What I loved so much about Aliens is, well, many things. But some of the main ones were :
a. The main monsters are concrete, tangible things. Bursts of gunfire work. They are dangerous but they don’t get to ‘cheat’ like, say, the monster from ‘the grudge’, which is intangible, can teleport, and appears to obey no rules whatsoever.
b. The aliens can be dealt with. You just need to not get facehugged (and if you do, don’t keep it a secret), bring plenty of ammo, rescue any survivors, and then nuke em from orbit. Also, make sure to check for stowaways before you put your pulse rifles away.
Anyways, they were great. Are there other horror films where the main baddies can actually be handled?
That monster in IT, at least from the trailers, appears to be the cheating type, as a side note.
Oh, I just remembered, Stranger Things is an example of non cheating. The Upside Down is real, you can go to it, gunfire is somewhat effective, Will didn’t die because he had his gun with him and he shot the monster before it could eat him, and so on.
Both versions of The Thing. In fact, both films are basically devoted to scientists figuring out what rules the monster operates by, so they can defeat it.
Also, while it’s not a great movie, several plot elements from Alien were borrowed from a film called It! Terror from Beyond Space. In It! a ship returns from a mission with only one crew member alive aboard, and he is going to be arrested for murder. He tells a story in a long flashback of a deadly alien boarding the ship and murdering everyone else, because he’s some kind of intergalactic serial killer. There’s no evidence of him on board, though, because the lone crew member defeated him, somehow (it’s been a long time since I’ve seen it). It’s not quite MST3K fodder (although for all I know, it may have been on the show, but if it was, it’s one of the better films to make it). I had a VHS of it, which tells you how long ago it’s been since I’ve seen it.
I think The Descent (2005) fits the bill. Hugely entertaining movie, not for the claustrophobic.
I think of Aliens as an action movie rather than horror, although Alien is more horror than action. The characters in the original movie discovered that the xenomorph could bleed (although you wouldn’t want it to), but they were woefully understocked on weapons. The Colonial Marines had weaponry ranging from pulse rifles to ummm … nukes.
If we’re fuzzing the line between horror and action, then Predator (1985) and its sequels (including ones featuring xenomorphs) probably should be included.
Stephen King-type intangible horrors always annoyed me.
It’s a very different philosophy – in a King-like story the horror is sort of intentionally antithetical to you. In the kind of movie you’re writing about, the creatures have their own independent existence and goals, and you’re just in the way, or are bothering it, or are a potential source of food. It’s not a Contest of Wills Between Good and Evil – it’s a small-time battle between you and a largely unknown opponent with goals and weaknesses.
There are plenty of “real” monsters out there. In fact, the whole cycle of 1950s monster movies seemed to revolve around finding the particular Achilles Heel for the Beast in Question, then killing it off with it. The most relevant to your query is arguably the monster from It! The Terror from Beyond Space, from which film the plot of Alien was lifted wholesale. The beastie was a Martian Creature who happened to crawl into the port on a spaceship, and is now eating the humans on board (well, absorbing their water). as an ostensibly real animal with its own goals, it’s believable. It also is vulnerable, but no so much to radiation or to being hit. But it needs a lotta air.
A lot of monsters just need to be shot or hit a lot of times until they lose enough blood and body parts to collapse – King Kong, the Ymir from 20 Million Miles to Earth, the T. Rex in Beast of Hollow Mountan or Dinosaurus or Valley of Gwangi.
Others can’t be so directly hit because their blood is diseased, and you don’t want to spread it (Beast from 20,000 Fathoms), or it can regenerate, and you don’t want to multiply your enemy a la The Sorceror’s Apprentice’s broomsticks (Reptilicus).
Sometimes it’s not in the form of a creature at all, and you have to figure out what its weakness even is (The Monolith Monsters, The Blob, Caltiki the Immortal Monster)
Or it’s so tough you need some special weapon to get at it (the original Gojira, with the “Oxygen Destroyer”, the robot in Kronos)
Ha Ha! I saw both of those back in 89 at a Drive-In Double Bill!
Saw this at the Drive-In too as the opener. Funniest intermission ever… no one would get out of the car to walk to the snack bar! :eek:
Followed by a plan to jump across roofs/hoods of cars and pole-vaulting to the Rest rooms!
If you’re looking for movies similar to “Alien”, by the way, there were a LOT of imitators that came out shortly after it. Besides the ones mentioned by DCnDC, there were
**Contamination
Inseminoid
Creature
Alien Terror
Xtro
Forbidden World
Alien from the Deep
**
In fact, there were a LOT of cheapo films with “Alien” in the title, hoping to cash in on the whole Alien vibe.
As I recall, The Relic was another Alien(s) clone movie so I believe it should qualify. Penelope Ann Miller fighting monsters in the Chicago Field Museum.
well, Relic is based on a book by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Childs about a monster running loose in the bowels of what is clearly the American Museum of Natural History (co-author Douglas Preston used to work at the AMNH, and wrote a history of it). Having grown up going to the AMNH, and hearing about all the behind-the-scenes stuff, I could easily appreciate Preston conceiving the idea.
The film was produced by Gale Ann Hurd (James Cameron’s ex, who had co-=produced other SF films with him), and directed by Peter Hyams (Capricorn One, Outland, 2010, and other SF films). They moved the story to Chicago.
The film isn’t really inspired by Alien or derived from it, except in atmosphere. I don’t count it as an Aliens ripoff at all. Although it does meet the OP’s criteria for a tangible monster threat (In the book it’s killed off by a bullet through the eye socket, which gets past its really tough bones. In the flick, it’s incinerated in an explosion.) In the novel, the threat isn’t completely eliminated, leading to a sequel, Reliquary.
