Species II (1998)

The first Species movie was already about as bad as you could get short of putting in scatological porn, Tyler Durden style, in the split second takes between reels. I really had no idea what to expect for this second one. What more could they do? They already ticked off every box of terrible filmmaking. It's kind of the movie equivalent of winning every race and then having nowhere else to go. But Species never wins anything, except maybe most disappointed family members of everyone involved.

Director: Peter Medak

Starring: Natasha Henstridge, Michael Madsen

IMDb

Co-written with The Observer.

But really, even though they had nowhere else to go, they tried anyway. God bless these plucky underdogs, coming back for one more round!

We start this sequel off with a ten minute dirge of a bunch of boring astronauts hangin' out in space, colonizing Mars or something.

"Wait, what do you mean we have to live up here forever? NOOOOO, WHY DIDN'T I READ THE CONTRACT BEFORE AGREEING TO GO ALL THE WAY TO MARS?!?"

I'm just amazed this movie had the attention span to actually stick to something this long with no boobs or violence shown, which is kind of made moot by the fact that this opening sequence is incredibly fucking boring. Also, what, did they just invent super light-speed space travel in the mid-90s that allowed them to get to and from Mars that fast? I mean, I am an expert on this. I've seen Interstellar; I know how tough space travel can be!

The Mars landing really important to all the people in this bar. Verdict's still out on whether or not they're actually cheering for the sports game on the other TV though.

What they don't show you is that this one bar was the only place anyone on Earth was watching, or caring at all, about the Mars mission. So sad, the decline of interest in things that matter...

There's this weird primordial alien ooze that sneaks into the ship and starts slowly creeping toward them – I love how fucking long this thing takes to get to them, like there's any suspense over what could possibly happen in this horror movie with primordial alien ooze in it. Ooh, maybe they'll get away! Oh wait, no, shit, it got them. If you’ve never seen a science fiction movie before, like Alien perhaps, or The Thing, well, I’ll spell it out—the alien is inside them now.

The astronauts actually black out for a minute, but never seem to question that at all. They have this whole process when they get back of having this doctor check them out, but he pretty much just gives them a clean bill of health. Even though they know they blacked out, the doctor just hand-waves that boring-ass shit away and tells them they're fine.

No quarantines? Not even gonna bother testing them a bit to make sure? Man, either that alien is just really good at hiding traces of itself, or the doctor was just waiting for an excuse to raise up the curtains and show the dozens of horny astronaut fangirls waiting for all of them, wanting to live vicariously because no doctor ever gets an entourage like that.

"I'll just pretend all of you are here to see me, like every other time a hot woman enters my office. Man my life is sad!" Also, I sure hope some of those chicks are lesbians and there to see the one lady astronaut. Otherwise that's massively unfair.

Either way, the “doctor” is so bad at his job, he was probably just some whackjob pervert off the streets and the real doctor is probably dead in the alley behind the building. Somebody go check!

Then we see a science lab where experiments are performed on a clone of the alien Sil from the last movie, though this time her name is Eve. I'm almost positive this had to be someone's fetish. I mean, look at this shit:

I wonder how that conversation went in the planning stages for this experiment...

“Hey, can we do experiments where we shower acid gas on her and see if the boils heal afterward?”

“Sure, why the fuck not?”

“Oh, and one other thing...”

“Yes?”

“Can we also have her naked and strapped into a chair with leather bondage stuff?”

“Why would that be important? Isn't she pretty much already under our control and won't escape or anything? Couldn't we just do this to one part of like, her hand or something? Does she have to be naked?”

“Woah, woah, woah! Don't question me!”

At this banquet thing for the astronauts as they come back, the one guy goes upstairs to find two women waiting to have sex with him. He complies, but not really in the way you usually do things when you have two women who want to have sex with you – he just fucks them one at a time. Which seems kinda like a waste of potential, you ask me, but then again, I'm not an alien possessing an extremely attractive man. So really what do I know?

But it does allow them to show off some grisly pregnancy type gore when his alien STD infects them...

This just goes back to what I was saying about that doctor – he couldn't tell there was something wrong with those astronauts? Really? It's one thing to make a small mistake at your job, and another thing entirely to make a mistake that results in people exploding from the inside out. Pretty sure something about that was detectable, guys!

And, hey, the way the woman astronaut dies while having sex is kind of like what I imagine Phil Robertson thinks happens every time people fuck.

For some reason, the black guy astronaut doesn't have the alien inside him, which they find out after they send half a dozen secret service guys to ambush him having sex with this woman on a boat.

"We just like to watch random people fuck! It's not weird!" 

How did they not notice the secret service guys standing there even while they were undressing and talking to each other? Are they deaf and dumb, or do the secret service guys just know how to tip-toe around really well? Eh, probably a bit of both.

We get several scenes in between these ones of Eve being tested in that research facility. My favorite scene is when she's just sitting there watching a baseball game on TV and she starts to get psychic visions or something from the deaths the other aliens are causing, and starts convulsing like she's overdosing on crack cocaine. This one woman scientist goes “I didn't know she liked baseball that much!”

That's the face of someone who really likes baseball.

Yes – you're clearly scientist of the year. I also love the completely random experimental priority these scientists have. One day, they're stripping her naked and showering her in acid. The next day, just hook wires to her head and let her watch TV. Makes sense to me!

I guess the plot is that the alien inside that guy wants to fuck as many women as possible, which immediately makes a child alien pop out of them. He’s trying to, I don’t know, make an army or something. I can’t even imagine the money he has to spend on diapers for all these kids though.

"Aw man, I woke up next to an eviscerated woman and then another 10-year-old boy popped up. What guy can't relate to this problem?"

The situation gets so bad that they have to bring in the only true expert, Michael Madsen. He spends his time defusing hostage situations now, or something like that, because Michael Madsen is the guy I'd go to for that.

Everyone else: "Wait, who is this asshole again?"

I especially love the way this government military guy gets him to come join the mission – he grabs Madsen's car keys and refuses to give them back. Because if you still had any doubts that this movie was stuck in 4th grade, well, I think they're quelled now! The idea of a high ranking military official pulling that stunt, like something your annoying older brother would try when you were kids, is just incomprehensibly hilarious to me.

"Dammit, I didn't really want to be in this movie."
"I know, but we all gotta make sacrifices in this economy."

He gets paired up with that black astronaut, because Lethal Weapon, and because I guess going up to space means the government can force you to participate in citizen manhunts for dangerous aliens. Why don't they have a team of professional military guys handle this? Oh right, because it's a dumb action movie, so we need to throw in a bunch of loose cannons.

I guess you could make the argument that these people know the alien because Madsen and the lab scientist lady fought her in the first movie. But that level of knowledge doesn't get them far, because even though they have experience and know what they're doing, the Big Bad Military Guy shoots everything they say down, because RRRARRRRR MILITARY! That's good storytelling!

"Look for me next month on Ancient Aliens! Isn't my crazy eye so cool?"

They hook up Eve to this machine that will allow her to see through the eyes of the other alien, but the downside is, it also makes her hormones and anger through the roof – why? Fuck it, we just need a way to move this ridiculous story forward! Don't ask questions. It's just a very weirdly specifically made machine with side effects that somehow align directly with the way this story was supposed to go.

"This was really just another excuse to have a really hot chick tied to a table!"

Madsen and the black guy chase the alien down to a grocery store, where he has kidnapped some woman to go rape inside of a stereotypical big black van, which I'm sure wasn't suspicious to anyone at all – and, apparently, despite my sarcasm, it wasn't. Nobody noticed it.

"Eh, we see that every day in redneck-ass Ohio."

Madsen and the other guy, clearly sensing the urgency of the situation, run after them like fat worn-out mall cops after too many donuts – yeah, guys, no pressure to actually catch them. They find a black van and bust out the window and point their guns inside, only to discover it's actually some completely random couple that decided to have sex in a creepy black van in the middle of the day in a grocery store parking lot. You know, like you do. What a coincidence!

"We're really taking this seriously! Honestly!"

"It's the danger that really turns us on. We do this in different parking lots every weekend. Think of it as the Mile High Club for poor people."

But Jesus, what do the Walmarts in this world look like if the random grocery store parking lots are prime locations for mid-day fucking in vans? They must be even more rampant with vans with people fucking inside. Let's take a look, shall we?

Yup, just what I thought. Gross.

The alien escapes, and Madsen reacts with all the candor and personal attachment of a guy who's had, really, a pretty good day at work – he looks fairly satisfied actually.

"All in a day's good work. Now that we're done handling important things, we can focus on the other identical black van that somehow ended up in the exact same parking lot!"

The alien makes his way back to the lab and stares at Eve through the glass, which I guess is supposed to signify that they've “found” each other – I suppose what they have in common is the fact that they were both directed to act like coma patients on Xanax in this movie. Which is really the only kind of bond, if you think about it.

"Neither of us have any character...I'M HORNY FOR YOU NOW!"

Eve breaks out, and of course despite having God knows how many military guys around with guns, she escapes relatively easily. Then it's up to Madsen and his motley crew to go hunt her down in the only style they know how – half-jogging like he forgot his kid's toy in the car at Golden Corral on a Sunday afternoon. Again, no need to hurry! Not like anything important is going on.

In the middle of all of this nonsense, the alien-astronaut-guy's father learns about the murders his son has committed, in the same room we've seen him in all throughout this movie – because I guess he never leaves.

"These are the crimes your son committed."

"Meh, I've done way worse in my time!"

Then the father goes and finds the son at the cabin where he's been keeping all his alien-spawn children that do nothing in this movie. He and his son hug and then the father dies, I guess, I dunno. This would have been a great dramatic scene in a movie without dumb alien sex spawn and goofy Michael Madsen moments, and overall a movie that wasn't this one.

Madsen and the gang get to the cabin too and have a showdown, which mostly involves a lot more weird alien sex and Predator rip offs.

This is what Predators jerk off to at age 13 - and yes, I did just ruin that franchise for you.

After it's all over and our main characters have very regrettably survived, the black guy gets put in an ambulance with this hot black woman, and they immediately get together without any conversation or doubt, because black people are automatically attracted to one another no matter what – it doesn't even matter what her life dreams, goals or aspirations are and his tastes and preferences don't mean jack shit. They have the same skin color, so they're perfect. Racism is fun.

Hooray for shallow attraction based on physical attributes! WOOHOO!

Well, that was Species 2. It was pretty stupid, nonsensical and plotless, but what did you really expect? I set my standards low for this and really, it wasn't any worse than the first one. Neither of these movies were good! If you want some pretty hilarious, unrepentant bullshit, this should suffice...I mean, it's so dumb it's honestly hard to hate. This movie knows it's awful, and for that, I don't really see a point in wasting my hatred on it. So really, if you just need to laugh...there are a lot better places you could get that, but I'll be honest - Species II isn't the worst place you could turn.

Images copyright of their original owners; I own none of them.

Species (1995)

I didn’t really know what to do for this week’s review, as, being a colossal idiot, I forgot to take into account that there were five weeks in August - and being a somewhat neurotic personality, I really didn’t want next week’s planned review to be the last one of the month. I had planned Ghostbusters 2 for that slot. But here I was with an empty slot waiting to be filled. I was conflicted over what to do until I noticed what was coming up next on my Netflix DVD queue…

Then I was like, “Hellooooo new can of worms to be opened!”

Ew.

This was one of those horror franchises I had overlooked prior to watching the movie for this review. Frankly, I kind of wish it had stayed that way after seeing it. I mean, how was this thing funded? My guess is, it had something to do with pointing a lot of guns at crying peoples’ heads while they beg for a little more time to pay you off for the crack they bought.

Director: Roger Donaldson

Starring: Ben Kingsley, Michael Madsen, Natasha Henstridge

IMDb

Co-written with Colin/The Observer.

Oh, is our time up? I can live with that. If it means I don't have to watch a second of this horrible movie! But that would be too easy, wouldn't it?

We start off with a list of actors overtop, which I think was a bit cruel; how were they expected to forget the fact that they’d ever been in this if their names are what STARTS the damn thing off? I mean these weren’t exactly unknowns: Michael Madsen, Forest Whitaker and Ben fucking Kingsley? I dunno though - maybe this was more like the price they all paid for the Satanic oath they took in the early 90s to become big stars later.

We then see a girl being held captive in some kind of chamber with Kingsley, playing scientist Fitch. Fitch orders his people to flood the chamber with gas and turns and walks away dramatically, which is always preferable to actually making sure you did the work correctly. As, you know, if you DON’T do that, your subject might escape and flee upon an unsuspecting world.

I see this fall's theater production of Stephen King's Firestarter is going swimmingly.

Oops! Oh well. We tried!

I just think it was irresponsible of them to let the Ferguson police force act as guards for this facility. But oh well, I guess they had to give them some jobs.

The girl escapes to a train where she gets a free ticket because she’s a little girl. However, the stewardess gets what she had coming to her for giving the girl a free ticket WHEN…

Yeah! Take that, train staff who did nothing wrong!

Kingsley is busy gathering a team of complete nonsense, as he has brought together the finest minds that poor writing can produce - a sort of “Super Friends” of idiocy. We get Forest Whitaker as Dan Smithson, a psychic. There’s Michael Madsen as Lennox, a hitman. There’s molecular biologist Laura, played by Marg Heigenberger, and also anthropologist Stephen Arden - I say all of their occupations, but really aside from Madsen and Whitaker, I couldn’t tell who these characters were supposed to be without looking at Wikipedia. Becuase that’s how you make a good movie!

Oh wait, no it isn’t. These characters are just bland with no personalities outside of one-note cliche. Madsen’s line sums it up pretty well: “We’re all here for the same reason...whatever that is.”

"When can I go back to doing blow off a hooker's ass crack? This is already boring me." Seriously, Madsen in this is just like Madsen in anything else - he has two modes of expression; confused and "I don't give a fuck."

It’s called a paycheck, buddy. It’s okay to admit that when you’re in a movie with this in it:

Well they always DID say women were different from men. Though when they said "women are from Venus," I never thought they meant it so literally.

Also, why is Kingsley, a scientist, utilizing a psychic to solve his problem? Isn’t that just like the most desperate, end-of-days sign ever, when a scientist who should have all the answers is just like “Fuck it! I’m calling a psychic!”? I mean Jesus.

That wouldn't be a good sign either!

Whitaker’s character is seriously just a new wonder of the world, as every line he has is just stating the obvious without actually contributing anything. I swear all of his scenes go like this:

[WHITAKER sees a horrific blood-soaked crime scene with a murder victim lying on his stomach with a clear gunshot wound to the head. The killer is being taken away in a police car.]

WHITAKER: Something...BAD happened here….I think…

That really isn’t too far off - he sees the place where that train stewardess lady was murdered, stares at it blankly for a few seconds, clearly understanding nothing, then goes “Something bad happened here.” Where did you come up with that brilliant deduction? Did you sit at your desk for hours and pore over complex formulas for hours? Did you lose sleep as you thought for hours about the complex ramifications of every bit of that concept?

We hit the ultimate low (for the first half hour anyway) when the movie actually tries to pull off an exposition scene with Kingsley explaining how they fucked up so hard. Get this: apparently they were given some space DNA or something from aliens and blended it with human to create a little girl that aged a lot faster than regular humans. Within a month she was already looking like a five year old girl:

So basically it's just another trite "humans fuck with science" movie. We get it, humans are bad. Please shut up and stop thinking you're intellectual in any way.

Maybe if you bungholes got security that wasn’t complete fucking shit, she wouldn’t have been able to escape that easily and you wouldn’t have this problem. You made contact with alien life, fucked with it, and then didn’t even have the good sense to make ABSOLUTELY SURE she can’t get out in like two seconds. That’s fucking amazing. You guys deserve an award. But not the kind you were probably hoping you’d get.

Oh, and apparently they made it a female because they wanted it to be “more docile and easy to control” - what, did you time travel in from the 1950s white-picket-fence suburbia housewife land or what? Are you even serious?

So their next step is to figure out something in the lab. What are they doing? I have no fucking idea - sciencey stuff is just cool! Lab coats and glass chambers! Yeah!

Kingsley orders two of them to go in and fix something wrong with the equipment. They can’t use lab techs who would normally do this because, as Kingsley informs us, “it’s classified.” So they go in there and immediately break off a part of their machine by accident, and spend way longer than they ever had a right to looking for it on the floor. Gee, it’s almost like they weren’t qualified to do anything in there, huh? While they’re doing that, a horrific alien mutation somehow happens in the room and begins to grow faster than an oil-boom town:

Kingsley’s immediate response is to lock all three of the people he hired to kill this thing inside and start counting down to destroy the entire room, chanting all the while that he “has to follow protocol” like a malfunctioning ‘droid from the Stars Wars universe.

Then after Kingsley comes to his senses and hits the ‘unlock door’ button and lets them out, the room then bursts into flames:

I'm really starting to think this whole science lab thing Kingsley runs is one of those cheap back alley ones where they pay you like a hundred bucks to do tests that turn your urine blue for two weeks and make your balls itch. I really don't think it's reputable, guys.

So that’s what would have happened to these poor saps who are working for free for Kingsley’s character, if they hadn’t been let out at the last second. Let’s recap - you’ve blown up your lab, almost killed your team (and if they weren't brain dead they would never trust you again after this) and learned nothing useful at all. Overall I think it was a success. But then again, I'm a complete fraud and nothing I say can be taken seriously.

So while they’re floundering around like complete morons, the alien, called Sil, is busy buying a dress that makes her look like a fucking Power Rangers-themed bridesmaid:

She looks like a Power Rangers suit that stopped changing mid-transformation. Sailor Moon looked more subtle.

Then she goes to some club and kills a woman in the bathroom, then wears nothing but a bra and long pants and takes some guy home to kill him. Her line is as follows: “You want to go to a party?” The guy goes, “Where at?” Then she says, “I don’t know!” I realize having a half-naked woman just walking up and flirting with you is awesome and all, but come the fuck on. That’s ridiculous.

They go home and we get the entire reason this movie was made:

...to show off her beautiful eyes, hair and facial features obviously! What? Did you think I was going to say something perverted?

The next half hour or so is mostly made up of Sil going around killing random men who won’t have a baby with her, because yeah, that’s the plot now - she wants to get pregnant and have some super-baby that grows up fast like she did, which will then start a perpetual train of horrible, horrible sequels. Joyous. I dunno, just set Sil up with the land shark from Creature. They’re both horny freaks and will be perfect for each other.

So yeah, tons of scenes of Sil just killing random guys, which is cool because of boob shots mostly, because this movie is perpetually 13 years old. My favorite is this guy, who freaks out like he’s being molested by a 60-year-old fat priest when she’s taking off his underwear.

Dude, you were already making out with her in a pool with her completely naked, so what the fuck? Oh well. He did make a bit of a scramble for the phone earlier and she had to pull him back in to keep making out. So my guess is he’s got some painful self-discovery to do sometime in the future. Or he would have if she didn’t kill him immediately after.

"I have to get the phone! That's my totally not gay male friend who wants to come over and lather my body in skin-refreshing oils!"

They eventually all meet up with Sil at this hotel or whatever and she thinks it’s a great idea for some reason to come up to Forest Whitaker, stare at him for a second so he can go “it’s you” because this movie thinks its audience is retarded and can’t figure things out by themselves, and then run away.

Spoon, meet audience's mouths.

Helicopters immediately spring up from nowhere, apparently and chase them down - what, were they just lying in wait for anything to happen at all? Must have been a boring fucking night.

"Oh goodie, something to do finally!"

I guess she sneaks back later and tricks Doc Ock from the Raimi Spider-Man movies here to have sex with her, then kills him once she’s finally pregnant. Then she runs into the sewers and they have to chase her, because this wasn't enough like a shitty Stephen King adaptation already.

Then we get one of the pastimes enjoyed by every bad, unimaginative pile of crap - the “flashlights and guns in the dark wandering” scene. Oh yeah. We really needed another one of those. And I really need a good coma right about now so I can wake up after movies stop thinking scenes like this are in any way productive to humanity.

Even the characters look bored to be doing this scene. GOD it's dull!

The movie’s not done with us yet, though, as we still have THIS image to burn into our minds:

The Gerber Baby is falling on hard times after being introduced to the new drug of chemical radiation.

The baby is killed almost instantly and is thrown into the fire below - which really pisses off Sil, who for some reason was just hiding this whole time. Why is she pissed off? She can make another one in like two hours! But I guess that wouldn't give us material for '90s computer game CGI:

There's a fucking reason old monster movies like Alien, Predator and Jaws didn't show the monster - it's because they knew the effects looked fake and wanted to keep up the illusion. Smoke and mirrors, you bungholes. Why couldn't you have taken the similar path?

They knock Sil into the fire too, very easily I might add, and then all that's left to do is save Whitaker from falling in:

Please don't save him. I don't need to hear any more Captain Obvious-style lines from this moron. "Oh, thanks for saving me, you guys; I could have burnt alive if I fell in there. That would have been painful. Pain is bad. I think something really bad was going to happen if you hadn't saved me." AAAAAAHHHHHH!

Then proving the film has the highest quality writers available, we end on this line: “I never thought I’d be so happy to be back in a sewer,” as they’re leaving the caves and instead going back into the sewers.

No. That line is stupid. This movie is stupid. The characters were bland as all hell when they weren’t ungodly annoying, the story was hackneyed shit made for perverted 13-year-olds, the acting was just pitiful and the CGI was seriously just so bad I can’t even think of a good word. Pac Man is laughing at you right now, guys.

It just amazes me that this somehow got enough money and fans to warrant sequels. Three sequels! That’s astounding to me! And they’re probably all even worse than this, which is hard to imagine at this point. What, did the directors of those sequels just blackmail the studio execs? I really don’t want to imagine the kind of blackmail it would require to allow THIS piece of sewer slime spawn sequels. Ugh.

This whole thing is just pure stale '90s cheese at its worst. It's extremely dated now, but I doubt it ever had much shelf life on it even back when it came out. This thing is just pure ass. If you have a chance to pass it up, take it like you would if you were offered a million dollars. You won't regret it and your brain cells will thank you later.

Images copyright of their original owners; I own none of them.