Out Of This World
The Weapons of Aliens
The HK VP70 was used as the standard sidearm for the U.S.
Colonial Marines in the epic 1986 James Cameron movie Aliens.
In 1986, visionary filmmaker James Cameron came out with what was, in my opinion at least, his masterwork. Aliens was the ultimate combat science fiction movie. Alongside Terminator 2, it was also one of the two best sequels ever made. Created at the very end of the analog era before digital special effects transformed the film industry, Aliens is simply cinematic perfection.
The original Ridley Scott Alien was a horror movie and a stupendous one at that. The narrative had the small crew of space freighter respond to a distress beacon that ultimately allowed a single most horrific alien monster onboard. The rest of the film was a series of creepy scenes, ample gore and jump scares. It also served to introduce us to Sigourney Weaver’s iconic character, Ellen Ripley.
When James Cameron was pitching the idea of a sequel to the execs at 20th Century Fox, he purportedly took a big whiteboard, wrote the word “ALIEN” in giant letters, and then put a dollar sign behind it. The resulting ALIEN$ pitch green-lit the project.
The narrative has Ripley narrowly escaping the rampaging monster and being lost in space for 57 years. She awakens to find that, in the interim, there has been a colony established on LV-426, the small planet where they first found the alien creature. Coincidentally, contact with the colony has been mysteriously lost. Ripley reluctantly agrees to return to LV-426, this time in the company of a squad of heavily armed U.S. Colonial Marines.
There results 137 minutes of gunslinging mayhem as the Marines discover hundreds of alien monsters, a single child survivor and peril aplenty. I’ll spare you the details. You need to see the movie yourself if you haven’t already. You’ll thank me later.
The M41 Pulse Rifle used in the movie Aliens was a bodged-together
amalgam of several real-world guns. The end result was cinematic gold.
The Weapons of “Aliens”
Arguably the coolest aspect of this homogenously cool movie for the gun nerd committed to his craft was the weapons. Developed under the guidance of Cameron himself by Bapty Limited in London, the same gun-bodging wizards who made the weapons for Star Wars, the weapons of Aliens made the film. Unlike later iterations that might include digital muzzle flashes and artificially enhanced action effects, these guns were the real deal. All the cool-guy stuff had to be created by special effects specialists in the real world.
There were two handguns featured in the movie. The machinegunner Vasquez packs a stock S&W Model 39 with white/ivory grips. The rest of the team uses HK VP70 9mm pistols.
The VP70s used in the film are otherwise unmodified VP70M selective-fire versions of the gun. In the real world, attaching a VP70M to a separate buttstock allows semiauto and 3-round burst functions. The same gun in semi auto only was imported and sold in the U.S. as the VP70Z. The VP70Z has a smooth grip, while that of the VP70M is ridged. One of the VP70M pistols used in the movie and demilled to UK standards sold for $12,700 at auction in 2022.
The M56 Smart Gun was created by mounting a WWII-vintage MG42 belt-fed machinegun onto a gyro-stabilized Cinema Products Model III Steadicam harness. This gave the big gun a most sinister gliding effect when used in the movie. When Vasquez shouted, “Let’s rock!” and opened up with her M56 that first time in the theater it was a near-religious experience for me. One of the two guns used in the movie was demilled and sold for $150,000 at auction in the U.S. in 2022.
I’ll never be able to afford a real screen-used weapon from the movie Alien. However, I remain nevertheless prepared for my next proper bug hunt.
The M41 Pulse Rifles used by the rank-and-file Marines were created from three different real-world weapons. The basic chassis was an M1A1 Thompson submachine gun. The 30mm pump-action grenade launcher was a radically shortened Remington 870 shotgun. The window dressing on the outside came from a Franchi SPAS-12 12-gauge.
The original plan had the M41 built around a 9mm HK MP5, but the muzzle flash was inadequate for Cameron’s needs. The .45ACP version from the Thompson was much more satisfying. Only one of the prop guns built for the movie had a functioning shotgun/grenade launcher. At the same 2022 auction, a demilled but screen-used Pulse Rifle went for $142,787.
Michael Biehn’s character CPL Duane Hicks also carried a curious cut-down Ithaca Model 37 shotgun. This gun had the pistol grip from a German MP40 grafted on. The same gun was used in the TV shows The Professionals and Dempsey and Makepeace. This gun was also demilled and sold for $63,481 at the same 2022 auction.
I’ll never be able to afford an original Aliens weapon, but my kids and I did build a decent facsimile as a homeschool project many years ago. The receiver is a piece of 1-inch square steel tube, the chassis is cut from pine lumber, and the fire control group was harvested from an original M1A1 Thompson parts kit. The SPAS-12 bits came from a cheap airsoft version of the shotgun. The end result isn’t quite screen-perfect, yet I remain prepared for my next serious bug hunt nonetheless.
