• AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldB
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    4 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    Never before had the genre been tackled with such style and sophistication, and its grimy space truckers vibe infused with a simmering '70s sexuality gave the project an edgy real-world foundation from which to launch into more familiar “monster in a haunted house” movie tropes.

    These precious news nuggets were mined from coveted fanzines like Starlog and Cinefantastique, poking from pockets of many a nerdy Bay Area kid, read in between Round Table pizza runs and Saturday afternoon treks to Talbot’s Toys and Hobbies for fresh packs of Estes rocket engines or miniature bottles of Testors paint to finish off that Revell airplane model.

    Months before release, our Belmont Theater displayed a vivid set of 11-by-14 inch  lobby cards hinting at the claustrophobic confines of the Nostromo, its blue collar crew, the exterior of a derelict spaceship, and astronauts climbing up onto the petrified Space Jockey.

    Much of its near-erotic imagery with the dreadnought’s yonic openings and pulsating semi-transparent eggs was lost on my pubescent brain in the sold-out theater, but the mystery and foreboding it evoked resounded inside my cranial cavity like a miniature time bomb.

    There’s an almost fetishistic way Scott lingers on the lethal creature’s drooling mouth, seductive prowling, phallic-shaped head, and dreamlike fluid movement, all adding to audiences’ latent fears and sexual repressions.

    Entrenched barriers were crossed between campy horror and high art, boundaries were violated, breached and bulldozed, as the unknown world of adulthood loomed on my horizon like the organo-form starship obscenely lodged in a rubble of jagged rocks on the hostile planetoid.


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