Every Alien Movie - Ranked From Worst To Best

It's a testament to the skill of franchise creator Ridley Scott and the nightmare-inducing work of creature designer H.R. Giger that the Xenomorph species, despite turning 38 this year, still manages to bring the scares.

Alien: Covenant brings everyone's favourite movie alien (and everyone's least-favourite alien to be stuck in a confined space with) back to the big-screen after being largely absent since 2007's Aliens vs Predator: Requiem, and delightfully, the beast is still as effective as ever.

Covenant is also Scott's return to directing Xenomorphs, Facehuggers and things bursting out of human beings, after Prometheus was light on the extra-terrestrial action and the last film he directed in the decades-old franchise before that... was the original in 1979.

And thankfully, the director hasn't lost sight of what works. The Alien series consists of eight movies and while some are terrible, some are average and others are great, the man who started it all knows that his titular creature is the real star of the show.

But how good is Covenant? How does it compare to the franchise greats? How does it compare to the duds?

The fact that Aliens vs Predator: Requiem was directed by The Brothers Strause, a pair of special effects artists making their directorial debuts, tells you all you need to know.

The creature design is suitably creepy and there's plenty of serviceable gore, but beneath that surface-level gloss there's a gaping, Chestburster-sized hole where a compelling story and convincing characters should be.

Requiem picks up where its predecessor left off, with a brand-new creature called a Predalien - an Alien/Predator hybrid - bursting out of an unfortunate Predator's chest. The Predalien manages to hijack a spacecraft and ends up crash-landing in Gunnison, a small town in Southern Colorado, where it starts to murder everything in sight.

There's a good movie in here somewhere. The Predalien is a cool idea but its in a movie that cannot use it effectively. The lighting in some scenes is absolutely terrible - that's if there were any lights at all - making the action hard to decipher and completely wasting a potentially memorable monster.

It's not even like the movie has an engaging story to mask its shortcomings, either. It's packed with dull human characters and there are more uninteresting subplots than you've probably had hot dinners - see the Ricky and Jesse romance, which both goes nowhere and feels entirely pointless.

Fortunately, Requiem bombed harder than the nuke that's dropped at the very end of the movie, putting a stop to another sequel that was teased at the end of this one.

And we can't help but feel slightly relieved.