40th Anniversary Screening!
On their long journey back to Earth, the crew of the Nostromo—a brilliantly selected cast of character actors including Tom Skerritt, Sigourney Weaver, Veronica Cartwright, Harry Dean Stanton, John Hurt, and Yaphet Kotto—are brought out of hyper-sleep early when their ship detects what is believed to be a distress signal coming from a nearby planet. While investigating the source of the distress call, one of the crew is attacked by a creature that latches to—or “hugs,” wink, wink—his face. While rushing back to the ship for medical attention, Ripley (Weaver, in her first appearance in the groundbreaking role), warns that her injured colleague shouldn’t be brought back on board due to quarantine regulations. Her orders are ignored, inadvertently bringing the Nostromo under threat from a mysterious extraterrestrial life form with violent and lethal survival instincts.
Four decades later, Ridley Scott’s Alien remains a shockingly perfect hybrid of horror and science fiction, one that has spawned several sequels, spin-offs and crossovers, none of which have risen to the level of perfection as Scott’s first entry. As such, we will be screening the 1979 theatrical cut, the first version that terrified cinema audiences forty years ago—and has been ever since.
