Alien
Once upon the ’70s, before there were doll-eyed albino Michelin Men, before fanged vagina-mouth Rasta-monsters from outer space barged in for a good rassle, before all the Winona-ing and cloning and sad Muppet Baby abominations, before the AIDS allegory and the Vietnam metaphors, before the titular nasty became just a screeching bug you can run over in your car, there was Alien, a movie about tired space truckers stuck in a floating haunted house with an unknowable, unbeatable Freudian nightmare made of genitalia, teeth, and KY Jelly. It is probably the best horror movie ever made, and it’s screens this week in tribute to Harry Dean Stanton, who counts among his myriad indelible movie moments the first ever on-screen death via full-grown xenomorph. A death witnessed only by Jones the Cat, who basically got him killed and didn’t do shit to stop it because cats are dicks.
by Bobby Roberts