"There's nothing worse than being told when to laugh."
Species was about a beautiful girl, Henstridge, who was really a hybrid form - a lethal combination of alien and human DNA who desperately wanted to mate with a male member of LA county so it could propagate and thus take over the world.The Uber-babe escapes, tries to mate with lots of guys (all of whom get the chop, um, as it were, once, you know…). Anyway, she is chased by a team of scientists/experts including Madsen and Helgenberger. The monster loses. The human race wins and the horror movie, cum thriller takes a dive.
In keeping with the template of the Hollywood sequel of the 90's, Species II replicates all the same plot moves, all the same character types…(and if you've seen Scream II then you know the 'rules of the sequel', so there's no point going further). The twist, if we can call it that, is that this time the human-as-monster-that-must-be-stopped is an astronaut (Lazard) returning to earth after a successful Mars mission, where he has picked up this really nasty DNA bug.
It's all too easy to be smug, indifferent and down right patronising toward this movie. It begs for it. Half an hour in, one character exclaims after being exposed to another's internal organs: "Oh God, this is terrible!" This is the kind of self-consciously camp line that begs some wag in the audience to heckle the screen: "No it's worse than that". Director Medak (Romeo is Bleeding) doesn't even try to put an edge or bite into the material, and dialogue like that only confirms his contempt for the material. His 'horror style' consists of the bludgeon (you know: very quiet bits - then a big BANG, to make the audience jump).
HR Giger's design looks as cobbled together here as it did in the earlier film. The only real change is that Medak has softened the first movie's blatant AIDS sub-text - he wants to, instead, make the film funnier, sillier. But it's neither.There's nothing worse than being told when to laugh. ---Peter Galvin
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