I finally watched Alien 2 tonight. The whole thing's on YouTube.
It has a few fun moments and some decent music, but it's extremely slow-paced and always feels like it's cutting corners. You could probably chop it down to a 30-minute fan edit without sacrificing anything important.
From IMDb:
QuoteThe first draft of the screenplay was much more ambitious and expensive than what was ultimately filmed. The story would have featured pieces of a spaceship and an alien falling to Earth (the implication would have been that it was the remains of the Nostromo and Xenomorph from Alien (1979) as it was meant to be a "sequel"). These fragments of the Alien would infect people who came into contact with them and cause chaos in the city. A good budget was given to the director but a lot of the money was squandered on a new car, visits to casinos, a vacation to Cannes, and the services of lady escorts. With only a small percentage of the budget remaining and the investors refusing to give the director more money, the script had to be scaled back, resulting in the cave setting, the lack of an actual alien present on camera and only the basic elements of the spaceship landing on Earth and pieces of the Alien infecting people being used in the final film.
That's such a bummer. If the director hadn't been a sleazy idiot, this could have been a really fun, cheesy footnote in the franchise's history. But as it is, it's so boring that it's not worth remembering.