there are some interesting paralells with the movie alien, especially in the final scene where the humanoid stalks doug mc clure's wife in her home, much like the alien did with ripley at the end of alien. ripley stows her cat away, mc clure's wife her child. even the raping of women, which also takes place in alien is a paralell as well.
what the hell was in the water back then?
What!? What "Alien" did you see? In all 5 Alien movies not one alien ever raped a woman. This film was made 1 year (it premiered a full 15 months later) after Ridley Scott's "Alien" so obviously Roger Corman stole the chest bursting scene with John Hurt and instead made the baby creature burst out of Peggy's abdomen. That's the only parallel. "Alien" happened in deep space. "HftD" happened in an American fishing village. What parallels?
shareI found one other "parallel". Gale Ann Hurd was a production assistant for "HotD" and a producer for James Cameron's "Aliens" (1986), the second "Alien" movie.
shareAnother connection is James Horner, he was the composer for HFTD and Aliens
I shall call him Squishy and he shall be mine and he shall be my Squishy.
To the poster who wrote: "what rape?"
Watch the DVD set, my friend, or read any critique of the feminist aspects of ALIEN or ANY smart critique of the horror in the film. When the Alien kills Yaphet Kotto & Veronica Cartwright's characters, his tail sneaks up in between (Ms. Cartwright) Lambert's legs and she seems to be cowering in a way that suggests her death will be slower than Mr. Parker's. Then we cut back to Ripley as she's hearing them get slaughtered and we hear what sounds like a wicked, evil laugh.
The intention of Scott was to hint that the horrors that Cartwright experienced were indeed sadistic, perhaps also sexual . . . why would the "bug" need to caress the inside of her leg with his scorpion-like tail? Why would there be a cold, terror inducing cackle heard over the headset? It's just suggested of course -- but even as a 14 year old seeing the film for the first time ('79), I got it. It was SCARY as hell.
The later poster is also correct in suggesting the "egg laying probe" of the face-hugger inserted into John Hurt's character also suggested a violation -- the creature does after all, use its "invasive organ" to "impregnate" a host. The director and team were using layers of terror to induce horror on the audience in both overt and subtle ways -- if you got it, you got it. If not, it may have played on a subliminal layer. Sexual terror is profoundly disturbing -- because its so personal.
Of course, the Alien DID NOT rape Lambert like the fishmen of the Corman flick, but the suggestion of same is simply terrifying.
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Good call!! I hadn't thought about it but it goes without saying that anybody making a science fiction/horror movie about lizardish creatures ripping people apart in 1980 or so would almost **HAVE** to have been thinking about ALIEN, and would likely have taken some leads from that film's more famous sequences
Roger Corman was also apparently obsessed with the concept(s) behind ALIEN before ALIEN even existed -- as early as the 1966 movie QUEEN OF BLOOD at least, which tells more or less the same story about an alien guest on a space ship who kills off the crew & lays eggs, along with the conniving scientists who consider the crew expendable and just want to study the thing. QUEEN OF BLOOD was also partially adapted from a Russian science fiction film about an Earth mission to search for survivors of a crashed alien spaceship after intercepting & decoding an alien transmission.
Roger Corman missed producing ALIEN by about two phone calls & a couple million dollars in pre-production holding money -- Walter Hill was actually the person who persuaded 20th Century Fox to buy the rights to Dan O'Bannon's story, if he hadn't persisted ALIEN no doubt would have been a New Line Cinema production made under Corman's supervision. He was apparently chagrined enough by missing his chance to produce GALAXY OF TERROR and MUTANT, both of which addressed ALIEN's sexualized themes in a more overt manner.
The alien may not have raped any women but the "face hugger" from the pod on the alien ship sure as hell metaphorically "raped" John Hurt's Kane by impregnating him with the creature that would eventually tear it's way out of his stomach, just like we see happening at the very end in the hospital scene.
I think you mean New World Pictures, not New Line Cinema.
shareThe rip off to "Alien" was known back in 1980.
<<(When there is no more room in Hell, the dead will walk the Earth.)>>
HAHA! Of course! You can just hear the pitch "Jaws meets Alien alla Creature from the Black Lagoon"
Th doctor is a direct rip off of Ripley....
This movie came exactly one year later...Im sure everyone was looking for the NEXT ALIEN...
"The more real things get, the more like myths they become. " R.W. Fassbinder