Don't bother with the Aliens Extended Edition. Really. Don't.

Do you know, it took me a long time to see it, until I finally got the Aliens DVD and see all this amazing new footage that my friend at University had been going on about back in 1994. "You should see the Sentry Guns!"

I wouldn't say my heart was pounding when I pressed the play button, but I was shall we say, "Interested."

Ridley Scott doesn't do Director's Cuts. All of his extended editions seem to be introduced with a little clip of his Ginger-Going-On-Greyness sat there in a chipperly avuncular fashion, saying that basically he doesn't do Director's Cuts cos his first cut was the best, but it's nice to see the deleted scenes.

. I can't remember what James Cameron said before this one, but I'm sure it wasn't "These scenes are a crock of shit, I can't believe I wasted the money filming them."

We kick off with a long and tedious "oh for fuck's sake cut to the chase" bit set in the colony on LV426, which is apparently entirely constructed with cheap plastic curtain rails and is populated by a myriad of crap actors of whom Captain Hollister from Red Dwarf is the best known. Cue redneck dad discovering alien ship and returning with a rubber chicken stuck to his face.

We are also treated to seeing Ripley sat on butcher's grass in the space hospital, being given a really really stupid photograph of her dead daughter - looking like Judith Hann off Tomorrow's World" - and doing some unconvincing crying. Or did this happen before? Fuck it I'm doing this from memory, and it doesn't matter anyway.

What else do we have. Oh yes, the much vaunted "Sentry Guns" scenes, along with the silly conversation about "Ant Hives". The Sentry Guns look ok, as models go, but they kill aliens rather too easily - in the manner of the Army of the Dead in The Return of the King - and the aliens they do kill are re-run footage hastily stitched in from what looks like the first marine raid on the cooling towers, but given a sort of fuzziness to make it look a bit different.

Yep, it looks different. And worse, like a Squid Head Star Wars figure being blown up with a firework while having yellow washing up liquid thrown on it. Shot in Super 8 and shown over and over again.

We finish with some "Don't be gone long" twattery, but the worst "Deleted" bit, by a mile, is the dire dire Hudson "rap". Forcing us over and over again to "Check it out" he masturbates over his weaponry like it's the night before Columbine round Dylan Klebold's house, reaching an orgasm with a decisive "Whap" before sticking his hand down his government issue camos for another round of frothy hand fun. "We got nukes, we got knives, we got sharp sticks" he ejaculates, before Apone  - and all of us - fearful of getting another faceful of sticky word come - tell him to "knock it off."

Er, I thought that's what he was doing already. Anyway, stick with the original cut. It does you no harm, and as Sly Stone would say, it might even do you some good.

Booba Lacka Lacka Lacka Booba Lacka Lacka!

Soul-less Sci Fi

I hate CGI and shiny surfaces; films sculpted out a block of marbled perfection, road tested by preview audience robots.

This is not the sccience fiction creation I aspire to.

I like rubber and latex suits where you can see the zip up the back, I like models where you can see the dinky drilled holes and the hairdryer parts and cannibalised airfix model kits.

I like planets with stupid names and pinky orange matte painted skies; where the mad scientist holds court amidst the fearsome buzz of Tesla Coils and robots menace damsels with heads made of an anglepoise lamp. I like rubber rocks being thrown, I like the papery thwack of collapsing polystyrene sets.

I like spaceships that look like breasts or phalluses with a November 5th sparkler providing the propulsion; I like craft with pointless wings in the unforgiving vacuum of space that emit sounds that you shouldn't hear in the void.

I like creatures that are tentacled entities of frightening antipathy towards the human race; or the occasional interplanetary policeman telling us to stop fucking about with atomic weapons especially if they have massive foreheads and strange hair.

I like grit. I like dirt. I like being able to see the fucking join. I like mistakes, failure and fun. I like being entertained.

And in modern sci fi, I get dazzled. And more often than not, I get bored.

OPINION - Sphere and the Weakest Movie Ending Ever

As is my habit these days - dictated by my genetic scottish tight fistedness - I buy most of my DVDs from Cash Converters the UK Pawn Shop chain. Second hand DVDs for a pound or a pound fifty, viewing pleasure mined from the dismal fate of junkies flogging thier own or other folk's stolen film collections to pay for the next hit...

It's a sad place to shop to be honest, but I do pick up occasional gems there for next to nothing. Zardoz. Witchfinder General. Yesterday I bought Sphere for £1.50, the "Special Edition", of which I can safely say in traditional style, if that was the special edition I'd hate to see what the original theatrical release looked like.

The film is dreadful. That it wasn't cheap is shown by some nice big undersea FX shots, but the story is confusing, the script terrible, and the casting of Dustin Hoffman in an action movie like this baffling, as he mumbles and gumbles away like a scientist version of his Rainman character. I liked Sharon Stone's haircut, but Samuel L. Jackson, as he always is if he is underwater, was dire.

Like Contact, the attempt to make a film about alien contact that had some sort of scientific credibility produces a film that is utterly and bloodily boring.

None of this is comparable to the ending however. A big sci fi production surely needs a big sci fi ending, doesn't it? Battles, blood, or a twist so vicious it could be a theme park attraction?

What we got with Sphere was three people holding hands, counting to three, and then a big golden golf ball flies off. That was it. 80 million dollars spent on the worlds most boring seance and a lame gag about men holding hands.

Tempting fate it was...

For did they not think, the film-makers in all their sun kissed LA wisdom, that if you have an ending in which the whole point is merely for everyone to forget the whole thing, then the audience will probably do the same?

OPINION - Richard B. Riddick

Every so often I check in on IMDB or Wiki or whatever, to find out what the latest progress on the next Riddick film is.

Now, as I read somewhere else, Vin Diesel now looks like Tony Hart's plasticine pal Morph, but Riddick was a fantastic creation that made him a star. Pitch Black was a superior and innovative B Picture. The Chronicles of Riddick like David Lynch's Dune was hampered by some daft scripting and terrible acting - not by Mr Diesel himself - but was fantastically designed and conceptualised. The section set on Crematoria and in the choking sulphorous prison was great.

My problem with it was that it was just not from the same universe as Pitch Black. That said, I thought the Necromogers were fascinating, and was looking forward to seeing how Riddick's apparent rise to Lord Martial would develop, and whether we would see the Underverse.

Well, we've apparently all died before our due time. The latest little bit  googling reveals that Riddick 3, or simply "Riddick" seems to be a stripped down affair, with some odd sounding casting for a major release - Katee Sackhoff, former WWE superstar Batista?  - with Riddick stranded on an alien world fighting monsters and mercenaries. We're back in a Pitch Black universe, by the looks of things.

Karl Urban's back, although I'm not surprised that Thandie Newton isn't.

It maybe that we will see Furya and Underverse in two mooted sequels, but I'm guessing the backers want to see if the Riddick character flies, financially speaking, before going larger scale.

I hope it does. I love these movies. There's something a shade different about Riddick's universe that deserves a bigger audience.

OPINION -The Dreaded Maximillian

I always think that Maximillian, the rotor twirling, Anthony Perkins drilling (not that way) crimson terror of Disney's The Black Hole is one of the more satisfying, and genuinely frightening, robot designs of sci fi - and horror for that matter.

As a child, I always imagined him chasing me down corridors aboard the Cygnus. How could I get away? If I turned the corner quick enough would he miss me?

Or would I end up having my intestines blended by those fearsome blades of of his?

Superhero Superficial

With apologies to the long forgotten Voodoo Queens, who sang...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcfJUiTf7eM

Supermodel Superficial!!!

I'm a bit fed up with the endless superhero films. I'm as "meh" as any cliche spouting lazy writer can be when it comes to Superman, Spiderman, the apparently Steedless Avengers, or any other leotard wearing platitude spouting fool.

"Prepare to Face Justice!!!" - oh fuck off.

Superheroes are fantasy figures originally designed to appeal to feeble men who were always getting pasted by jocks and couldn't get a girl even if she looked like Eric Stoltz in Mask, and in parallel to appeal to an America insecure in the face of Nazis and Communism. They are alternate egos, a feeble boy with a black eye imagining himself to be chiselled from granite "sock pow kerblamming it" to his foes. The opressor becomes the opressed. And he gets to give the  - to give them credit - usually quite sparky wench a big kiss at the end, his brain too young to understand the concept of hot, filthy penetrative intercourse.

I hate them. I wish I was a big strong beyond-super entity, capable of giving Superman and his Kryptonite knickers a good kicking, before stealig Lois to a dirty planet hideaway.

Spot. The. Hypocrite.

Firefly versus Farscape

Someone I know is being indoctrinated into Firefly.

THis is a good thing. Firefly was a great show, gritty, low tech - which I love - well written and well acted by the usual Joss Whedon suspects. It is superior to the Serenity movie, which despite the addition of Chiwetel Ejiofor looks far too shiny. Far too shiny indeed.

Nonetheless it's a superior piece of Cult TV, and I really wish I hadn't given the DVDs back to the guy I borrowed them from.

However when I tried the same trick myself, on the same person, with Farscape, with the fun and jolly "Crackers Don't Matter" the response was all a bit "meh". I loved Farscape the moment I saw it, was gutted when it was cancelled despite the fact that after Series 2 it lost its way a little and turned too much into the Ben Browder show on occasion.

"A bit meh" - I was hurt and offended I can tell you. Wonderful characters, genuinely inhuman creatures - not just people with wrinkles stuck on their noses (Guilty as charged, Star Trek TNG) - Scorpius, the greatest camp villain since Servalan from Blakes 7, and settings just not found elsewhere.

I don't understand how any geek or nerd could not like Farscape!