What better way to celebrate the recent Alien Day than to place the eight movies in the long-running space saga into some kind of order of excellence? And also perhaps to ask how so many film-makers have managed to muck up the original film’s formula.

Let’s start at the bottom. The two Alien vs Predator movies from 2004 and 2007 are now remembered largely for their staggering blandness, as if everybody involved had forgotten what made the early films so chilling. Ostensibly B-movies, but lacking the joyful, half-cocked knockabout bombast of a Roger Corman or Ray Kellogg film, they even disappointed fans of the crossover comic books that spawned them. If 20th Century Fox thought it was getting the new Ridley Scott when the studio hired Paul WS Anderson to direct ’s Alien vs Predator they were sadly mistaken. Bringing the xenomorphs to Earth, as Fox had intended to do in 1992 prior to David Fincher’s Alien 3, turned out to be the dumbest move since John Hurt decided to take a closer peek at the funny egg thing on LV-426. Even a smart moment of stunt-casting – Aliens’ Lance Henriksen as Charles Bishop Weyland – couldn’t paper over the cracks of this weirdly bloodless film. Aliens vs Predator: Requiem upped the gore but dropped quality levels even further, with untried music video directors Colin and Greg Strause at the helm. That the saga survived at all after this twin descent into movie purgatory is remarkable in itself.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ready to grumble ... Alien vs Predator. Photograph: AP

Next worst, because their collective failure made a mockery of attempts to revive the space saga, are 2012’s Prometheus and 2017’s Alien: Covenant. When Scott was persuaded to make his first science-fiction film in the best part of three decades, hopes were high that we might see a return to the pared-back slasher-in-space majesty of his 1979 film. But where Alien was a claustrophobic, searingly linear story of blue-collar workers coming into contact with the ultimate cosmic horror – a movie in which nobody knew what the hell was going on – Prometheus was a sprawlingly portentous slice of backstory that promised to tell us absolutely everything. Then failed to do it. Its only real triumph was Michael Fassbender’s cold-eyed android David, whom Scott decided to bring back for the sequel. In the end, nobody actually wanted to know how the xenomorphs were originally spawned, because the most fascinating thing about these acid-blooded monstrosities is their devilish inscrutability.

I’m placing Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Alien Resurrection (1997) next. It’s a flawed movie in terms of its inception (would a clone Ripley retain the personality and memories of her “parent”?) but Sigourney Weaver delivers an eye-poppingly nutty performance as the part-human, part xenomorph Ripley 8, and there are some enjoyably sickly moments to compete with anything in the previous three movies. The scene when Ripley meets earlier failed versions of herself that have been pickled for posterity, and Brad Dourif’s fondness for the murderous extra-terrestrials, even as he is about to become a vehicle for their reproduction process, particularly stick in the memory.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Grin and bear it ... Alien 3. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

Alien 3 (1993) is next on my list. David Fincher’s battles with Fox over the final cut are well documented, as is the flawed decision to kill off poor Newt after she did so well to survive the horrors of the previous episode. But the movie boasts an impeccable supporting cast of British character actors who all enjoy themselves immeasurably, and the decision to retain the earlier films’ use of a pinched and airless setting within which the xenomorphs can wreak their mindless violence turns out to be a splendid one. Weaver, as ever, is excellent throughout.

And now we come to the big decision: whether to plump for the original Alien, which shattered the horror paradigm forever, or its 1986 sequel Aliens, which launched James Cameron towards Hollywood megastardom and stands as one of the greatest action movies of all time. I’m going to plump for the latter in first place, if only because the advanced special effects of the 1980s made Giger’s slimy xenomorphs so much more scary and realistic. There are few moments in Hollywood history more iconic than Ripley’s final exo-suited battle with the alien queen, a scene so gratifyingly violent that the film-maker couldn’t resist plagiarising himself in Avatar. And the fact that we know exactly what is waiting for the band of cocky space marines only makes their plight even more delicious, even when watched for the umpteenth time.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest About to burst ... John Hurt (centre) in the iconic scene from Alien. Photograph: Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar/20th Century Fox

Final mention, however, goes to Scott’s original Alien. At the time, there had simply been no more terrifying movie ever made by Hollywood, while Weaver delivered a career-making performance as the mid-ranking warrant officer who takes command and fights for survival. If the memory-wipe system employed in another great sci-fi flick, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, really did exist, the first thing most horror fans would do would be to use it to eradicate all recollection of this cosmic classic from our noggins, just so that we could enjoy a virgin viewing of Scott’s spine-chillingly majestic film all over again.