Whose Bright Idea Was This?

1996's Species was certainly a stinker: a clunky screenplay by Dennis Feldman, pedestrian direction from Roger Donaldson, and embarrassed performances from Michael Madsen, Marge Helgenberger, and Forrest Whittaker resulted in some of the weakest plotting and most inane dialogue witnessed since Ed Wood, Jr. passed on. Who didn't howl when Whittaker's pathetic "psychic" walked into a gore-stained room and announced "something bad happened here!" And has anyone figured out what accent Ben Kingsley was attempting? On the plus side, it did offer a nifty new beastie from H.R. Giger, and better yet, pneumatic Canadian lovely Natasha Henstridge frequently unencumbered by clothing. The whole thing played like a Roger Corman's New Horizons programmer somehow blessed with a Devlin-Emmerich budget.

Species was also a surprise hit, so it was inevitable that somebody would green light a sequel. Problem is, how do you make a follow-up to something that was already cobbled together from just about every s.f./horror film ever made? What's left to steal?

Well, the first thing you do is commission TWO screenplays, and I'll tell ya, if Species 2 was spawned from the BEST of the two, then the other one must've read like a reject from Space Precinct. Because, IMHO, this has to be one of the worst screenplays ever developed by a major studio. I say this after marathon viewings of such regrettable swill as the entire Ghoulies series and just about anything produced in the 70s based on Edgar Rice Burroughs.

If anything had me anticipating this sequel as something other than another excuse to gawk at Henstridge (until recently stuck in swill like Maximum Risk and Adrenaline),it was the promise of Peter Medak as director. Medak is the versatile, underrated filmmaker who's probably best known for The Ruling Class with Peter O'Toole and the recent The Krays. Medak had created a real horror gem with 1980's Canadian ghost story The Changeling starring George C. Scott, plus, he had also helmed a few Tales From The Crypt episodes for the now-defunct HBO anthology series.

That's why it's so disheartening to see Medak operating squarely on autopilot on this one: just keep things in focus, get the shots competently composed, and wait for the catering truck. The special effects are astonishingly shoddy for a film of this magnitude in this day and age. The Mars lander seems to touch down on the old Amok Time set from Star Trek, and the alien cocoons look like something from Luigi Cozzi's Alien Contamination.

The performances are again uniformly terrible, esp. the one from James Cromwell, whose on-again, off-again Southern accent sounds makes him sound like Huckleberry Hound (or Lindsay Crouse from Michael Cimino's The Desperate Hours remake). Madsen just looks tired, and is often unintentionally hilarious in action scenes, since he looks like he could barely trot up a flight of stairs and not get winded. Plus, he's saddled with gems like "The last time I took on that alien-bite-bitch I nearly got myself killed". Gangway for George Dzundsa, squeezed into a general's uniform and sporting Donald Pleasance's eye from You Only Live Twice, spewing the patriotic drivel. And poor Myketi Williamson, who after suffering public humiliation in the tabloids from his recent arrest, gets to set racial stereotypes back to the Baretta era with lines like "Brother can't get no booty".

Forget any attempts at suspense, momentum, or logic. Why does the astronaut hide his alien brood in an old barn? Is there a certain AMOUNT of kids he has to spawn before anything happens? Why can Henstridge track down the infected astronaut via mind link right down to the bloody AISLE of a supermarket, but fail to guide Madsen and his partner through a parking lot in search of one measly van? And whatever happened to the mutant rat from the conclusion of the first film?

There are a few promising ideas at work here, like having the Mars mission be a corporate-sponsored endeavor (thanks to Nike, and the like), and making "Eve" (the clone of Sil) sympathetic and intelligent. But for the majority of its running time, Species 2 is little more than a hodgepodge of unconvincing gore, limp pursuits, and gratuitous T & A as laughable as any similar moments in Mancuso, Jr.'s Friday The 13th film series.

Still, it's hard not to like a film which offers Richard Belzer as the President of the United States, and in which a captive alien teaches herself to drive a military vehicle by studying Dukes Of Hazzard reruns.

- Maxx Renn