by Steve Brennan

Created on: March 22, 2009

There comes a point in every man's life when you realize that nothing is sacred. Got a favourite song? It'll be used on a car ad or soft drinks commercial by the end of the year. Favourite musician? One day they'll be advertising perfume or clothes. Favourite film? Well, here you have the most varied possibilities for sacrilege.

Chances are that if this film had one or two good ideas, they'll be ripped off before you can blink by countless imitators, with diminishing degrees of success. Take the originality of Halloween, for example, beaten to death by various noxious movie series like the Nightmare On Elm Street films or the Friday The 13th saga. Or, more recently, the shameless rip-offs of films like Signs, with truly criminal straight-to-video insults like The Aliens Who Leave Maps In Fields. That may not have been its exact title, admittedly, but it was along those lines.

Undeniably, one of the most influential horror/ science fiction films of the last 30 years is Ridley Scott's Alien. Look at any outer space fright-fest since and there will be Alien overtones all over it: Event Horizon, Species, Starship Troopers, Pitch Black. Its nightmarish and groundbreakingly original depiction of extraterrestrial terror remains as effective today as it was when it was released. Atypically, the sequels were intriguing expansions on the original story, rather than just tired re-treads.

James Cameron's Aliens is still one of the most exciting action movies ever committed to celluloid, while David Fincher's actually-really-good Alien 3 gave us a hellish prison for British character actors being gradually slaughtered in a variety of fascinatingly horrible ways. Can't say fairer than that, can you? Despite the blatant Terminator 2 rip-off ending, it was a fitting conclusion to a brilliantly realized modern horror series, and the film-makers clearly intended for the line to be drawn there, as evidenced by Ripley's noble suicide while destroying the aliens once and for all.

But no. Out of the steaming pile of rejected script ideas for squeezing more blood out of the series came Alien Resurrection, directed by acclaimed Frenchman Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Delicatessen) from a dire script by Joss Whedon, and what a truly rubbish film it is. Apart from Batman And Robin, it's hard to think of many films that have so comprehensively shat on their legacy the way this does. It's full circle here - the fourth film in a series that practically invented the space-horror genre now freely steals

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