ALIEN RESURRECTION

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Familiarity also breeds affection. The aliens still have pretty teeth, ooze slime from every pore and maintain their relentlessly hostile attitude toward all things human. But by now--Alien Resurrection is their fourth screen appearance--there's something funny about their reliable malevolence. It's sort of like Mr. Magoo's nearsightedness; you await its inevitably disastrous consequences with high comic anticipation.

Naturally, the creatures' old nemesis, Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), has been--literally--reincarnated, and her wit and toughness were not forgotten in the cloning. Nor did screenwriter Joss Whedon (of TV's Buffy the Vampire Slayer) neglect to provide her with a spaceship of fools who refuse to believe her warnings of impending carnage. He has even given Ripley a soul sister (Winona Ryder) to bond with. O.K., she's a robot, but she's got a heart of gold as well as buns of steel.

The director, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, hurries us past all the desperate explanations required by sequels to movies that ended up pretty definitively (the last we saw of Ripley in Alien 3, she was taking a dunk in molten metal). Since most of these are incomprehensible anyway, especially as they are constantly interrupted by fires, floods and explosions, Jeunet is eager to get on with the really scary stuff. This is not, given the movie's self-satirizing impulse, as terrifying as it once was. But on the whole, the eek-for-yuks trade-off is more than fair--hip without being campy or condescending to one of the better movie franchises.

--R.S.