I wheezed in the smoke that filled the room as my faithful companions combatted the goons that had turned the basement of the Museum of Schlock into a fentanyl distribution center. I do mean tooth and nail. Edwige, the kangaroo, was sinking her jaw into the neck of a flailing punk. The smoke began to dissipate and severed limbs and dotted the floor. That was the Revenging Manta’s handiwork. I heard Waldo screaming in pain and I went in the direction of his cries.

— To be continued.

Tonight’s movie is 2024’s Alien: Romulus from director Fede Álvarez. Yes, that movie came out less than a month ago, but I’m writing about it because Alien is the franchise that cannot die. I’ve never liked the term franchise to describe a series of movies because the word franchise reminds me of fast food chains, but some intellectual properties act just like fast food chains, offering a crap product at ever-increasing prices.

Alien: Romulus serves as the greatest hit album of this series. You get a little bit of everything from the previous installments For instance, Ian Holm reprises his role of an evil android like the one he played in the first movie. This time he’s called Rook instead of Ash. The director said it was a shame that we never got to see Holm’s android model in another movie. Maybe that’s because the Weyland-Yutani corporation required Ash to be a one-off design because he was supposed to pass for a human science officer on the Nostromo! He was like a covert operative. Still, it was good that Ian Holm got to reprise one of his most famous roles even if he was just voicing a CG creation.

Oh, wait. Ian Holm has been dead for four years now.

Are any of you fans of Prometheus and Alien: Covenant? Oh, wow. There are five of you out there. Rest assured, the black goo is back. You didn’t really think with a new director that Ridley Scott still wouldn’t have his fingerprints all over this thing. The Weyland-Yutani corporation needs the juice inside the xenomorph to make a better human being, one that can withstand the hardships of colonizing alien planets.

Any fans of the human/alien hybrid creature from Alien Resurrection? We get another one in this movie. This one looks like one of the Engineers from Prometheus with a little bit of xenomorph mixed in. It’s as stupid as it sounds.

When he first pops out of his mother’s womb, he looks like a Cabbage Patch Kid in that I think he was in actual cabbage leaves. I kept expecting The Colonel from Monty Python to show up announcing that the movie has now gotten too silly.

I’m resigned to the fact that the Alien franchise will never go away. If I make it to a hundred years old, they’ll still be making Alien movies, each one more ridiculous than the last and audiences will keep paying to see them. Alien movies are inevitable. The series jumped the shark back in 1993 with Alien 3, but few people noticed. Maybe I’ll console myself with Alien ripoff movies like Contamination.

 Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, episode 284, episode 441, episode 442, episode 443, episode 444, episode 450, episode 477, episode 491, episode 492, episode 493, episode 495, episode 496, episode 545, episode 546, episode 547, episode 548, episode 549, episode 575, episode 596, episode 597, episode 598, and episode 599) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.