At Anorak: The 5 Best Alien (1979) Knock-Offs of the 1980s

My new article is up at Anorak, and it gazes at some of the best knock-offs of Ridley Scott's horror watershed: Alien (1979).

Here's a snippet:

RIDLEY Scott’s Alien (1979) dramatically altered the template for horror films set in outer space. For example, the blockbuster film was among the first (after Dark Star [1975] to suggest that travel in the final frontier would be the purview of “work-a-day” space truckers rather than noble explorers or adventurous astronauts.

And instead of intrepid space travelers fighting men-in-rubber suits inside idealized white-on-white space station environs (as was the case in The Green Slime [1968]) Alien suggested a technological space age marked by endless industrial corridors and aliens of constantly shifting dimension.

The Scott film’s central alien — a bio-mechanoid horror created by H.R. Giger — could also gestate inside a living human host, and this fact ushered in a new era of cinematic “body horror.”

As with any genre blockbuster, Alien almost immediately spawned a host of knock-offs, some terrible and some quite good.  These films found much material to imitate and emulate, from the diverse make-up of Alien’s victim pool, to bloody variations on Alien’s famous chest-burster birth scene.  Many Alien knock-off films also involved long forgotten derelicts or other structures on alien planetary surfaces, for instance.  Inevitably, human crews would discover these Lovecraftian edifices and wake up age-old horrors.

Among the Alien knock-offs of the 1980s were Scared to Death (1981), Forbidden World(1982),  The Beast Within (1982), Parasite (1982), The Being (1983), and Biohazard(1985), to name just a handful.

The list below represents five of the best — or at least the most memorable– of the Alien knock-off breed.  As is often the case regarding knock-offs, the best such films are invariably those that re-purpose not merely the clichés from one source – in this case — Alien — but also from other literary or cinematic works as well.