As a rickety heap of a commercial spacecraft is on its way back to Earth, its crew are awoken from hypersleep by a distress call. Grumbling about their lack of pay to do such work, and the general bad conditions they suffer at the hands of "The Company", a search party is dispatched to the surface of a windswept barren planet from which the signal emanates. They find an abandoned spacecraft which had obviously crashed many years before. Further investigation reveals the crew suffered some kind of internal attack, against which they were defenceless. One of the rescue crew, Kane, finds a strange nest of eggs; touching one, a crab-like embryonic alien springs out and, burning its way through the front of his visor, attaches itself to his face. Kane is rushed back to the spacecraft where he remains in a critical condition for some time until the creature, apparently dead, drops off his face. Claiming he is feeling 100%, Kane joins the rest of the crew, including the leader Dallas and his second in command, Ripley, for a meal, when he suddenly lurches, and the baby alien bursts out of his gut and scuttles away. It doesn't take long for the alien to mature into a vicious killing machine, and start a murderous game of hide-and-seek, picking off the crew members one by one. Ridley Scott's science fiction-horror story - a reworking of the earlier classic 'The Thing' - still holds its own despite its more flashy successors, with Weaver superb as Ripley, attempting to keep the bickering crew members united in the face of H R Griger's horrifically realised alien (which you never actually see fully). Winner of the Best Visual Effects Oscar.