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Alien: Earth (Disney+)
Panto season will never be the same again. Disney have invented a new kind of movie sequel crossover, updating Sigourney Weaver’s horror classic Alien by blending it with Peter Pan.
Alien: Earth sees Wendy and the Lost Boys blast off from the planet of Neverland to fight intestine-munching monsters that have crashlanded their spaceship on a Chinese city.
Clips from the 1953 Disney cartoon original play in the background, usually while something blood-curdling is unfolding in the foreground.
And there’s a lot of blood to curdle – this is far gorier than the version of Alien that killed off John Hurt with a snake-headed special effect bursting out of his chest.
We see people burned alive, half-eaten corpses (literally half-eaten – top half swallowed, legs left untasted) and soldiers drained of blood by scorpion-like leeches.
The instructions for finding Neverland appear to have changed. It’s now, ‘Second dismembered corpse on the right and straight on till morning.’
Peter Pan has become the galaxy’s youngest trillionaire (Samuel Blenkin), though he behaves more like villainous Captain Hook.
Adrian Edmondson plays his obsequious bo’sun, Mr Smee, who is now called Atom Eins.
Disturbingly surreal though it is, I imagine this eight-part serial will appeal to audiences in a narrow age-band – old enough to want gore and gun battles, young enough to retain some affection for the innocent movies of their childhood.
My suspicion is confirmed by a scene in which Wendy (Sydney Chandler), and her brother Joe (Alex Lawther), separated by light years, both watch another children’s cartoon, Ice Age… a favourite so familiar that they’re each able to recite the lines.
Disney might have devised a whole new genre here. Why not remake Star Wars with the Teletubbies – ‘Tinky-Winky… I am your father’?
Or what about Terminator vs Cinderella, in which Arnold Schwarzenegger loses his glass slipper and has to fight an entire army of Ugly Sisters to get it back?
Before the advent of streaming channels with unlimited budgets, Alien: Earth would have been unthinkable.
It works, up to a point, because no expense has been spared in recreating the look of the first Alien movie, released in 1979.
The explosions on board the spaceship look real, not CGI. And in a knowing in-joke, the crew behave like 1970s space-farers, chain-smoking and making sexist remarks… at least until they’re all devoured.
Meanwhile, on the Neverland ‘research island’, a girl with terminal cancer is about to have her conscious mind transferred into a synthetic adult body.
When she wakes up, Wendy is still mentally a child, but she is physically all but indestructible – able to leap off cliffs and outrun bullets.
Fans of another ’70s hit, The Six Million Dollar Man, and his counterpart The Bionic Woman, will recognise these superpowers.
The stars of those shows, Lee Majors and Lyndsey Wagner, never fought aliens… but only because the scriptwriters didn’t think of it.
Housework tip of the night: Every time we see customs officer Dom (Ashley Thomas) at home on In Flight (C4), he’s moodily pressing the laundry with a fancy steam iron. He still managed to burn one of his shirts, though.
Try a lower heat on man-made fabrics, Dom.
Alien: Earth is available to stream on Disney+ now, with new episodes every Wednesday.
