Podcast: Alien
A very deep dive into Alien, Ridley Scott, and the very complicated imagination of Dan O'Bannon
Bring Me The Axe! Horror Podcast
Episode 107: Alien
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Bring Me the Axe! is a comedy podcast celebrating the best (and worst) horror from a time when the video store ruled the night. Every other week, brothers Bryan and Dave White (and the occasional guest) heed the call of nostalgia and evaluate the classic 70s and 80s horror movies they loved in their childhood to determine whether the movies are still relevant today or should be allowed to fade into obscurity.
On the podcast no one can hear you scream. This week we’re taking a look at the horror movie hingepoint in 1979, Alien. Before Star Wars there wasn’t a studio on earth that wanted to make an expensive science fiction movie and after Star Wars they couldn’t find enough scripts to get expensive science fiction movies into production. Alien was one of the first ones to come out of the gate that wasn’t a cheap ripoff of George Lucas’s masterpiece. It was worlds apart from the recent space movie hits. It featured no highly competent astronauts traveling to Jupiter and no dashing heroes in star fighters, wielding light sabers. Instead, Ridley Scott delivered a quiet, slow-moving horror movie featuring blue collar characters just trying to get by on a commercial tow vessel. At the same time, they delivered one of the most suspenseful horror movies with one of the strongest casts and one of the most iconic monster designs by world-class artists. It is truly one of the greatest horror movies of all time.
Alien sees the crew of the Nostromo rerouted to a planet nearby where a crashed alien vessel sends out a radio signal that they interpret as a distress call. By the time the ship’s computer figures out that it’s not a distress call but a warning it’s too late and the ship’s XO finds himself with a horrifying alien creature stuck to his face, laying its egg inside him. When the egg hatches by exploding out of his chest it unleashes the perfect killing machine, a biomechanical alien that stalks the ship’s crew and kills them off one by one.
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