I deliberately try and opt for a bad movie sometimes, just so that I can rag on it (I find doing so quite therapeutic), and Specimen bore all the hallmarks of a real stinker: a no-name TV director, Saved by the Bell's Zack Morris (Mark-Paul Gosselaar) in the lead, a dreadful DVD cover bearing the lousy tag-line 'Be very quiet... They might want you...'. But although the film is definitely a cheap piece of derivative cheeze, a mish-mash of ideas stolen from 'Firestarter', 'The Terminator' and a whole handful of other sci-fi films, it still managed to be slightly more fun than I had expected.
The film begins with a pre-credits sequence in which a young boy, Mike, somehow unwittingly causes fires in his sleep, resulting in the accidental death of his mother. That boy grows up to be Gosselaar, who—after the death of his grandmother—finds a box of his mother's belongings which leads him to her hometown in search of the identity of his father, and an answer to his uncontrollable pyrokinesis. All of this is handled pretty well by director John Bradshaw, and Gosselaar is actually decent; at this point, Specimen is shaping up to be a surprisingly classy flick.
And then 'The Terminator' arrives—or rather Eleven, an extraterrestrial in human guise (played by Doug O'Keefe, doing his best Schwarzeneggar), arrives—and the film becomes an unintentionally laughable mess. Eleven's mission is to find and destroy Mike, who is an alien/human hybrid, the result of his mother being abducted and impregnated by scientists from another world (and who can blame the naughty ETs? Mike's mother is played by the very probe-worthy Carmelina Lamanna, who flashes full-frontal during some flash-backs), but is thwarted by another alien named Sixty-six who happens to be Mike's father!
Matters get progressively sillier here on in, with the two aliens battling it out with each other while Mike tries to come to terms with his bizarre lineage and the fact that he might not be able to get it on with new girlfriend without causing her third degree burns. Expect a lot of pyrotechnics, a Terminator-style synth score, plenty of dreadful dialogue, no explanation as to why Eleven wants Mike dead, and an open ending that makes one wonder whether this was intended as a pilot for a TV series that (not surprisingly) never happened.
