Species 2 (1998)

SPECIES 2

WRITER: Chris Brancato

DIRECTOR: Peter Medak

STARRING: Michael Madsen as Preston Lennox
   Natasha Henstridge as Eve
   Marg Helgenberger as Laura Baker
   Mykelti Williamson as Gamble
   George Dzundza as Colonel Burgess
   James Cromwell as Senator Ross
   Myriam Cyr as Anne Sampras
   Sarah Wynter as Melissa
   Baxter Harris as Dr. Orinsky
   Justin Lazard as Patrick Ross

QUICK CUT: Sil's back, but this time she's Eve.  But not evil.  She's on our side, and fighting to stop a new strain of her alien parental DNA strand when it's brought back to Earth during our first manned mission to Mars.  Even though that's not how we got the strand in the first place.  More sex, violence, and plot holes in the Species tradition ensues.

THE MORGUE:
   Patrick Ross - Our reluctant villain.  Reluctant in the sense that he's little more than a vessel for the alien goo to spread its seed and procreate.  Ross himself is a bit of a cipher.  He's an astronaut and stuck in a bad situation.  He feels grief over what his actions cause, but gets dragged around unwillingly, much like the viewers.
   Eve - Not quite Sil, but not too far off.  Not as naive, and the only thing stopping her from screwing the human race out of existence is a glass box and a lack of men.
   Preston Lennox - The returning hero.  He's retired from whatever wetworks job he was doing in the first movie, and now is working security.  Pres gets dragged back into things when the alien fuckbunnies return.  Still a badass.
   Laura Baker - Pres's flame from the first movie, and the head of the EVE project, trying to prepare America for any future invasions.  Yeah, how's that working for ya, doc?
   Gamble - Patrick's fellow astronaut, and mysteriously unaffected by the alien goo.  He joins up with the old guard to stop his friend when he goes off the rails.  A good man, a good astronaut, and good with the ladies.  Shame the aliens couldn't turn him.
   Colonel Burgess - Laura's boss, and the hard-nosed military lead of the EVE project.  Typical military, typical roadblock.
   Senator Ross - Patrick's father, and generally only concerned with his son's political career.

Taking a number two.

THE GUTS: Here we go again.  Another dump of Feces from the franchise.  The double dip starts off with a long, slow shot passing by a space shuttle towing a lot of equipment.  I'm not even sure what I'm seeing or how this works.  They couldn't have launched it like that, surely.  So they built the space trailer up there, hooked up the shuttle, and it has sufficient thrust to haul it and the cargo?  Colour me dubious.

ANYways, the shuttle Excursion is on its way to Mars as part of our first manned mission.  And ok, so there's rockets on the space trailer.  What's the point of the shuttle then?  A landing module?  That's a bit overkill.  Something in this mashup just is not adding up.  It's a handful of ok ideas in and of themselves, but as a whole it doesn't work.  Typical engineering nightmare.

All that aside, the model is actually really nice, and finely detailed.  I love a good miniature, and this is not bad at all.  I miss seeing them, and too often there's a reliance on CG...oh geeze, there's spnosorships on the side of the rockets.  Who the hell is gonna see Pepsi and Sprint ads plastered on the sides of this vessel in space?  And if they see it, what will the aliens think?  We're just asking to be invaded now.

So much for packing light.

Once they're safely in orbit, a hatch opens in the top of the vessel and launches a lander module out of it, which goes up, then rockets back down to the planet, past the Excrement.  Now, I'm no space engineer, but wouldn't it have been more feasible to just open the floor somehow, and launch it downwards?  Rather than have it go up, manuever out of the way of the ship, then back down?

Yes, I know I am nitpicking the hell out of the first four minutes.  The wonky science makes my head hurt.

And so the expedition begins and astronaut Patrick Ross sends out his rovers and plants a flag.  The US flag, while saying this is being done not for one nation, but for all nations, on camera.  That message might be more poignant if you weren't doing it with the single greatest symbol of America in your hands.

With the photo op out of the way, Patrick sets out to start digging holes into the Martian soil.  While he's doing that, a guy in a mental institution is watching the report and lamenting that he told them not to go.  He must have tried to stop the movie from being made.  My hero.

Do not leave us. Robots have feelings too!

I don't want to keep harping on the Excursion, but the lander comes back up, and enters through the floor!  Why not go out that way?  Surely they must have been able to make that work.  And man, it is one tight fit.  Talk about threading a needle.

While the crew of the Excursion talk to President Richard Belzer, the plot slowly creeps along as we get to see one of the core samples starting to fiz and warm up.  Oh thank gods, something happening.

It finally blows its lid and a green sludge that looks like something from my Evil Horde Slime Pit oozes out, proving once and for all that Mars is made of snot.

The slime mold of doom slowly creeps along the shuttle's floor, clearly disobeying the laws of gravity, or lack thereof.  It also apparently possesses the ability to understand English, and has a sense of dramatic timing, since it waits until the mission countdown from NASA reaches zero before attacking the astronauts.

Who needs 3D when Species 2 will throw up on its audience just fine?

Whatever happened throws the shuttle out of communication for several minutes, which makes Crazypants McGee destroy the tv in his ward, and NASA get all panicky.  Inside the Excursion, the crew wakes up from their nap and resumes their trip home.  See, when even the astronauts are being put to sleep by space missions, something is wrong.

They seem ok, and don't seem to be aware of what happened to them, and explain it away as just a quick systems check, despite all of them clearly being asleep or unconscious beforehand.  They blacked out for seven minutes, and brush it off like nothing.  And oh god, we're going for an extreme closeup of Patrick's eye!  And I mean extreme.  I can count pores.  I can count lines in the iris.  Oh holy crap, the Earth is inside his brain!!

And hey, we're back to characters we know!  Hi, Sil!

Oh wait, now she's Eve.  Or E.V.E, which stands for Extraterrestrial Vulnerability Experiment.  This is a second hybrid, raised from one of the leftover embryos mentioned in the first film.  She's been raised as an experiment to find ways to combat the Species should it ever return.  And yes, I totally heard it capitalised like that when they said it.

At least they were smart enough to not have her come in contact with any males.  And hey, she's being watched over by Dr. Baker!  Yay more familiar faces.

Ladies and gentlemen, the stars...er, star of our movie.

They start to gas her as part of the experiments, and isn't this what started all the problems the first time?  I know sequels are supposed to take what works, but that's ridiculous.  She even calls out for help.  I know they should keep their emotional distance, but damn, to just stand there and watch.

The gas causes Eve to grow welts on her skin, showing they've created some form of biological weapon against the Species strain.  I love the colonel telling them to check out the welts, and the security footage zooms right into Henstridge's breasts.  Yes, check out her...welts.

Unfortunately, the welts heal up before their eyes, and we learn that a biological agent only works once.  Great, Eve's a space cockroach.

Hottest lab ever.

Laura explains to Eve why they torture her frequently, which is more for our benefit, since she knows this already.  They try to make us sympathise with her, with some overwrought stuff about how she'll never see all the wonderful places, and is part human.  Somehow, the first movie made me sympathise with her a lot more than this movie, because she played a naive, innocent, child.  She's very knowledgable and mature here, and it just comes off as whining.

Meanwhile, the USS Stock Footage lands and the astronauts are given clean bills of health, but they're going to be kept under quarantine.  Which is the first smart thing this franchise has done.

Oh no, wait.  I take that back.  By quarantine, the movie actually means 'go out amongst the public, and make sure to attend a giant party.  Just don't have sex."  So much for intelligence.  That is not a quarantine!  I love that the one thing that they are to refrain from, the one thing that is being quarantined, is the exact thing this movie needs to move forward.

While the astronauts attend their celebration, Patrick has gone awol from the group, saying he doesn't feel very well, and the other two say much the same thing.  If only there had been some sort of protocol that would have kept them away from the populace just in case they had some sort of space sickness!

Of course, Patrick isn't feeling so bad that he can't be making out with someone.  Someone that's not his fiance.  So much for doctor's orders.  What could possibly go wrong with ordering three national heroes to not have sex after being cooped up in a tin can for 300 days?

And after the ceremony, he's with her and a friend.

So while they're taking turns with the nation's pride, tentacles start bursting forth from Patrick, and we've once again stumbled into hentai.  I hope they're not nipple tentacles.  I'm still recovering from the first go around.

The first girl becomes instantly pregnant, and the second one is understandably freaking out when she finds slimy new handles on her astroboy.  And then the pregnant woman has her kid burst out of her stomach like it was an egg from a much better alien movie.

Enough to put you off childbirt.

After Eve freaks out because she can apparently sense these events, we see Patrick leading two very much grown children dressed in potato sacks or giant shirts and escorting them to a farmhouse.  I get the accelerated growth thing, and it's handy to skip all that time raising them, but wow.  And where'd he get the clothes?

The next day, Patrick tries to tell his father that something is wrong, but he just brushes it aside saying the drinks at the party are awfully strong.  Patrick is aware enough to know that something is more wrong than just his drinking problem, and it probably happened on the shuttle.  Maybe he should tell other people, that might oh, try a quarantine?  A proper one even?

Meanwhile, the NASA doctor is trying to get ahold of Nutty McGee, and has discovered something strange with Patrick's blood.  When he drops the jar, and it is one big mother of a flask filled with Patrick's blood, the blood starts to wander around the lab of its own accord.

The blood pools up at the wall, where the doctor foolishly touches it, but that doesn't have time to kill him.  Because an alien something punches through the wall and rips out some vital organs.  With the doctor dead, the blood then slides up the wall and into the gaping hole, and we see a Sil-like creature insid the walls.

Inside.  The walls.

I got nothin' folks.  Apparently the blood seeped through a crack at the base of the floor, coalesced into a Giger nightmare, and punched through a wall and a scientist.  Why did it go behind the wall?  Why didn't it just spontaneously burst into form from the jar?  Or bubble up from the floor?  Or anything besides somehow passing through walls?  I could pick these 30 seconds of film apart for days.

Worst of all, this is never touched upon again.  The commentary reveals that it is actually supposed to be the one and only Patrick, but that just makes my head hurt more.  Did he lay in wait in a janitors closet, hoping his blood would come home, and a scientist would walk over to the wall?  Sigh.

Dr. Lauren concludes from DNA samples in the doctor's wounds that he was killed by an alien human hybrid.  Because there's apparently only two species in the entire universe.  They speak like there's only the two, at least.  And what are the odds of a second alien of the same type being found on Mars in the one random place we drill?  The wrongness is piling up.

The solution to this is to call in Pres Lennox.  Aww yeah.  Lennox takes some coaxing to the tune of a million dollars, and he ends up at the E.V.E. facility, where he and the colonel walk right into the room where Eve is being held.  How quickly they toss aside that whole keeping her away from men.  If that's their idea of security, I'm surprised it lasted this long.

Laura at least throws the appropriate fit when Lennox activates the slow motion effect in the lab, as Eve sees him.  If she hadn't, it would be increasingly stupid.

So Lennox and Baker are teamed back up, on the shaky ground that they killed one before, they'll do it again.  Do they really need these specific people to point and shoot a flamethrower?  Most any monkey can pull that one off, right?

They track the doctor's phone records to the nuthatch and meet Cromwell, who infodumps on them about the original Mars meteorite that brought the alien DNA to Earth.  There's only one problem.  A METEORITE DIDN'T DO THAT.  We got the DNA sequence in a signal received by our SETI dishes.

Cromwell knows the DNA he found wasn't native to Mars, since it could only come from the Magellanic Cloud.  I have no idea how he could know that.  Did Sil have a "Made in the Magellanic Cloud" stamp on its ass?

More bad science abounds as they tell us that thawing DNA will come back to life.  Because we've perfected cryogenics, apparently.

Lauren says they need to test the blood of the astronauts, and says they need to do so before the sexual quarantine ends.  Yes, because sexual urges are so easy to keep in check, and they're so certain no astronaut would go boinking people.  This is why a quarantine isn't defined as letting people wander free.

They decide to test Patrick first, which is probably good for the blonde he's with...hey wait, what did he do with the bodies of the other girls?  They get briefly mentioned later on, but that's about it.  Anyways, unfortunately Patrick isn't at home, so his sexual encounter goes uninterupted, and Lennox and friends search for the others.

Which raises the question, why just go test one of them?  What if you don't find him, like in this situation?  Why not send multiple teams to grab and test everyone, at the same time?  If time is of the essence, get to it!

Possibly the most fucked up thing ever seen on this site.

The following scene is...almost indescribable.  As they rush to find Anne, she's wasted no time boinking her husband, and her stomach has wasted no time bursting forth...something.  But not a baby, for some reason.  Instead, a tentacle pops out, then other smaller tendrils, and then one more gigantic one grabs her husband by the face and, well, check out that image.

If this is similar to Sil's DNA, why didn't she do that in the first movie?  I get their being differences between male and females, but what the hell is that?  What is going on?  I'm scared to find out!

Pres and Lauren show up just after the nick of time, with Pres somehow shooting the tentacle in half, and Lauren blasts the belly with some gas.  One of these events apparently kills the astronaut, and her husband looks pretty dead too.  Good job!

With two down, it's time to find the third astronaut, and yes, he's making a play with his girl as well.  At least him they get to in time, although he doesn't look too pleased to be coitus interupted.

Whatchoo talkin' 'bout, Lennox?

They take Gamble back to the lab to test his blood, discuss Anne's death, and the blackout aboard the shuttle.  His blood sample comes back normal, so they determine he's not the thing that killed the doctor.  So, if he's so normal, why did he turn up normal before?  Was it because they didn't know what to look for?  Ok, fair enough.  But why did he black out?  And if he's normal, why is he normal?  Are these answered?  NO!  Well, mostly no.

We jump to Anne's autopsy, where they're cutting off the top of her head, and not moving hair out of the way, which won't work for the way they're cutting, but at this point, I am long beyond trying for accuracy.

It's a moot point anyways, when they're about to peel her face off and a giant tentacle bursts out of her mouth.  The doctor is quick with the saw and slices it up, at least.  Makes for good splatter.

Check please!

Meanwhile, back at Camp Patrick, his girlfriend died off screen, and there's a ten year old newborn waiting for its grey shirt.  Instead, Patrick loads up the shotgun as Gamble pulls up.

At the site of his dead girlfriend, and another mouth to feed, Patrick decides he would rather eat the shotgun than take care of another kid.  Gamble shows up just in time to watch his friend and commander blow off his own head, in one of my favourite head explosions since Scanners.

That's just awesome.

As if that wasn't enough awesome for you, we get to see the head GROWING BACK.  Oh yeah, you heard me.  The CGI is pretty bad, but back in 1998?  I remember when I saw this for the first time, I was on the edge of my seat.  It really grabbed my attention.  It still looked fake back then, but you just did not see that every day!

I love that the newly regrown parts of the head are spotless, and everything from the old head remain drenched in blood.  That's just a chilling visual, and the way the actor changes once Patrick is dead and the alien takes over...pretty gruesome stuff.  Although it's unclear just how Patrick he is now.

Gamble runs back to Biohazard 4 while his former friend looks for love in all the right places, and gets a hooker.  Patrick drives through a small villiage, or a campground maybe, with a hooker on every porch.  Seriously, it's like an all you can eat buffet of girls.  He'll have no trouble producing offspring.  But it's still weird though.  At least they work from home?

Lauren starts to notice Eve's erratic fits time with Patrick banging some girl, as Pres finds the dead hooker.  I'm surprised Patrick only took one.  He had his pick.  I guess he's smart enough to stay ahead, but I'm surprised none the less.

Oh, and there's a hilarious bit of cruelty to the handicapped as Pres shoves the wheelchair bound owner and pimp of the hooker hotel towards a car.  Classy!

Patrick then finds an exotic dancer, and it jumps right from him paying her, to burying her body, and taking the newborn adolescent to the barn again.  I get not wanting to repeat themselves, but they had such promise, until they started skipping the kills.  Sigh.

One of us! One of us!

The colonel wants to use Eve to find Patrick, somehow, but they can't take her out for fear of her getting lose, and maybe even mating with Patrick.  There's more bullshit science about using a cyclotron to wake up her alien DNA and telepathic abilities, and it is at this point I just through my hands up.  They're stringing words together with no rhyme or reason.  I give up.

Baker tells them the dangers of making her more alien, but the arguments fall on deaf ears, and they determine it to be worth the risk.  Random aside, the colonel and friends exit through large doors that make some very loud noises.  Loud noises we've not heard until this point, even with people going in and out repeatedly.

So they pop Eve into the cyclotron, which is nothing like any cyclotron I have ever seen.  She's strapped to a large table, and a trio of lasers pinpoint her forehead.  And...this will wake up DNA how?  Sigh again.

Most accurate cereal title ever.

The guys show up thanks to Sil's tips, a little bit late again, and are just behind Patrick as he grabs a fangirl and drags her off into a basement.  Are we gonna find more secret underground tunnels, again?

In all honesty, I'm surprised Eve didn't lie, for some reason.  Although she has the lamest line ever, "He wants to mate with her!"  Yes yes, we know.  We've watched the past hour of movie.

You would think someone dragging a struggling hostage wouldn't be outrunning two trained soldiers, but Patrick manages it pretty well.  Never at any time does it feel like Lennox and Gamble are closing the gap on their prey.

They come across a van that's rocking back and forth, and they actually watch it for a good 20 seconds, after they finally notice it, before finally deciding to take a peak.  It's the wrong van, but they didn't know that.  He could've had alien spawn grown to 15 years old in the time it took them to do shit.

Patrick starts tapping into Eve's thoughts, and having found better prey, lets the girl go.  Gamble and Lennox miss this completely, even though they're only a few feet away.  They completely miss the crying, yelping girl running away with torn clothes, and panicking.  Not until Patrick himself comes out do they do anything.

Proving once and for all he's a badass; the sideways gun hold.

The commander tries to deny it, and the guys actually listen to his denials, rather than just drag him in.  A crying near-rape victim just ran by you!  What more proof do you need?  "Oh, that's just coincidence, he's probably just here by chance.  There must be some other astronaut we forgot about that's doing this."  NO!

Of course, Patrick is more than willing to be brought in, since that will bring him straight to Eve, and a pure alien strain from their mating.

Eve senses her mate nearby, and begins to go into heat, demanding to be let out of her plastic room with the erector set door locks.  At the same time, Patrick escapes his captors with ease, even tossing around Lennox.

Baker calls a lockdown of the lab, and Patrick tries to convince her to open Eve's room.  She refuses, and he's about to shove an alien tongue down her throat (To...convince her?  I got nothin'.) but Lennox shows up with the freezy gas and makes him run away.

The colonel is all set to take the commander down, but his father isn't about to let that happen, thinking only of his son's future run for president, and demands they leave him alone.  Do you think he'll still get the alien overlord breeder vote?

Gamble and Eve share a moment through her plastic bubble, and she backs away from him.  They determine he must have some genetic defect, thus has no interest in him, just like in the first film.  Well, at least they try to explain why he's not infected, but it doesn't really make much sense for him to have still been blacked out, and everything else.

Sickle cell anemia, the best defense against an alien shag monster.

Meanwhile, the senator finds his son at the old ranch, knowing he'd come there, and tries to talk him down.  You know, wanting to stop his son from fucking the human race away.

The senator won't let his son be killed, and decides the best course of action is...to take Patrick to the hospital, and give him the best of care.  Oh, there's so much wrong with this idea.  First off, it means going public with the potential of alien DNA infections.  Second, there's no way the government would just let the threat sit in a hospital room.  Third, the best care is with the people that have actual experience with the hybrids.  Fourth, what does he think a doctor is going to do??  Perscribe penicillin??

Patrick realises this is a dumb-ass plan and says no, but still wants help.  Before the touching father and son bonding can go much further though, the alien inside shoves into the senator and crawls out his neck.

Ouch, he failed the reverse blowjob.

The scene pans back, and we see Patrick's kids standing and watching.  I don't know if it was intentional, but the blank look on Patrick's face totally reads to me as, "Oh shit, I just showed every fruit of my loins how to commit patricide."

Lauren tries to convince Eve to help them track down Patrick again, but she refuses.  No reason given, just that she won't do it.  This seems fine by Lauren though, since she leaves.

Not like they couldn't tie her down.  But I guess if she doesn't want to speak, that would be a problem.

Well, there's yer problem. You got aliens.

Back at the ranch, Patrick is helping his eldest children grab onto the ceiling and become grownups.  This is done by tendrils shooting out of every orifice, and glomping onto the cellar roof, dragging the kid up and enveloping them.  And when I say EVERY, I mean it.  We see them out of their nose, and ears, and from where it looks like they came from, they must have shot out the kids' asses too.  Puberty is still a bitch in the Species-verse.

Lennox and Gamble play with guns as they arm themselves, and Gamble eventually settles on a machete.  Lauren brings them a serum concocted from Gamble's blood, and gives it to Lennox and his tranq gun.  They wonder if this doesn't work, what next?  Lennox says they're fucked, but I seem to remember two of the three people in the room were in the first movie, and instrumental in ending the threat.  They've said the creature evolves past biological threats, but I bet the fucker ain't fireproof.

On top of that, there's no reason why Patrick would have Sil's immunities from the first movie.

Finally, Eve gets to do something, and reuses her lookalike's trick from the first film, smashing through the glass.  Does no one remember anything from the original?

A soldier rushes to a button to do something, but is stopped by a baseball of Eve's, thrown at the soldier's head.  Even though it hits her in the helmet.  Weak stoppage of a soldier, movie.

The trio of heroes are randomly locked in the cage full of guns, and can't get out.  Oh, if only they had some sort of small projectile weapons that could pass through the large, gaping holes in a chain link fence.  Oh wait.

Soldiers come crawling out of the woodwork and take down Eve with a hail of bullets as she busts through some arguably steel doors.  How she just pushes them aside with her forearms doesn't make any sense, even with super strength, but whatever.

Did...did she land in a Christ pose?

They stare at her bleeding body, and watch as the blood that poured out gets sucked back in, and she jumps up and runs off.  At least they try to shoot her some more.  Instead of just standing there as she sprints across the straight, half mile long road.

As an aside, it always bugged me when people regenerate in media, and the blood gets sucked back in.  I can buy a cut healing, that happens every day, this is just faster.  But I don't suck back in any nearby blood at the same time.

Eve steals a hummer and our heroes give pursuit, waiting for their chance to nail her before she nails someone else.  She heads straight to the farm, with the military right on their heels.  I get the impression this was almost an actual backup plan.

Our heroes discover the hatchery, while Patrick and Eve discover each other again.  They waste no time stripping down and getting to business, with flashes of full body aliens boinking.  I suspect it may be reused footage from #1.

Lennox goes alien hunting, while Lauren and Gamble spray down the pods with sickle cell anemia in gas form.  Um, what?  I just...  Every time I think they've thrown enough bad science at me, it finds more and more to throw, somehow.  But just internally, if the gas guns are spraying anemia (That just hurts to type) then what were they spraying before to kill or hurt the creatures?

Also, shouldn't they be careful of where they're wantonly spraying genetic disorders?  Or wear protection?

If the chitonous exopod is rockin', don't come a-knockin'!

Lennox finds our lovethings doing the nasty inside a giant coccoon, and tries to get Eve out of the way.  Before he can shoot Patrick, he bursts out of the pod and chases after him.  And somehow looks nothing like he did two seconds ago.  And for a creature already changed far from baseline human, that's saying something.

Lauren begs Eve for help, and now that she's done the deed and gotten what she wanted, she complies and shoots her backspikes out and through Patrick's thorax.  Because they could do that, you see.

Like any failed relationship, he smacks the woman around a bit and...holy fuck, why did his head just split in two?!  GAH!

Two heads are better than one.

As if this is not a fucked up enough visual, there's an alien penis being shoved into Eve's red alien lips.  Yes, she apparently has liptstick on her exoskeleton.  And that's NOT the strangest thing in these frames.

With Eve dead, Patrick pulls his space cock out of her, mashes his two heads back together, because there was a point to them splitting in the first place, and gets shot at by Lennox for a bit.

Lauren sprays the thing good, but suddenly the anemia gas does nothing.  So Gamble tells them to use his blood (They are!) and Lennox jabs his leg with a pitchfork, hurling it spear style into the creature.  The movie can't even stay consistent for 10 seconds.  Anemia isn't working!  Quick, use anemia!

The little sprinkles of blood on the pitchfork do more good than anything else they've thrown at the thing, and it falls to the floor, sizzling away.

I can't even be bothered to point out how little any of this makes sense.

Mind if I just lie down here for a bit?

They cart off Eve's dead body, now reverted back to human, and pack Gamble off into a helicopter to get medical attention for his leg wound.  There's an odd triumphant sense to this, as he's flying off all happy with a cute nurse, and getting waves and smiles from his teammates.  Something about it just feels really wrong, possibly the body count ending in smiles makes me ill at ease.

Or maybe it's because the movie ends with a cat in the ambulance (WTF) jumping on top of Eve, and one of Patrick's kids sitting in the corner of the ambulance (Double WTF), like no one would have noticed.  And he just sits there and watches as Eve's belly expands into the credits.

Yeah, that would be why.

AUTOPSY REPORT

Video: Since this is a big budget movie from 1998, the video quality is pretty solid.  A nice transfer, good quality, and everything is easy to see.  It is a professional production, after all.

Audio: Same with the audio.  Hollywood movie with the budget behind it, making for a good looking and good sounding movie.  At least something is good.

Special Features: A nicely informative commentary, and pretty honest about the quality and sort of movie this is.  Not entirely appologetic about it, but they know what they were doing.  Also some deleted scenes that are mostly just added gore and boobs.

Best Line: "This isn't the X-Files, goddamnit!"  This isn't even the X-Files final season.

First Kill: 23 minutes in, we get death by childbirth.  Ahh, the circle of life.

Best Kill: That would be the tag team of Anne and her boyfriend.  He dies by a facegrabbing tentacle from her alien-infested girlfriend's belly slamming him against the ceiling, and she gets gassed shortly after.  How do you top that?  Ever?

Blood Type - A: Not quite as bloody to me as the first movie.  That said, there is blood.  Hooboy is there ever.  And if that's not enough, there is even more disturbing Giger imagery.  And space cocks to rival the nipple tentacles from #1.

Sex Appeal: Well, this is a Species film, so here there be boobs.  And plenty of them.  Lots of naked women being sexed up, then killed.  The movie gets both done at once.

Movie Rating: This is at least a slick, big budget, good looking movie.  The acting isn't half bad.  Michael Madsen is again pretty awesome.  The action is decently mindless.  But the plot has holes large enough to fly the Excursion through.  The story is just a mess, and while it might be brainlessly enjoyable, once you give it any thought at all, it crashes and burns like a house of cards.  This gets a two out of five instagrow kids, to match the parent film's.

Entertainment Rating: Oh, but man is this movie entertaining.  Keep your brain shut off, ignore the plot, and this movie is FUN.  I like this one way more than the original, if for no other reason than there is no Dan the Obvious Psychic.  When I first saw it, I thought it was genuinely good!  Now though, I see it for what it is, and I shudder.  But it is wicked fun, very entertaining, and has some great deaths, and is just a blast to watch.  Four out of five anemia darts.

And remember this movie's moral, Keep your dick in your pants.