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.

Piranha 3DD (2012)

It shouldn’t be that hard to make a Piranha movie – put in some stock characters, spice in a bit of bullshit pseudoscience and then put in huge doses of boobs and gore and you have a movie. The bar is low and nobody ever expected anything at all out of this series. So with THAT said…Piranha 3DD is a giant mess that I’m not sure who it was supposed to appeal to.

Director: John Gulager

Starring: Danielle Panabaker, Matt Bush

IMDb

Yup, from the super classy title on down, this movie is basically just confused. It’s confused about why it even exists. Frankly, so am I. So let’s play detective and try to get a hold on what the fuck went wrong with this botched attempt at a sequel.

The movie starts off with a news report explaining that the town from the last movie was abandoned because of all the piranha attacks. There doesn’t seem to be any context for showing this news report now or anything, so I guess it was just rerun day at the news station.

Also, what, the ENTIRE FUCKING TOWN was abandoned because some people died in a piranha attack one day? There was no government intervention to try and help out? No scientists sent out to investigate? Nothing?

What's the big deal? It's just a mass murder by way of killer fish. Get over it. Pffffffttttt.

Okay. I totally buy that.

We then get a couple of rednecks playing Open Kill Fodder out on a lake with a dead cow. I’m really just waiting for Jason to show up and kill these guys, but all I get is fart noises and piranha eggs coming out of the cow’s ass.

Worst Hatchet sequel ever!

Our main characters this time are a bunch of people at a theme park. Apparently that guy from Thank You for Smoking who wasn't Aaron Eckhart is now playing some jackass running a water park with an adult section full of nude women swimming around.

Ohh yeah, late night commercials will totally bring in the millions; you're such a fuckin' genius of marketing.

I really don’t get who would ever go to this place – the usual audience for a water park is kids, whose parents would DEFINITELY not take them to some place where there are a bunch of strippers swimming around naked. And the perverts who WOULD usually flock to see strippers WOULDN’T be paying the exorbitant prices for a water park – they’d just be going to a strip club down the street. I mean it’s really not worth the effort.

Also, yes, going down a water slide naked with fireworks in both hands that could easily kill you is an AWESOME way to die horribly and/or live a life of agonizing, crippled and humiliating pain. You truly are the smartest person in the world.

Should I go for a Darwin Awards joke, or is it already implied?

Anyway, enough of that boring stuff – it’s time for OTHER boring stuff, like characters having sex in the water. Apparently this girl named Shelby is a virgin, and has finally decided to give it up to this random guy she just met tonight. They strip and go in the water with her asking him “not to try any funny stuff” – then immediately gets up close to him for a kiss afterwards. Clearly we’re dealing with a real brain trust here. This is further proved when she mistakes a bunch of piranhas nipping at her lower legs for the guy's hard-on against her belly – I know she’s supposed to be a virgin, but unless you just had this magical idea in your head that a guy's dick can disperse into hundreds of tiny, sharp-teethed fish, this is pretty tough to believe.

After they get out of the water, she asks if the guy thinks her friend is prettier than her. The guy says no, he’s never been attracted to girls with big breasts – to which the girl says that’s sweet. I can’t – I just can’t. If I even try to think about this dialogue too much, I'm pretty sure I'll end up turning into an alcoholic in a few paragraphs.

Elsewhere we get more idiots having sex, this time in a van that I guess they forgot to put in “Park” – as it starts rolling down the hill and lands in the lake. Because the one guy had his hand handcuffed to a pole, he can’t get out when piranhas start attacking. The girl says she’s going to go for help. Even though the van is clearly not far from the shore at all and she could easily jump or even walk to safety, she just stands on top of the dumb van and screams for help when clearly nobody is around to help.

Keep shouting, you idiot, I'm sure you'll make it out okay. I mean it's not like you're in a horror mo---oh. Never mind.

I’d like to say nobody hears her because they’re just not around, but I really think the REAL answer is that they all DID hear her and just wanted her to die. I mean, that’s what I would have done.

The next day, main character Maddy is comforting Shelby, who is sad that her best friend, Stand On Top of Van Girl, is missing and probably dead. Shelby then says the girl has stolen 11 of her previous boyfriends – wait a fucking minute; 11 PREVIOUS BOYFRIENDS?! And she was one of your best friends? What, were the rest of your friends serial killers? Child pornographers? How is someone who has stolen 11 of your boyfriends over the years in the running for BEST FRIEND?!?

On second thought, anyone who has 11 boyfriends and still can’t get laid clearly doesn’t deserve sympathy. So I’m good with that. And anyway they DO almost get killed immediately afterward, which is cool:

They fall right into the water where the piranhas are, and somehow don't just die immediately. I guess it's 'cuz they're the MAIN CHARACTERS!

Even despite all of what’s happened already – the piranha attack they saw firsthand and the fact that their friends’ van was found empty in the same lake where piranhas just attacked them – they never alert the authorities and never even really piece together the connection between any of this. You goddamned morons.

But hey, I’ve heard of worse excuses for a Christopher Lloyd cameo:

Flux Capacitor, Marty, yadda yadda yadda.

Gee. Either that’s actually Doc Brown from the future taking the present one’s place, or you just called Christopher Lloyd at the last second and he said ‘fuck it’ and rolled out of bed and came straight to the set. Either way. The scene is pretty much just a bunch of pseudoscience. I mean, THIS is what passes for ‘studying fish’ for him:

Yup, just putting his face up to the glass and imitating piranha teeth snapping. Amazing. The rest of this scene is just filler trying to explain how the fish are going to kill everyone later. I’d go into detail, but really, who cares? Who is this scene supposed to appeal to? Your built-in audience isn’t exactly the type that’s going to really give a crap what you make up to explain your “plot” – they’re pretty much just here for the boobs.

We also get a David Hasselhoff cameo – he’s in this hotel room with a couple women playing some dumb song on his miniature keyboard. I mean really, guys? What, you couldn't throw in a Kurt Russell or Steven Seagal cameo too? Maybe "Who Let the Dogs Out?" to complete the timeless references?

Meanwhile, we get the end of the ‘Shelby is a virgin’ subplot – she’s been feeling sick all day and is afraid she’s going to die, so she begs that idiot to fuck her. Yeah, you could at least GO TO A DOCTOR if you’re afraid you’re going to die, but I guess that would make too much sense, and would deprive us of the absolutely essential scene where a piranha comes out of her vagina and bites the guy’s dick off.

Pfft, not nearly as good as Teeth. Call me again when you have symbolic and metaphoric implications of the feminine coming of age and THEN we'll talk!

Yeah, you just saw that. I’m just amazed it took this movie of all things to show the way piranhas really work. They’re like werewolves! If they attack you, they then proceed to burst out of you like that thing from Alien. That is how werewolves work, though, right? Right?

The only other slightly funny thing that happens is when Marcellus Wallace from Pulp Fiction shows up with no legs – apparently his legs were eaten in the first movie and now he’s chosen this water park opening to try and beat his new fear of water.

That's pride fuckin' with ya. Fuck pride.

He tries to get his sidekick guy, who looks something like a drowned Steve Buscemi, to push him in the water, but keeps changing his mind at the last second. He even says not to listen to him when he protests and just to throw him in anyway. This results in a scene where a lifeguard sees the guy about to push him in and stops them – it’s small change in terms of humor, but eh, you could always do worse I guess – you could always write the crap the rest of this is filled with.

Like this other scene ripping off Nightmare on Elm Street, because yeah, when I watch a Piranha sequel, I really fucking expect to see a parody of Nightmare on Elm Street in it:

We get a couple of scenes of Maddy trying to warn everyone about the piranhas, but her jackass stepfather won’t listen and even has his cop buddy physically pick her up and carry her away to prevent her from telling anyone. It’s pretty much a waste of screen time though, as within the next few minutes after this piranhas are everywhere, and causing a bloodbath if I ever saw one.

Pulling her out of the water to safety would be easy, but I guess that would make this guy a likable character...gee, he'd really be good buddies with Arkin from The Collector, I guess.

If the gore was better, I’d say this was a pretty fun climax – but it’s mediocre, and there are a bunch of flat out what the fuck moments on display. Like, really, do I need to see a 3D close-up shot of this guy’s ass with a piranha attached to it? I mean, that DID have the effect of making me unable to sleep peacefully ever again. If that was your intention, good fuckin' job on that!

I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry for your oncoming flood of night terrors for the rest of eternity after seeing this.

And what’s up with that scene where the stepfather sees a little girl crying over her dead mother and then gives her a bunch of money to try and make up for the dead mother? I mean wow - pretty dark for a horror comedy about fucking piranhas. I mean Jesus.

Then he accidentally runs her over and kills her with his golf cart, turning the whole scene from depressing and unpleasant to absolutely miserable. Thanks a lot for that gem of comedy gold too, movie! Fortunately, the movie then shows us you can get decapitated by a party streamer line if you drive into it. You don't even have to go that fast or anything. Just colliding with a party streamer line will decapitate you. Funny world, huh?

Only in death, however, does this wretched character finally score with the ladies:

I'd say this is incredibly fucking tasteless, but ... no, it's just incredibly fucking tasteless. That's the end of it.

So I guess they kill the piranhas by draining the water from the park and sucking most of them back down the drain. That one fat guy from the instant-mental-scar ass shot from before goes down and blows up the water supply, causing a big torrential downpour upstairs that ends up impaling the cop guy from before with a trident. I dunno, I'm far past the point of caring by now, but what REALLY makes the scene good is the pseudo-epic orchestrations put in as a joke!

Eh, still better than the ending of The Collection. I mean this was supposed to be stupid; when The Collection did it, they were trying to be serious.

Then they get a call from Doc Brown again, telling them the piranhas are evolving and growing legs – well, that’s completely fucking stupid. If you make a sequel of that, I will stick a harpoon in your gut. Some dumb kid goes up to the last piranha flopping around in the shallow water and tries to take a picture of it. His mother warns him against it, but he tells her she’s stupid and piranha can’t move as fast on land – she SHOULD just physically just DRAG him away, but I guess having a kid so stupid was unappealing to her, as she just watches as the piranha devours her child's head:

Hasselhoff ends the movie by calling the kid dumb, which sounds insensitive, but honestly I pretty much agree. I mean, what was that kid’s future, anyway? Certainly nothing good if he’s the type of little moron who approaches the fish that was just murdering everyone to try and take a picture.

I mean, clearly the real injustice here was that the kid shouldn’t have been allowed to have a cell phone at that age! Insert your own social commentary about Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, complete with self-indulgent prattle about how Millennials suck. Now you're ready to write for the Huffington Post.

So that’s your movie! Child death, fish coming out of vaginas and David Hasselhoff. I think that really says it all. What else do you want? A dissertation on the shit-ass godawful dialogue, characters, plot and overall story this movie spewed out as if from a leaky sewer-pipe? Pfft. I think we all know why this movie was really made...

Hmmm...nope, it's still not quite coming to me...

On second thought, I'm stumped.

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