Father Malone's Weekly Roundup - Weapons (2025), Alien: Earth (2025)

and Chris Stashu. We're gonna have surprise guests and we'll be recording the whole time, So stop by and say hello. And if you can't make it, we'll be rounding up that weekend here as well. Something to look forward to that's important, considering the two things I was looking most forward to have arrived. We're discussing them tonight. Should we do weapons or Alien Earth? First? Good point, We're doing neither. Psych Actually, it's time for the mail.

It's about the television series Taxi. Apparently frustrated with the infrequency of Night Mister Walter's episodes, he had to seek more frequent lands and we are nothing if not frequent here at midnight viewing. Welcome aboard. Richard Dallas Norville wrote in to let us know he's got yaucha fever. HP and I are covering the Predator film series. That's yaoucha

fest every other Friday. Dallas has been revisiting the flicks and I convinced him to watch Prey and his life is now much better by the way, Yes, Dallas, you should see the movie together immediately. The more I think about that film, the more I like it. Dallas even shouted out HP for his work on the show. Amazing work. I don't know if he's doing amazing, it's work been like, definitely always great to hear from you, Dallas. Shane Mackie,

haven't heard from you in a minute. Stomped into chat a little about that misbegotten Saturday Night movie from last year, and since you're looking forward to the weapons review, I guess we'll do it first. Oh guess and guess not. I've been checking the comments on Spotify. That's new to me. Sorry if you've written to me prior. I'm trying to answer them all. But we've got like one hundred and eighty episodes, so it's taking a while. Trish Dabkowski wrote

in about another yahoucha fest flick, Predator two. We mentioned Kent McCord is in it. He was once the star of Adam twelve. Trish wrote in to remind us that he was also on the television series Farscape. Thank you for reminding me. I had intended on bringing it up. It's just that when I start talking Farescape, I can't really shut up about it. Kent McCord played the lead character, John Crichton's dad. He was great in it. You know who I loved on that show? I mean, everybody but

Sikkozu the Leviathan expert. God damn she was sexy all the women on that show.

makes me watch them because he hates me. We did one about the Billy Crystal nineteen eighty six special Don't Get Me Started. Derek asked, what does a near forty year old HBO comedy special by Billy Crystal say about you who cares get over yourself. I don't know if I can answer your questions without a few of my own, but I'll do my best. It's supposed to say about me that my friend chose a special for me to watch and then we reviewed it. I don't expect anyone

to care. And while I have tried on numerous occasions to escape the skin. I truly cannot get over myself. But I'm actually wondering where you're coming from. Is there something you'd prefer us to cover? Please forward it along. And finally, tenth Letter wrote in about our Fantastic four coverage. Here's what he had to say. Uugh, sounds silly, but I'm not into man boy movies. So Reid has a mustache, which I don't think he's ever had in the comics

because mister overexposed Hollywood star won't shave. I see this universe. That universe multiverse crap is just bad, inconsistent, uncreative writing. Thanks for the sum up. Like every other video game esque movie in existence, I know I can quite safely hard pass on this. I prefer my comics in book form, and I salute you, my purest friend. Keep turning the pages. It's so fucking satisfying, isn't it. I think Marvel made a big mistake when they took that sound of pages

whispering out of their production logo. Let me know a title worth looking into, tenth Letter. That's a j James Jason, Jeremy jehosaphat that's a g okay that's the end of the letters. But let me just mini review something really quick. I had intended to do an entire episode about Red's Sonia, but then I saw it not good. Here's their one innovation. That character always had this weird catchphrase about how she'll only go to bed with the man who can't defeat

her in combat. That's gone. As for the rest, the lead actress is game, but she's struggling mightily because the script is poor and the action is sub hercules the legendary journeys. It's very volumetric, if you know what I mean. Sorry, Red, hit it, HP, Thank you HP. You know Jerry Folwell

frequently wondered when Mulder and Scully were going to do it. Let me tell you about my first experience with Alien. One of my best friends as a young boy was Brian McMahon. Brian was my horror buddy. He was as obsessed as I was with all the fucking horror movies we could get our hands on, and Brian's parents weren't so finicky when it came to toys, so of course he had a sowd Off shotgun toy that ejected plastic shells when you broke it open, and yes he had

the requisite Aurora models of Frankenstein et ce. But best of all, he had the alien action figure from Kenner the Star Wars people, so you know you can trust them. It was eighteen inches authentically detailed, mechanically operated jaws. I'm reading from the packaging as seen in the movie. Relive the exciting action with the creature itself moveable tail to swing by spring loaded arms to crush its victims. Not a toy that was going to appear in my house

anytime soon or ever. Wait, there's more press the back of the head on the bottom. His mouth opens and the gruesome teeth move forward, his evil brains glow in the dark. That was the part that bothered me about the figure, The fucking skull underneath the translucent dome of his head. That design is the original alien design. If you look at the production stills taking under harsh light,

the fucking thing practically screams at you. In the finished film atmosphere being one of those things that kept getting Ridley Scott work, you barely perceived the skull at all, and all future versions of the Big Chap that's what everyone calls the original design would be skull free, seeing something so human inside the most otherworldly thing I'd ever seen was the really disturbing part. Everything else was just

fucking cool. So I got to meet the alien before I saw the movie, and thus began my life of not giving a shit if something was spoiled. Not that you can spoil Alien. Everyone thinks of that movie as having one major twist, the alien hiding in Caine and the dinner sequence explosion. But that's just one surprise. You know what the Nostromo was hauling surprises. We get a distress call. No, it's a warning. Hey look eggs ah shit, Hey, I'm okay. That's a relief past the salt. Oh my god. Well,

at least it was a tiny thing. Wait what is that? Don't worry. Everything's gonna be fine. Captain Dallas is just gonna crawl. Oh god, Ash, we could really use some help. You're an android, you pick up when I'm laying down here. We remember Alien so fondly because it was a fucking

surprise factory. In addition to being the greatest science fiction haunted house movie of all time and inadvertently introducing a global audience to the notion of lovecrafty and horror terror from beyond space that we should really pray never finds its way to Earth. It succeeds as social commentary, as a science fiction epic, taking George Lucas's Lived in future ideas and applying it to real world scenarios. It works as a horror movie as a creature feature, it is

a perfect film. In any attempt to replicate it seems like folly, which is probably why no one ever has. James Cameron was smart enough to know not to even try. He knew escalation was the only response, bringing in marines and queens and hordes of our once lonely big chap and from there we've had a mix and match salad bar of films, all drawing from the same two sources, and all in different balances. Alien three was an Alien

major and an Aliens miner Resurrection the opposite. The AVP films are all Aliens Zero, Alien and Prometheus and Covenant. I don't care. I do not rate them at all. I say live and let live to different interpretations and alternate timelines and multiverses. Invariants. However, Prometheus and Covenant suck. My Alien comes from somewhere in the darkness of space. It has nothing to do with humanity in either design

or creation. Man perverts God's will and creates monsters. Really deep Ridley, Mary Shelley says, Hi, that doesn't mean I hate backstory or prequels or attempts at shading in the corners of a universe. I think Alien Romulus was a huge step forward, the most positive step forward since Ripley sent the Queen spiraling out of an airlock. Yes it

was you, You killed that queen, good girl. The problem with Romulus was zero likable characters, and while I appreciated all the nods to the Alien Isolation video game, it just kind of reminded me that I'd rather be playing in that universe than watching poorly conceived characters running from face huggers. You can hear my review of it from

August of last year. An Alien TV show seemed like a joke at first, the way the idea of a Pirates of the Caribbean film sounded ridiculous until Johnny Depp's name started appearing on the posters. That's the way I felt when I read that Noah Hawley was creating and going to be show running that automatically meant a few things. It was going to be truly limited. Every season of every show, serialized or not, that Holly has been involved with tells a complete story beginning, middle, and an end.

It also meant that we'd be in the hands of an adaptation veteran. If his only previous credit was Legion the Effects series starring Dan Stevens an Aubrey Plaza, then I'd at least be optimistic that show was an X Man adaptation, with Stephens playing David Holler, the son of

Charles Xavier. The lead character's dissociative disorder allowed for fragmented storytelling with a wildly unreliable narrator, producing three seasons that not only visually and structurally, were able to give us the TV equivalent of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mine, but it did so while honoring the spirit of the original source material. Adapting a comic book to the screen

is one thing. The unfucking believably tall hurdle of turning a theatrical film into a successful television series is entirely another. But then he did that too with five seasons of The Incredible Fargo, a series that jumps around in time, end plot and characters season to season. Anchored by Minnesota and the incredible Cohen Brothers film, it not only makes a nifty companion piece to the film Fargo, it frequently

manages to remake and rework the Cohen's other films. It's really an anomaly of a television series, and the quality jumps up and down, just like anything serialized over a number of years. But ultimately these are very smartly written shows that turned out not only to pay homage to its forebear, but recognize and amplify what was so damned good about the original to begin with. And he does it here again. I'm genuinely gobsmacked by his work here

on Alien Earth. He gets what's so incredible about that first film. He understands the need to prize as much as lay Easter eggs every which away. Hey, they got a drinky bird from the Nostromo in Romulus. Yeah, here's the fucking bridge of the Nostromo, and here's Mother's control room. It isn't the Nostromo. They're still floating out in space waiting for the supposed distress signal to wake them up. But here's Holly giving us the goods Right up front.

The USCSS Magino, a Wayland Utani deep space science research vessel is heading back to Earth almost in its orbit, and it's packed with specimens from distant worlds, and it's a dead ringer for the Nostromo in exacting detail. I know because I've been running through its corridors trying to get away from that motherfucker whenever I'm playing the Last

Survivor mission on Alien Isolation. When we meet the crew, they're just waking up, and it's all very familiar, not just paralleling the first film's events, but introducing a group of characters that are genuinely likable. And then it goes further by giving us flashes of what's eventually going to befall them. Here's a hint. It's the Zeno Morph and it's glorious. The classic dome of the Big Chap and everything I know. Cameron has specified that his Aliens were

soldiers and the Big Chap was a drone. That's why his have more cartilage looking bony heads. But that's the one thing I think Aliens is lacking. Maybe the dome was too reflective. Either way, I love that dome and I love this alien and yeah, things go really bad, but instead of floating out in space, the imagine is on a collision course with Earth.

the ultimate tech bro. Although his reasoning thus far is actually pretty philosophical, but then Thanos wasn't wrong in theory, so don't think I'm praising him. He runs Prodigy Corporation, a rival of whaleen Utani. We knew there had to be rivals out there. Why is fucking Whale and Utani responsible for everything in the universe. The first full hybrid is Marci, a terminal eleven year old girl who, in her new synthetic and adult body, adopts the name Wendy.

Holly loves a theme, and here it's Peter Pan. The island nation near Singapore controlled by Kid Cavalier is named in Neverland. The group of fellow hybrids that will eventually join Wendy are called the Lost Boys, and their adopted names follow suit with Smee and Nibs and Curly Hell. During the process of transfer for human to synthetic, they're actually watching the Disney cartoon Peter Pan, which I know twenty century Fox is now owned by Disney, so the

wheels are a little more lubricated these days. Nevertheless, it had me flashing back to Gremlins when those fucking terrors are sitting in a theater watching snow White before the film runs out and they continue their murderous assault. It seems so wrong and yet so right. Same here mainly because Holly embraces the parallels rather than trying to bury them, and he manages to not be beholden to Peter Pan.

Wendy and her cohorts may not ever grow old like the original Lost Boys, but then they didn't have to deal with terrors from beyond space. This group of Lost Boys is mentored by Prodigy Corporations chief Synthetic Kirsch, played fucking perfectly by Timothy Oliphant. That really is the one thing all of these iterations of the Alien franchise has gotten right. The Android or Synths as we're calling them now I named the Luminaries earlier. Kersh is a welcome

addition to their pantheon. So we've got a Wayland Utani ship crashing into a Prodigy city, and its contents are volatile, to say the least. That's the setup for the first two episodes, and luckily for Kid Cavalier, he's got a squad of Hybrids who are perfectly suited to secure that crash site and investigate what's inside the ship, which is about as far as I'm going to go without spoiling anything. However, I said, Holly understands the importance of the new when

it comes to reinterpreting a film or series. He's doing it here with way more than plot and character and location. He's doing it with tropes we've come to not only rely on, but have become kind of boring. The crash of the Magino into a city scape would be the

entire episode in lesser hands and lovingly rendered. Buildings would crumble and totter, and people would scream and run, more interested in the action and actual terror from the human perspective, thus giving echoes of nine to eleven that are undeniable. It's horrible and unexpected, and it fucking works. And the nerd in me loved that the Maginaut's engines were still firing as the first responders were trying to sort out what the fuck to do. And I haven't even mentioned

the other specimens that are lurking inside the ship. Of course, there'd be other alien life forms. We'd be picking them up all over if we were colonizing other worlds. These do not disappoint. Neither does the music. I want to point out Jeff Russo, he's the composer, and I had no idea it was the guitarist and lead singer for Tonic.

not You. Russo does a great job here, not only with his original work, but when he quotes, he's doing it from the original Jerry Goldsmith's score, and particularly the stings way more effective than telling another alien to get away from her.

which is doubly true of weapons. You heard the setup. An entire third grade class goes missing one night. Even more maddening, they did so of their own volition, walking out and running into the night, as captured by many many ring cameras. Those early shots of the children waking

and taking to the night. Arms swung back like birds or missiles running against the backdrop of sleeping suburbia are gorgeous, and all scored to George Harrison's Beware the Darkness, just one of a half dozen of my favorite songs of all time, like Percy Sledge's Dark End of the Street and my literal favorite Harry Nilsen tune Gotta get.

Those points of view are Justine played by Julia Garner, the film's nominal protagonist. It's her class that's gone missing. Archer a father of one of the missing children whose obsession with finding him will either kill him or set him free. He's played by Josh Brolin. Then there's Paul, played by the once upon a Time Hans solo Alden Ehrenreich. He's a cop in the town and a former flame of Julia. James, a homeless drug addict played spectacularly by

Austin Abrams. He was on The Walking Dead and Euphoria. Then there's Marcus, the schools put upon principle, played by Benedict Wong. Can we put mister Wong in everything? Please? There is no project he will not make him better. And finally, and most revealingly, there's Alex, played by then eight year old Carrie Christopher. Alex is the only child in Julia's class who didn't go wandering that night. I really can't say any more other than the kid was

fucking amazing. I've dealt with plenty of precocious terrible child actors over the years on Tails from the Dark Side and Night Gallery and Twilight Zone eighty five. Not a fucking whiff of that here He's great. Each of the separate stories are economical and interesting, and in some cases take you far from the main plot, involving you more in these people's personal lives than your average scare show allows, which is a hell of a neat trick considering the

film's central mystery involves seventeen missing children. But is it scary? Fuck? Yes, it is and dreamy and personal and weird and thrilling in skin crawling, and it functions as a hell of a meditation on addiction and its widespread lingering effects on the lives of everyone it touches. And it's funny as funny as together was Boy. Horror is really hitting a

stride recently, like Alien Earth. I'm loath to reveal anything else, but I'd like to note if a nature documentary shows up in a horror movie, you should pay attention, just saying your mileage may vary when it comes to the reveal. Sometimes no answer is better than disappointing one. I myself love an open ended mystery. This ain't that Craiger isn't interested in stringing you along, And I, for one, was right there with this flick every step of the way.

The supporting cast. There's a supporting cast after five leads. Yeah, and it's just as strong. Toby Huss is a fucking gem. He's the chief of police here and father to Paul's fiance Donna, who is played by podcast legend June Diana Rayfield. Toby Huss, though you probably know him as the whizb I'm the Wizist, but he's made a career of gentle, authoritarian characters. But I just wanted to point him out and say how fucking good he is. Justin Long and Sarah Paxton show up as parents of one of the

other missing kids. And Amy Madigan is also in the film, and she's fucking spectacular. What a real life duo she and Ed Harris make just powerhouses in every direction. You know what, I take back what I said earlier. Do not see Barbarian that's readily available on streaming. Go to the movies and put your money down for this one. I encourage that a lot, But this is it.

We're getting out of here. Tune in Friday. We've got the latest tannels from the Dark Side, and the Friday after that will be Aliens Versus Predator. But if you want to hear that right now, it's on the Patreon channel Patreon dot com slash Father alone. You'll get episodes in advance, weeks in advance sometimes, and you'll have access to shows not in the main feed, like HP Hates Me.

The latest episode is up where HP made me watch Corey Haymes me myself and I, a self released video made to convince the industry he was sober and ready to work, all the while being high as a fucking kite. Next Monday, we'll probably not be another round up. That's right. I'm like SNL. I'll come in hot and I'll bail, but it will be a new show. Not a new show, but show you haven't heard. That'll be my own weapons mystery. Until then, until we meet again, I'm Father Malone for

Ripley Gene. We're gonna leave you with a bit from Alien Earth.