SPECIES @ 30

The yetis from SETI have made the kind of contact that Nigel Kneale thought up in the '60s, invasion by DNA. Their first test case is fused with a female human sequence that grows up rapidly to look like a pre-teen Michelle Williams. The point of making the hybrid a girl was that she'd be less aggressive. Well, that went off the table as soon as Sil the Experiment started acting out her nightmares while asleep. So, they fill her big glass cage with cyanide gas which she breathes like it's strawberry vape and breaks out and escapes with her learning capacity galloping even faster. By the time they have assembled their team of stock characters, Sil's on her way to L.A. with a bag full of stolen cash and emerges from a human coocoon as a twenty-something Natasha Henstridge. In Hollywood, she gets a room, a wardrobe and a tip from the nightman about the club around the corner as she's now in need of a breeding partner. Meanwhile, the anthropologist, macho black ops agent, biologist and special empath, led by the story's Baron Frankenstein, Scientistprofessordoctor Fitch.

Ok, so once we settle into Sil's motivation and the various powers of the pursue crew, the movie plays by numbers. But, really that's not a bad thing. Species arrived in the mid-90s after a decade and a half of seminal sci-horror moments and had to try and either do something new or at least something generic with a lot of style. Ok, so this does neither. The world had seen this kind of pursuit, regardless of motive in things like The Hidden, Terminator, Predator, and their many carbon clones. Hell, they even got H.R. Giger off the ice for the creature design which sent everyone who saw it right back to Alien.

With a cast of strong performers, led by Oscar laureate Ben Kingsley and including U.K. character star Alfred Molina and highly effective heavy Michael Madsen, you'd expect some spark but this is a good example of how passable writing cannot fill gaps in chemistry. Kingsley cannot work out what accent he's going for and frequently sounds unintentionally mechanical which rubs his quality emoting the wrong way. Madsen and Marg Helgenburger form a couple of circumstance who, though credible on paper, act like they really are just doing it for the money. Molina does some day saving, along with Forest Whittaker who lets us believe in his new agey empath claptrap through an effortless sincerity. Henstridge turns up trumps as a genuinely otherworldly creature. When the effects go to work on her, the coldness inherent to her Sil intensifies. That's not faint praise; she's actually pretty good.

All that said, this movie will entertain you from the word go and keep you watching to the credits effortlessly. Why? Because once you realise that it's Sil's movie and the Keystone Boffins don't need too muchof your attention, you'll be fine with what you move with. It's also a good showcase of the state of physical effects which, in this margin between their near perfection and the onset of CGI, render the predatory alien believable. Even in the mating scenes where the film might have gone for team-human body horror, we want the Earthling marks to shut up and lie down for the seeding. Species enjoys a strange glory for this, the first creature horror of its greater era, to steal the support from the good guys and make its audiences want the baddie to triumph over all the population of the Earth, one DNA sequence at a time.

This doesn't make Species a bad film or even a bad alien horror movie, just an unusual one that only looks bad if you treat it as a normal one. If you do let the good guy gang through with too much credit. you'll be missing out on the fun of the story. The sadder side of this is that it was not intended. The decade that was thrilling people at the cinema to an ever sleazier parade of serial killer filler, was also rendering sci-fi and horror into high sheen, over-designed bland plates. There are always exceptions but Species was not one of them, however much fun it is. It was a symptom of the fallacy of the suits throwing more and more money at genre, assuming that that would lead to a golden age of cinema commerce. It would take micro productions like Primer and The Blair Witch Project to burst that bubble (re-inflated by the Waniverse a decade on but not permanently). In the meantime we got Species, too late to make a difference and too lunkheaded to make a mark. Still, it is a ton of fun.

Viewing notes: I watched Species on STAN through a subscription. It's also rentable through a number of outlets but is long out of print on physical media in Australia.