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Species II
Humanity has finally set foot on Mars. But we weren't the first...
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Species II
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Rated R
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Starring Michael Madsen, Marg Helgenberger, Natasha Henstridge
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Directed by Peter Medak
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MGM
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95 minutes
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Review by Tamara Hladik
 select NASA team of three has gone to Mars for the first time--and come back heroes. Chief among these equals is Patrick Ross (Madsen), the son of a prominent senator and a champion for the new millennium. But, underneath waves of applause and adulation, Patrick is buffeted by violent currents.
Before Mars, Patrick had been like any Adonis--clean-cut, adored, a pretty girlfriend on his arm and lots of women on the side. Before Mars, Patrick had possessed the Midas touch. Now, he has the kiss of death. Sex with this demi-god instantly impregnates his partners with a rapid-growth organism that bursts through the womb, killing the host. After discovering the taint of alien DNA in Patrick's victims, the government deduces that Patrick picked up more from Mars than just core samples.
The Feds turn to Dr. Laura Baker (Helgenberger), who is studying an oddity of her own--a half-human, half-alien woman named Eve (Henstridge) who is actually the clone of an earlier experiment gone awry. Previously, extraterrestrial DNA had been sent to Earth by beings unknown, with instructions on how to combine it with human genetic material. The result was Sil, who, like Patrick, had a violent, ruthless urge to mate. And, like Patrick, Sil's alien half overran the vestiges of her human conscience.
But Eve, Sil's clone, is more human than her predecessor--Dr. Baker has suppressed Eve's mating drive and tutored her in human emotions. With Eve, Baker works to discover a weakness in the near-indestructible hybrid before Patrick's transmogrifying offspring overwhelm the planet.
Nearsighted production, myopic direction
Clearly, with this second installment, producer Frank Mancuso Jr. has hopes for a Species franchise, and he is probably going to get one. The splicing of the hybrid DNA concept with Nordic knockout Natasha Henstridge is as near-unassailable as the monsters themselves. The half-human, half-bestial characters are representative of a classic archetype (Jekyll and Hyde, The Werewolf, The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Fly). This archetype has been consistently well used to illustrate the wary detente between competing, seemingly inimical drives within every human's psyche.
However, Species' greatest lure is its greatest yawn, for Mancuso's vision is shortsighted and director Peter Medak's is even more myopic. In Species II, gross nudity is substituted for plot advancement, partial nudity is proffered as character development, and gratuitous nudity is assumed to be dramatic tension. With an underlying premise that practically delivers potential metaphors, ironies and paradoxes fully-formed, this team can barely pull off the minimal daring of Henstridge's symbolically-named "Eve."
If the movie's entire, natively rich concept is wasted, how can viewers mourn for a single actor? Yet, mourning there must be, for the waste of the overly-competent Helgenberger, James Cromwell (Senator Ross) and Mykelti Williamson (astronaut Dennis Gamble). Henstridge, too, demands mourning, for, although not yet on the level of her more experienced peers, she is indeed the understated linchpin of the sequel (and of the original). Henstridge's possibilities are as securely imprisoned in director Medak's lazy, confused, inconsistent yarn-spinning as Eve is in Dr. Baker's lab. Despite being practically ignored by Medak, Henstridge--whether Eve or Sil--manages to bring a necessary, resonant humanity to her alien role.
The movie does have queerly interesting moments--like Richard Belzer as the President and Peter Boyle as a Cassandra-cum-scientist. It was almost as if this movie were channeling some other film.
-- Tamara
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Legion
Alien meets The Dirty Dozen in this Sci-Fi Channel original
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Legion
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Starring Parker Stevenson, Terry Farrell, Corey Feldman, Rick Springfield
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Directed by Jon Hess
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The Sci-Fi Channel
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Saturday, April 25, 3 p.m. ET
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Review by Jeff Berkwits
 t's 2036, and the Allied army is fighting an apocalyptic war that has recently spread beyond the Earth's surface to the Industrial Space Colonies. After six years of ferocious battle, the opposing forces have reached a bloody stalemate, leading the Joint Forces Council to decide that a new, unorthodox method of combat is needed to win the conflict.
To that end, Colonel Flemming (Troy Donahue) heads an innovative project to recruit a ragtag band of military prisoners and turn them into an elite demolition team. This questionable bunch includes a hacker, a nymphomaniac, a renegade doctor, a rapist, and assorted deserters, thieves and thugs. Under the leadership of Major Agatha Doyle (Farrell), a disgraced officer who inadvertently caused the deaths of an entire squad, the 10 members of the group venture out on a suicide mission to destroy an enemy fuel processing plant located on a desolate, windswept world.
The unit expects to meet fierce resistance, but upon landing discovers that the building is deserted. As the soldiers fan out to complete their mission, one by one they are mysteriously murdered. With hours to go before a rescue team arrives, the steadily dwindling crew races to discover whether they've got a killer in their midst or if they are being stalked by some unknown creature.
A ragtag band of fugitive actors
While there's almost no character or scene that is genuinely original in this flick, watching so many familiar faces shamelessly emote is surprisingly enjoyable. Doyle's ever-present scowl is unintentionally hilarious, and observing the sweat-drenched, spectacled visage of Private Siegal (Feldman) as he simultaneously struggles to descramble a coded message and control his fear is similarly amusing.
Captain Aldrich (Stevenson), a decorated war hero imprisoned for desertion, is the ostensible star of this production, serving as both the group's voice of reason and as counterpoint to Doyle's no-nonsense leadership style. This assignment has saved him from certain execution, and his haggard appearance is moderately convincing and believable, belying a strong mind that slowly but surely determines what is actually occurring on the mission.
The team itself is a standard-issue military crew--an accomplished pilot, a special forces operative, a demolition expert, etc.--and although each (with the exception of Doyle) is known only by his or her last name, they all manage to elicit appropriate levels of sympathy or, as necessary, revulsion, from the audience. The derivative adventure essentially mixes the scenario of Alien with the setup of The Dirty Dozen. Legion never comes close to approaching the excellence or excitement of either motion picture, but it does serve as reasonably effective escapist entertainment.
This is one of those so-bad-its-good films that doesn't quite keep you on the edge of your seat but still manages to hold your attention. Corey Feldman fans should definitely tune in, if only to catch a brief but droll reference to his famous role as Edgar Frog in The Lost Boys.
-- Jeff
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