SPECIES II
Rebecca Wan
Directed by : Peter Medak (II)
Produced by: FGM Productions / MGM (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer)
Main Cast : Natasha Hentrisdge (Eve), Michael Madsen (Press Lenox), Marg Helgenberger (Dr. Laura Baker), Mykelti Williamson (Dennis Gamble).
Length : Approx. 1hr32 minutes
Official Website: mgm.com/speciesII/.
Rating : * * out of * * * * *
This Review Filed: 27 July, 1998.
This review might contain spoilers. Read on at your own risk!
![[ Pic from SPECIES II ]](/film/images/speciesii.jpg)
There's only one word that comes to mind when I think about SPECIES II (and I really try not to think about it too much).
"Wow."
Don't get me wrong, SPECIES II is just about as bad as you've probably heard it is. If you haven't heard, it's really awful. It's the sequel to the 1995 SPECIES, which also starred Natasha Hentsridge, Michael Madsen and Marg Helgenberger. But where SPECIES stuck fairly closely to the "predator aliens are destroying us one by one and have to be stopped" type of storyline, SPECIES II is plagued by a ratty plot that trips over too many loose ends, loses its way and degenerates into a wan mix of erotica and grotesque imagery. It doesn't help that the alien designs, already much maligned for their similarity to ALIEN (Richard Giger, who designed the original SPECIES alien, also helmed the ALIEN creatures), are again not easily set apart from the ALIEN series.
SPECIES II gets off to an interesting start: a group of astronauts successfully complete a mission to Mars, where one of them, Patrick Ross (Justin Lazard), collects soil samples. On their return to Earth, however, it's eventually discovered that some of them have been infected by alien DNA. Meanwhile, a genetically re-engineered clone of the original alien from SPECIES is being studied for warfare purposes by the government. She is named Eve (Natasha Hentsridge), and she is half-human, with "dormant" alien genes.
Ross'infection turns him into a super-cruiser who uses his mating rituals for procreational purposes. He "gets wind" of Eve when her alien genes are artificially enhanced by the laboratory scientists, and the rest of the film is spent documenting the destruction that ensues as the two try to get together. They are both pursued by Press Lenox (Michael Madsen), the detective who captured her in the original film, her doctor ( Marg Helgenberger) and survivor astronaut Dennis Gamble (Mykelti Williamson).
SPECIES II is singularly mindblowing for its perversity. Its imagery takes the Gigeresque grotesque a step further than that of the original SPECIES, and the result is a pop pastiche that takes the provocative suggestions of the ALIEN series and aggrandizes them to gargantum proportions.
In the climate of contemporary mainstream cinema, every successful innovation that once made a financial connection is now accelerated according to formula, enlarged, and swollen to an excessive degree. SPECIES II appears to have taken its cue from this process. One-upping every successful filmic horror/sci-fi symbol to have worked
its way into popular culture, SPECIES II posits terrifyingly exaggerated oedipal and primal urges, and merges them with distortions of gender, the symbolic order and the Self. With blatant symbolism (exploding pregnancies, waving penile tentacles, etc) and imagery working overtime, SPECIES is a psychoanalysis student's wet dream.
Within a feminist discursive framework, SPECIES II is especially interesting for its employment of both empowering and decapitating actions towards the female. Eve, as the half-human and half-Other, is a lab-induced superwoman, docile when her alien genes are retarded, threatening when the genes are "awakened". The alien self signifies horrifying otherness (the physically unknown, the literal alien), but manifests itself in sexuality and the sexual act. The latter in SPECIES is configured as destructive and physically repulsive, culminating in the disfiguring death of the mother, even as the child alien is born.
The name "Eve" is the best example of SPECIES II's over-active connotative register. It doesn't take much to identify its double meaning as "threshold" (as in "eve" of awakening) and also as Eve, the original woman in the Bible, who was disciplined for her curiosity by the pain of childbirth. This equivocation again reflects the doubleness of the role of women in the film. It is not a coincidence, therefore, that the birthing process in SPECIES II is particularly demonized. Once "implanted" by Ross, each impregnated woman screams, petrified, as her own belly immediately swells to mammoth size, then explodes. Throughout its entirety, SPECIES II resonates with this kind of morbid, bludgeoning irony.
![[ Pic from SPECIES II ]](/film/images/speciesii2.jpg)
As Eve, Hentsridge is wonderful. When she breaks free from her lab prison and runs (in slow motion, always in slow motion) in search of her lover Ross, she is a glorious, Amazonian creature in full voluptuous stride, trapping and enrapturing the gaze, even as she is herself entrapped. Eve is simultaneously admired and feared, desired and detested. Like all typical representations of the other, she is awe-inspiring for her claim to conquest lies in her ability to assimilate. Because of Eve's alien inheritance, she can be injured by a different weapon only once, before she immediately heals and adapts to that form of attack. In a terrifically empowering sequence, military soldiers pump her body with several rounds of bullets. She falls, but rejuvenates in a manner a seconds, springs up and runs off in full form.
Engorged by lust, the sexual act liberates, revealing both aliens' "true" selves. In the ALIEN tradition, but in reference to ALIENS in particular, the intrepid group of world-savers (Madsen, Helgenberger and Williamson) encounter the perils of not only the enraged and nightmarish Ross alien but the threat of a roomful of percolating alien cocoons, enmeshed in attractive concoctions of gossamer and slime.
In another tradition that dictates the destruction of the other, there is no redemption for Eve. When confronted by the Ross alien, Baker urges Eve to recall her human connections with them and help them against Ross, even in her deformity. But Eve's attempts to battle Ross reveal her as a feeble warrior (another stereotype); she is decimated by tentacular oral insertion, an act that establishes the supremacy of the phallic organ.
Do you wonder why I spent the whole of SPECIES II thinking: "Are you *kidding* me?" The reason why I find this film breathtaking is because, .. well look at it! One staggers out from SPECIES II dazzled by its audacity. Most of all by the fact that it quite clearly quotes without imagination from a number of science fiction horror films (the ALIEN series is the most obvious), but also for the poor quality of its script and the hardly sublimated anti-female message it perpetuates.
Toting cliches of textbook psychoanalysis, SPECIES II is curious as spectacle that wears its repressed on its sleeve, inverting the unconscious so that even Homer Simpson could diagnose urges and instincts like a pro. Which, considering everything, is what it shouldn't be doing, should it? Isn't the whole point of a psychanalytic reading of a text the fact that the hidden desires of its unconscious are, well, hidden?
More importantly, SPECIES II contributes to the process of reducing once-powerful symbols to triteness by abusive overuse.
The Flying Inkpot's Rating System
* Wait for the TV2 broadcast.
** A little creaky, but still better than staying at home with Tonight With Gurmit.
*** Pretty good, bring a friend.
**** Amazing, potent stuff.
***** Perfection. See it twice.
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