Alien

Alien will scare the peanuts right out of your M&M's. It was about time someone made a science-fiction thriller that thrills... and just boils everything down to the pure, ravishingly vulgar essence of fright.

You can have Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and 2001. I'll take Alien.

Miss Weaver, a New York actress making her film debut, makes the most of the opportunity without overdoing it. She suggests toughness and fear in equal measure.

The most intriguing aspect of the film is actress Sigourney Weaver, who cuts quite an imposing figure as the one intelligent member of the ship's crew besides the monster.

Alien, like the Exorcist, works on your nerves and emotions with the practiced hand of a torturer extracting a confession. The movie is terrifying, but not in a way that is remotely enjoyable.

You are in for jolts, shocks and some fairly gruesome and shuddering sights. With only his second feature, Ridley Scott has emerged as a major film maker. What he has to say is still not clear, but he certainly knows how to say it effectively.

Simply one of the best at being terrifying with the random unknown disconnected from any necessary lore.

This thing scared the shit out of me. Alien's a masterpiece of fright.

It is space in raw, horrifying terms. It is primitive, stricken, painful. And it is terrifying in the way that Edgar Allen Poe's horror stories are terrifying -- the physical reaction transcends the words, or, in this case, the images.

Ridley Scott's Alien is simply extraordinary. It's as spectacular as horror thrillers ever get.