Alien Species? More like Alien Feces! So clever...
/Twenty years ago, we were given a great blockbuster alien invasion movie: Independence Day. While there is lots of talk about the needless sequel, nobody seems to be talking about the other alien invasion movie from 1996: Alien Species.
Set in the distant future of 1999 (three whole years beyond when this film was made), aliens visit our planet and immediately set to work on their master plan:
- abduct a cow and some people
- destroy a few vehicles at random
- ?????
- profit
Fortunately (?) for us, an astronomer, his granddaughter and acolytes combined with some deputies and their prisoners are here to help. After their truck gets upended by a (drunk?) alien pilot, the group takes shelter in a cave (like you do), only to find (uh oh!) the aliens have set up shop in there for, well, it isn't clear. I assumed some kind of alien pottery seminar, though I didn't see a wheel. Perhaps it is an Earthist assumption that a wheel would be involved, so increased cultural exchange between our races is clearly needed. Anyway, the cave is used by our heroes to run back and forth through the same ten or so feet, while the aliens lay waste to a city somewhere.
What's important is that we later learn that being abducted by the aliens means going to the cave to be covered in spiderwebs and/or enclosed in some kind of cocoon. Hatching from the cocoon makes you a zombie, a curious story element that goes nowhere. The humans fail miserably at everything, but they do destroy one ship, which sends the aliens packing. World saved!
This movie is full of ACTING, as shown to us by people who have probably heard of acting, but only over the radio or something. It's filmed almost entirely at night with insufficient lighting to make out a lot of what's going on. I'm filing that second point as an accomplishment, and I think the movie would have been better if it were even darker.
That's more like it!