Deluge

Don’t put a trigger on a hose unless you want me to re-enact the scene in “Aliens” (1986) where Hudson ****ing goes berserk with his pulse rifle against xenomorphs attacking from every angle.

“YOU WANT SOME?!  *GET* SOME!!!”

hudson

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Throwback Thursday: “I coulda had a V8!”

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These commercials were ubiquitous in the 1970’s.  If you were a small child, you could rattle off the trademark slogan without even understanding what it meant, and adults would find it extremely funny.  (The ad actually isn’t terribly funny by itself.  The 1980’s had a plenty of inspired commercials. but the few I can remember from the 70’s were generally lame.)

Anyway, fast-forward about 12 years to when I was a senior in high school … a buddy of mine actually handed me a can of V8 and dared me to pound it in one gulp.  (For those not in the know, the product is a phenomenally awful beverage concocted from vegetable juices.)  I took the dare.  And I wound up projectile vomiting like a god damned fire hose — all over the rear bumper of that 1972 Plymouth Duster that I loved so much.

I suppose that I could try to blame my lifelong abhorrence for vegetables on that experience, but I hated greens even when I was a kid.  (I was endlessly sneaking them to the dog at the dinner table; I wrote a story about it in the second grade that my parents nevertheless found amusing when I brought it home.)

The V8 vegetable drink is still around; the company is owned by Campbell’s.  Somebody should find out where it’s canned, break into the place at night and just machine-gun all the cans in the same manner as Ripley shooting all the alien eggs at the climax of “Aliens” (1986).  It would be a public service.

 

 

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Cover to “Aliens Colonial Marines: Rising Threat” #1, Tristan Jones, 2019

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Dark Horse Comics.

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So I’m introducing a dear friend tonight to “28 Days Later.”

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So I’m introducing a dear friend tonight to “28 Days Later” (2002).  It is possibly my favorite horror film of all time, maybe even narrowly beating out “Aliens” (1986), “Alien 3” (1992), John Carpenter’s “The Thing” (1982), the Sutherland-tacular 1978 version of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” and George A. Romero’s first three “Dead” films (1968, 1978, 1985).  (Whenever “Star Wars” fans refer to their “Holy Trilogy,” I muse inwardly that those last three are its equivalent for zombie horror fans.)

My friend thinks it’s funny that I refer to “28 Days Later” as “my sacred cow.”  I’ll be crestfallen if she does not like it, and I told her as much.  And that’s weird for me … I usually don’t feel let down when someone doesn’t enjoy the same books, movies or music that I do.  Not everything is for everyone.  Art would lose its mystique if it weren’t subjective.  If all art appealed to all people, it would lose all its appeal altogether.

Part of me feels, unconsciously perhaps, that “28 Days Later” is the kind of film that “redeems” the horror genre (even though no genre needs such redemption — if art is well made or if it affects people, then it’s just fine).

Most comic book fans of my generation can tell you how people can occasionally roll their eyes at their favorite medium.  (Comics have far greater mainstream acceptance today than when I started reading them in the 1990’s.)   For horror fans, it’s sometimes worse.  Horror is a genre that is easily pathologized — and sometimes with good reason, because a portion of what it produces is indeed cheap or exploitative.  I wish I could accurately describe for you the looks I’ve gotten when acquaintances find out that I’m a horror fan.  They aren’t charitable.

“28 Days Later” and movies like it are so good that they elevate horror to a level that demands respect from the uninitiated.  It is an intrinsically excellent film — it just happens to have a sci-f-/horror plot setup and setting.  It’s beautifully directed by Danny Boyle, it’s perfectly scored and it’s masterfully performed by its cast — most notably by Cillian Murphy and Brendan Gleeson.

Moo.

 

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