Yeah it's an Alien rip off and the monster isn't as good. But there are a few things that it actually did better, as far as the characters went. The big lacking is the, well... Ripley made the Alien movies and you didn't have someone like her to stand out, you had neither a strong male nor a strong female lead... you didn't have any strong leads at all, and that. Wendy Schaal did a respectable job for the intended intelligent scream queen, but given it's an alien rip off you didn't want her to be a scream queen, you wanted her to be bad@$$. And, for a standard horror movie scream quee...