Stars:
Sigourney Weaver, Charles Dutton, Pete Postlethwaite, Charles Dance, Lance Hendriksen

Choice Dialogue:
Only when this weezy outing breathes it's last credit.

Conclusions:
* In the future, maximum security prisons will eliminate the need for showers, toothbrushes, overhead lights and common sense.
* Steam billows from pipes when you're about to be killed.
* Splitting up -- BAD IDEA!!!
* It's hard to get a response from your dog when he's been turned into goo.
* It's hard to get a response from your android when he's been turned into goo.
* It's hard to get a response from your audience when your script has been turned into goo.

Review:
There are some acts you just can’t follow. Alien was great, Aliens was also great, if not better. In the case of Alien³ you would correctly assume that the third time is not the charm. Or in my case simply plead "Please God, no more".

The problem with this series is that there is only so much life that you can squeeze out of this premise. The idea of a battle between a female mercenary and a 30 foot cockroach doesn’t have the juice to turn into an ongoing epic, but by God they're gonna try!

Alien had it’s crew imprisoned on a spaceship nowhere near a planet. Aliens had the crew imprisoned on a planet without a spaceship. Alien³ has Ripley in a prison on a remote planet while an aggrevated critic sits trapped in the audience wondering how to retrieve his 8 bucks.

The neverending saga of Ellen Ripley continues on and on despite how many times Weaver has tried to wriggle herself out of the role. But it seems funny that as her paychecks go up the quality of the series goes down. Alien³ seems to ooze "been there, done that" from every orafice. After a while you not only see a pattern but you spot holes in the fabric.

By the time the story opens, Ripley is 250 years from where she started and her circumstances haven’t changed. The main features of her existence (and the routines of the series) are that she wakes up from a deep sleep, recieves some devistating news then finds that she has to play Orkin Man for the next two hours. If it weren't for bad luck, she'd have no luck at all. This time despite the fact that her previous crew has bitten the dust and that she's trapped in a prison with horny males she also has an alien embryo festering in her brain. I imagine that this plot device was just a clever ruse to get Weaver to sign on because it suggested that the series would finally be over. ahem, WRONG!!

After years of hacknyed horror movies, it's only now that Ripley learns the oldest lesson in movie history: Don't make friends, they're fishfood. Fishfood, in this case, is the explanation that the supporting cast from Aliens died in hyper-sleep after the actors who played them wisely realized that this whole movie was just a house built on sand.

Sigourney Weaver (one of my favorite actresses) turned Ellen Ripley from a frightened astronaught in Alien into a brass-cajones mercenary in Aliens and earned an Oscar nomination. Having nowhere to go with this movie it's hard to tell exactly what she's thinking. Normally I can read an actor's body language but It's hard to tell if Ripley is exausted or Weaver is just bored. You can almost see the paycheck being waved over her head as she goes through the motions.

The rest of the cast sweats and screams and bleeds when their not smacking their lips at the shaven-headed heroine who has dropped into their midst. Did I mention shaven-headed? Well everyone in the film is shaved bald to prevent lice which renders us a bit confused when trying to tell one character from another. A dinner scene, for the audience, looks less like a meal and more like a Harry Crishna reunion.

The supporting cast falls victim to that old horror movie cliche in which they are set up and killed in order of their celebrity. Hence if you know them, thier demise will be delayed as the actors die in accordance with the Hollywood Celebrity Food Chain.

It wasn’t that long ago that Alien scared the pee dingers out of a generation of movie goers and left us with the notion that “In Space No One Can Hear You Scream”. That same logic still applies only now it comes in a rather splintered variation. You can scream “No More Alien Movies! No! No! Uncle! Uncle! UNK-A-HULL!” and no one in Hollywood will hear you scream.