13. The Thing (1982)

The Threat: The Thing’s forms are many, ranging from dog-devouring “thing” to clawed “thing” to multi-toothed flowering “thing”.

The Fallout: Infection, bodily assimilation, paranoia, suicides, shootings and a potential threat to the whole human race, given its rapacious infection rate.

The Solution (Nick): “This movie shows that fire is an effective weapon against hostile aliens and flamethrowers would be a logical weapon to try.

However, to paraphrase from a well-known sci-fi movie, given that a tiny piece of this alien may be capable of infecting humans, I say we nuke the entire site – it’s the only way to be sure.”

14. Signs (2002)

The Threat: Stealthy, long-legged, dogbothering and creepy-fast dirt-green critters, assembled in ships over roughly 274 cities and using crop circles to coordinate attacks.

The Fallout: Crushed crops, creepily clicking baby monitors and a lot of people die.

The Solution (Nick): “This is counterintuitive, as most people with an interest in the paranormal interpret crop circles as a benign, New Age phenomenon,”

15. Invaders From Mars (1953)

The Threat: Humanoid Martians ruled by a head in a glass bowl. With tentacles. Abilities include underground tunnelling, sucking people underground through sand-whirlpools, rock-melting guns, mind control and amazing eyeball acting from the head-in-a-bowl leader.

The Fallout: Rocket scientist dad returns eerily changed after scouting the site of a saucer-landing witnessed by his son. Soon, most of the townfolk have changed.

The Solution (Nick):  “As in many sci-fi movies, if we believed kids who said they’d seen UFOs, and if we got suspicious when local people started acting strangely, maybe we’d increase our chances of dealing with the aliens.

Issues of mind control are interesting, however, and both the Americans and the British have spent a lot of money on psychic research, as has been revealed in formerly classified documents released under the Freedom of Information Act.”

16. Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959)

The Threat: Danger comes from outer space in saucers. Aliens take the form of well-spoken humans in swishy satin, whose weaponry includes “decomposite rays” and waspish put-downs.

The Fallout: Plan 9 involves resurrecting the dead using long-distance electrodes to stimulate pineal and pituitary glands.

The Solution (Nick): “Again, this isn’t really about evil aliens, because if we’d  listened to their messages, we’d see that they simply wanted humans to stop developing weapons of mass destruction.

The bottom line, as with a lot of this, is try to talk to these people first. But if that doesn’t work, hit them hard, with everything you’ve got.”