Alien Species

Release date is Germany January 23, 1998(video premiere) Nightmare Worlds 50 DVD collection has the date at 1996.

This is one of the crumbiest movies you will come across. It is too cheap to be campy. Very low budget and it shows from the beginning. They Borrowed the Sleestak suits from "Land of the Lost" a 1974-1976 TV series. You can see the zippers.

Who are these actors? Surly not good ones that just need a little extra money. Name one that you have seen before. Maybe they are relatives of the producer or director.

A tad of blood, but mostly running, running, screaming and screaming.

The world is being attacked by aliens for nefarious purposes. The poor aliens never dreamed that we would shoot them down with an old-style anti-tank weapon that just happened to be available.

I have no idea why an accomplished actor like Charles Napier would sign on for something like this. It was like so many other alien invasion movies you've seen, but literally so much worse. Bad writing. Bad acting. Ironically, whoever made it spent a few bucks on special effects. It wasn't enough to save this stinker.

We start on two people apparently researching extra terrestrial life. Then we shift to some deputies and some bad dudes in the back of their truck. In an inexplicable bit of writing, when they come across a crashed car, instead of calling it in, they get to investigate, say they can't help, and they'll call it in.

The dialogue was bad. The acting was worse. They had one professional actor, and even he couldn't be bothered to put on his acting chops for this thing.

Surprisingly, a number of things came to mind while watching ALIEN SPECIES, Peter Maris' empty skulled direct to video ripoff of the equally idiotic INDEPENDENCE DAY, mostly because the film is so vapidly uninteresting that it served as an opportunity to engage in free-form speculation for ninety minutes while things got blown up while bathed in fluorescent green lights:

1) I am in awe of Charles Napier. He may not be as endearingly grandfatherish in appearance as Peter Cushing or have a spry, mischievous old coot thing going on like John Carradine. But like those two legends Napier has made a career out of making the ridiculous seem perfectly ordinary. Usually he is cast as a cop or military officer who always has that glint in his eye that says he knows more than he is letting on, playing the fool to keep everyone at arm's length. My favorite Charles Napier scene is from Fred Olen Ray's DEEP SPACE where he dons a Scotsman's kilt and takes up the bagpipes after an intimate dinner. His date asks "What, is that supposed to make me want to sing or something?" to which Napier matter of factly replies "No, it's supposed to make you want to take your clothes off." She does.

2) The "hero" in this movie comes across as a dirtbag who has a haircut that makes him look like at least two of The Red Hot Chili Peppers. Which two I am not certain since they usually only wear socks and their underpants on-stage, and as such I have never really gotten a good look at them.

3) Actress Jodi Seronick Golden is indeed the best thing about this film: She is spunky and speaks with excellent enunciation, looks great splattered with alien blood while running around in a torn business suit and has a cute little nose. She deserves better than this.

4) I do not miss Will Smith at all (in fact, there are only white folk in this ID4 ripoff, which sort of misses the point why that giant bag of hot air actually kind of worked: We are ALL doomed, not just the white suburban punks & techno nerds) but the film could use an appearance by Brent Spiner without his "Data" makeup on. Without that white pancake base and ping pong ball contacts, he looks creepy.

5) The kook 9/11 Truth theory idiots have nothing on the whacked out techno paranoia conspiracy allegations spouted by homogeneous white suburbanite nerds in this baby. Maybe if they didn't look like members of Garbage or Curve I could take it more seriously ... Actually, no, I couldn't.

6) Computer grapics animation & special effects should only be made by people who's work does not look like it was recorded from a video game. It is one thing to make a movie that inspires or resembles a video game, but to get the process backwards requires such a willingness to look like such a moron that it us unacceptable.

7) Usually I praise a film with the audacity to ignore any kind of "suspension of disbelief", has no remorse about it's ultra-low budget and sticks to it's subject matter without ever look up from the gutter once. The problem here is that this film is pilfering global threat topics and doesn't have the good sense of a movie like ZONTAR, THING FROM VENUS to just have people sitting around and talking about it. By trying to show us instead the movie crosses the line from just being vapid & amateurish to having the gall to think it would be able to hold a candle to the sight of John Agar sitting on a Naugahyde couch looking concerned as the deaths of thousands are described to him.

8) The movie appears to have been intended to be the first part in a two-installment story, with no mention of whether or not part 2 was ever executed. My suspicion is that somebody had their Powermac taken away.

9) The film seems unsure at times if it is a parody or just a low budget ripoff, resulting in the film's most interesting scenes. You aren't sure if you are supposed to be laughing at the idiocy or poking your friends in the ribs to make sure they get the joke too. It is a disorienting viewing experience: Are we supposed to be taking this seriously? I hope not, but if so, what was the point of it?

10) The film has an affection for colored neon lighting that is used as a substitute for atmosphere. To be frank, the most unnerving scenes were ones set inside of a car with the principal characters attempting to have a conversation. It was like listening to a bad "X-Files" episode, which amazingly is referred to in dialog in what may be a rare instance of the film's self awareness showing.

11) At one point during a moment of crisis inside of the abandoned warehouse level from "Half-Life", one of the characters sweeps the area with his shotgun, at one point aiming it directly at the pretty head of Jodi Seronick Golden. Good thing it wasn't really loaded and they weren't really being attacked by space aliens or she would have been toast.

ALIEN SPECIES can be found on a new 50 movie/12 DVD box set called NIGHTMARE WOLRDS. It can be found there, but just why you'd go looking for it is a matter for you to decide.

2/10

I love movies where I can honestly say that I would have done a better job directing. Seriously. I'm not Mr. "Oh, I can do better than that" usually. But I think my dog could have directed this movie better, and I don't have a dog. Doesn't make sense, does it? Neither does the director's strategy for making this movie.

This is one of those movies that must have a budget of about $10,000 and you wonder "where did the money go"? I can only assume that the explosions in the film were an accident, since nothing else in the movie works, especially the plot. I also think that the actors in the movie were not only not trained in the art of acting, but deliberately taught wrong as a joke.

In this movie, you expect a hard-core sex scene to come on at any moment, not because of any sexual tension that has built up, but because the movie looks like it was shot by the same people who brought you anal whores volume seven. They should have paid the actresses an extra $50/day to score some crack and act while high. At least that would have been interesting.

To sum up, only see this movie while drunk with friends. Recommend this movies to none but your worst enemies, and see a good movie directly after this to avoid having the badness of this movie contaminate you.

Alien Species is a very cheap knock-off that was clearly surfing the wave caused by the massive blockbuster hit Independence Day (1996). This one was also released the same year as that one so that gives you an idea how fast it must have been devised, filmed and distributed. The speed of production shows, as this is a very shoddy and cheap effort, whose title also alluded to the previous year's sci-fi hit Species (1995). Well, it cannot be accused of not covering its bases that is one thing for sure. I quite enjoy rip-off films though so this was, if anything a slight plus point for this one and, in truth, Independence Day was a monumental load of gash and this minuscule budget movie was no more painful to watch. Just horrible in a different way.

Huge alien space-crafts arrive in our orbit and attack immediately. Various human survivors wind up taking refuge in a cave which turns out to be the base of these extra-terrestrials. Lots of alien-invader based stuff happens off the back of this, including explosions and cow theft.

Despite the budget, this one actually stars Charles Napier in an admittedly uninteresting role but it was still good to see him here nevertheless. It also sports some effects of the giant spaceships that were half-way decent. But in all other regards this is bargain basement stuff to the max. Its soundtrack was so tinny and awful it is hard for me to believe that this could have sounded remotely acceptable back in 1996. Sadly, this music is pretty relentlessly played throughout the movie as well. Its director is Peter Maris who I was already aware of on account of his debut movie being the sleazy thriller Delirium (1979) which made the infamous British video nasty list back in the early 80's. It was a good film though, quite significantly better than this one that is for sure. This one is also notable for ending on a very strange and ambiguous bit of dialogue that frankly posed more questions than it did any answers but, really, that's the least of this movies problems.