As with the director’s cut of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, this is no restoration but a revision; roughly five minutes of the original have been cut and roughly four of previously unused footage have been added. If there’s a difference in overall quality, I’m unaware of it. Dave Kehr calls this 1979 feature an empty-headed horror movie with nothing to recommend it beyond the disco-inspired art direction and some handsome if gimmicky cinematography. The science fiction trappings add little to the primitive conception, which features a rubber monster running amok in a spaceship. Scott relies on suspense techniques that looked tired in The Perils of Pauline: for the most part, things simply jump out and go ‘boo!’ Under the circumstances, the allusions to Joseph Conrad (Nostromo) and Howard Hawks (The Thing) seem unforgivably presumptuous. Instead of characters, the film has bodies; some of them are lent by Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt, Veronica Cartwright, and Yaphet Kotto. 116 min. (JR)