Species: Hungry Freaks, Daddy

Species is one of the trashier SF movie franchises out there, at least in terms of its image. You only need to look at the posters for the movies as the franchised progressed, beginning with a comparatively interesting Gigeresque design with hints of titillation and devolving fairly rapidly into a formula of “stick an attractive woman on the cover, show few if any details of what is actually going to happen in the movie”.

Nonetheless, 88 Films are the sort of boutique physical media company who aren’t afraid to take a punt putting out blu-rays of this sort of material, and they’ve recently put out a four-disc set of the entire series. Let’s take a dive and see how much I can take, shall we?

Species

It’s the mid-1990s and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence has hit paydirt: a signal from an alien culture, apparently intended for us, sent in response to signals we sent out in 1974. The first message from 10 light years away provided an astonishing new industrial catalyst, so the aliens are assumed to be friendly; the next message contains some exciting genetic code and a note along the lines of “lol mash this up with your own DNA, it’ll be funny”. The end product of doing so is Sil – a child who grows rapidly, reaching an apparent age of 12 (at which point she is played by Michelle Williams) in well under a year.

Sil is clearly no ordinary child, however – she’s prone to abrupt, violent outbursts when she sleeps, and Xavier Fitch (Ben Kingsley), who’s the sort of lead science/admin/conspiracy co-ordinator for the government project that spawns her, decides that it’s not worth the risk that she might do something regrettable. Naturally, when a child is not growing up how you want, the patriotic, all-American thing to do is to crush them – the whole “pray away the gay” industry is based on that principle, after all – so Fitch arranges to flood the chamber Sil has lived in her entire life with cyanide gas.

Naturally, Sil decides she has had enough of this shit and busts out of the containment chamber like it was made of cardboard and escapes. Sil is incredibly fast and strong, and smart as anything, absorbing knowledge rapidly; soon she’s on a train to LA, and after snacking on a large amount of biomass she pupates and emerges with the appearance of a fully-grown adult (Natasha Henstridge). Driven by alien instincts she does not understand, she uses her abilities to try and seek out a suitable mate that fits her requirements so she can reproduce; she might be better off looking in less vanilla nightclubs than those she frequents, since her ideal partner would probably need to be OK with her real form, played by Dana Hee under a lot of costume and makeup. (It would be wrong to call her true form “Gigeresque”, but only because it’s not an imitation – it’s an authentic Giger design made for this movie by the man himself.)

Obviously, Fitch has some tidying up to do, otherwise the Cigarette Smoking Man will never let him live it down at the next Conspiracy meeting. He calls in an elite team of experts to help him spearhead the hunt for Sil: black ops bounty hunter/hitman Preston Lennox (Michael Madsen), anthropologist Dr. Stephen Arden (Alfred Molina), telepath Dan Smithson (Forest Whitaker), and molecular biologist Dr. Laura Baker (Marg Helgenberger). But will they catch up with Sil in time – and will they be able to resist her aura of alien horniness when they do?