SPECIES II
Bad has a new name
Species may not win any popularity contests on here, but I'll go ahead and say I loved it. A gorgeous woman (a local girl, no less) running around naked throughout the entire film, spending half the time seducing people and the other half killing them with her tongue and/or nipples? I'm there!
So, I went to see the sequel today, with those admittedly modest hopes, and oh my Lord... I can't express how many levels of bad this movie occupies. It's Batman & Robin bad. Hell, it's Con-Air bad!!!
At the conclusion of Species, an alien-infected rat gets away at the end. You'd think that this would be the setup for a prospective sequel, but then you'd think wrong; the scientist responsible for creating Sil (that's the naked alien chick) in the original (played by Marg Helgenberger, who looks embarrassed) has created another one, Eve (Natasha Henstridge). Eve's been engineered to be more docile, but they keep her in a big cage anyway (probably a good idea, considering those killer nipples of hers). Eve's pretty content with being strapped in a chair and poked and prodded all day, until a space mission returns from Mars and the three astronauts aboard appear to be contaminated with an alien lifeform remarkably similar to hers. Soon, one of the astronauts is fucking every woman in sight, with grown kids bursting right out of the poor women moments afterward, and Eve, as you might imagine, is in love.
Most of the ways in which it was bad were pretty mundane. The characters were dopey. The action was pathetic (the chase sequence is paced at a fast walk). It's just ugly, in many ways. And Henstridge gets naked but once. What's up with that?
But I think what takes the cakefor this movie is the one lonely black character, whose name escapes me. He's the guy who played Bubba in Forrest Gump. Anybody who had a problem with Will Smith's "wacky black lingo guy" in ID4 is gonna shit himself with this guy. He gets these two incredibly jaw-droppingly awful lines, lines which spark disbelief at how awful they are when you first hear them, and make you laugh days later at the notion that it was actually used.
He (like the other astronauts) are put under "sexual quarantine" for some reason when they get back, standard procedure, I guess. When this period is over, he rushes off to his woman to have sex for the first time in 11 months. (pfft. 11 months. I could do 11 months standing on my head.) But then a bunch of government guys stomp in and point their guns at him. His response: "Brother can't get no booty!"
On my best day, I couldn't whip up a line that bad.
His other line, I don't even understand. He picks up a machete to use against the alien brood and brags about how he's "gonna go back to Africa on their asses". Anyone care to explain this line to me?
Wow. That's what I said when the movie was over. Wow. It makes me appreciate just how good the first Species really was. Hell, I'm even being a little kinder to Lost In Space in retrospect.
Was the worst movie of 1998 until Very Bad Things came along.