Species (1995) * 1/2 A movie review by Serdar Yegulalp Copyright 1998 by Serdar Yegulalp
CAPSULE: Oh, ick.
SPECIES is a forehead-knockingly bad movie. You know what I'm talking about: that's when you sit there, slack-jawed, staring at the screen, and then just pound your first into your forehead in total disbelief at what you're witnessing. It's so awful it's downright charming; it's about as bad and as *loud* as STARGATE.
Here's the "plot": Scientists recieve a transmission from space that seems to consist of a genetic code. After synthesizing it and crossbreeding it with human DNA, they develop Sil: an innocent-looking, wide-eyed girl-thing who, for reasons too protracted to list here, has to be destroyed. Only trouble is, they can't simply put a gun to the back of her head and turn her into dog food -- like a Bond movie, they have to kill her *elaborately*, which gives her a chance to escape.
The government corralls together a team of "experts" -- mostly at screwing up, from the look of it: an assassin (Michael Madsen, looking even dopier than he did in RESEVOIR DOGS), an empath (Forest Whitaker, looking like the Pillsbury Doughboy), another scientist, and the creator of Sil (Ben Kingsley, the best thing in the movie). Most of them will of course be murdered in various creative ways, but not before they get to show their various "skills". Smithson, the empath, for instance, has the uncanny ability to just spit out where Sil is and what she's doing. Thanks to the fact that his skill doesn't have any explicit rules, it leaves us scratching our heads as to why he doesn't just produce a map and draw an X on it.
Sil, as it turns out, is growing and developing at a furious rate -- which, of course, requires that she murder several people to feed herself. Which is nothing compared to the vigor she exhibits when trying to find a mate. The adult Sil (played by Natasha Henstridge) looks like she just walked off the runway of a fashion show and has no trouble finding nookie in California, and the movie gets some good laughs out of everyone reacting to her total guilelessness. There is also one moment -- maybe salvaged from an earlier, better draft of the script -- where she tries to to explain who she is, and can't. But the main purpose of the movie is never in doubt: violence, gratuitous nudity, ear-hammering sound effects. The last one is really ticking me off in a lot of movies lately: why, for instance, do we alwasy have swooshing sound effects to accompany the image of a FLASHLIGHT playing across the camera lens? Light beams didn't disturb the air much the last time I checked.
The worst thing about SPECIES is how unctuously dumb it is. It's not much fun as a beer movie, because it's possible to come up with good comebacks to everyone's rampantly stupid behavior even when you're drunk. And when you're sober, it plays like a game of Spot-the-Plot-Hole, where the holes are big enough to park elephants inside. I yearned for a horde of killer tomatoes to spruce things up.
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