November 29, 1997 -- I was surprised when I heard they were making another "Alien" movie. The last one was so bad I thought they would have given up. I'm kind of glad they didn't.

"Alien Resurrection" is similar to the other three Alien movies, but somewhat lighter in tone. It dares to make fun of itself. The humor that helped make the second film in the series, "Aliens," such a crowd pleaser is even more pronounced in this film.

Oh, it's true, there is lots of blood and slime and lots of people getting bitten with those great big teeth, but underneath that gooey grimness the actors are having great fun and you can see it.

In one scene, Sigourney Weaver, who reprises her role as Ellen Ripley, the macho heroine, miraculously escapes from the aliens on the ship. Another character says, "I thought you were dead." Ripley replies, "I get that a lot." Ron Perlman ("The Island of Dr. Moreau," but best known as "Vincent" in the TV series "Beauty and the Beast"), who plays the space pirate Johner, sits down at the controls of a spaceship that is out of control and admits he hasn't a clue how to fly it. It isn't his bag, he says, "I mostly hurt people."

Ripley is cloned back to life by a group of goofy mad scientists on a military spaceship, headed by veteran character actor Brad Dourif ("Murder in the First"). In the process, Ripley's DNA gets contaminated by the aliens and she gets some of their characteristics, including a natural talent for basketball.

Basketball? You say what's a basketball hoop doing on a spaceship hundreds of years in the future? The answer is, the filmmakers are just having fun with it, just like they are having fun with the rest of this film.

After the aliens are cloned, they, of course, escape. The aliens end up chasing a small band of survivors through the doomed ship in a race against time. The small band has some interesting characters, such as the bank-shooting pirate Christie (Gary Dourdan "Playing God"), a soldier, Distephano (Raymond Cruz of "The Substitute"), Winona Ryder and others.

One of the things that makes this interesting is that Ripley, with her partially alien DNA has conflicting loyalties, she's mostly human, but she is also drawn to the aliens. After all, she is the queen's mother. It makes for a little different slant to the story. The creatures look better than ever, thanks to advances in computer-generated graphics.

It's amazing how director Jean-Pierre Jeunet ("Delicatessan") can take those millions of dollars and an essentially grim story and have to nerve to make such a devil-may-care movie. Ordinarily this kind of film would be heavy with atmosphere and all the actors would be quite stern, such as was the case in the first and third films in the series. Thanks mainly to Weaver and Perlman's performances, this movie is a lot more jaunty than that. The action moves along pretty well, too. It rates a B.

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