Although there’s a lot of unpleasantness here to maintain the tradition of this SF thriller’s predecessors, one finds neither the high-tech effects of the first nor the quality direction of the second, and few of the thrills in either; just about all that music-video veteran David Fincher has to show for himself in his feature debut is clumsy elliptical cutting and alien-point-of-view shots. Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) is the only human survivor when her rocket ship crash-lands on a remote lice-ridden planet containing a religious order of maximum security male prisoners; a deadly extraterrestrial winds up on the planet, too, and menaces everybody in sight. It isn’t hard to figure out the rest, but I found it pretty boring. Written by David Giler, Walter Hill, Larry Ferguson, and Vincent Ward; with Charles S. Dutton, Charles Dance, Paul McGann, Brian Glover, and Lance Henriksen (1992). (JR)