Subject: Review: Species II (1998) [Revised and corrected]

From: [email-masked]
Date: 18 Apr 1998 16:26:07 GMT

Species II (1998)
-* (Minus-one stars)
A movie review by Serdar Yegulalp
Copyright 1998 by Serdar Yegulalp

CAPSULE: MONEY TRAIN has been displaced; SPECIES II is the worst movie ever
made by a major studio.

You'll notice that there's a "minus" sign in front of my one-star rating of
SPECIES II. This is deliberate: normally, the lowest I go for any movie is
"no stars", meaning that I was not only unentertained, but offended as well.

Minus-one stars, then, goes even lower than that. SPECIES II is the most
offensive movie -- morally and aesthetically -- ever made by a big-name
studio. Period. It's a sequel, I guess, to the dumb ALIEN ripoff of a few
years back that had one twist: we got a sexy *female* alien, who transformed
into a very unsexy puddle of chow mein when she got horny. This movie doesn't
even have a new element to bring to the mix. It's a geek show.

There is one scene in SPECIES II that is the core of my disgust with the
film. It consists of two creatures that we have seen represented as humans,
transformed into aliens. One of them -- the "male" -- attacks the "female" in
a very specifically sexual way, raping her orally. It's impossible to
interpret what happens as anything else. I am astonished that even an R-rated
film could contain a revoltingly explicit depiction, however metaphorical, of
oral rape -- and with no point to it except to give us trashy shock. But
there it is.

When the film isn't being disgusting, it's boring. Its plot, what little I
could find of it, centers around astronauts returning from Mars infected with
the same alien DNA that spawned the first movie's "Sil". One of them mutates,
mates like mad, learns that there's a female alien on Earth somewhere, runs
amuck. I am not leaving out much, nor am I trying to.

The director of his garbage, incredibly, is Peter Medak. Medak is a good
filmmaker, and you will never know that from watching this movie. Medak has
directed LET HIM HAVE IT, ROMEO IS BLEEDING, and THE KRAYS, all of which were
above-average movies about crime and violence. SPECIES II seems to have been
done entirely on autopilot, which is a shame, because if he'd bothered to
take the material into hand, he could have reworked it into something less
purposelessly nauseating and vile.

A friend brought up a comparison that's worth mentioning here. The Japanese
animated sex-and-apocalypse epic LEGEND OF THE OVERFIEND is wall-to-wall with
scenes like the one I described above, and worse. But it is nowhere nearly as
hateful as SPECIES II is. As disgusting and repellent as LEGEND OF THE
OVERFIEND was, it at least had a degree of internal consistency and ferocious
energy. SPECIES II doesn't even classify as a beer movie (not unless you feel
like cleaning beer-vomit off the couch). It isn't interesting, original,
watchable, fearsome, thought-provoking *or* entertaining. It's an all-new
cinematic low.

Congratulations, guys. You're my new basement tenants.

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