In this one, a super-strong, super-hot, super-horny alien sex monster named Sil is terrorising Los Angeles with her awesome boobs and overwhelming desire to get knocked up. Turns out she was created in a laboratory by fusing human and alien DNA (will movie scientists never learn?) and now her creators want her dead, so Ghandi assembles a crack team of dumbasses (Mr Blonde, Ghost Dog, Doctor Octopus, her off CSI) to stumble around as though they couldn’t find their own asses if their buttocks had been removed and stapled to each hand.
Along the way, Natasha Henstridge flashes her baps many, many times, which never gets boring.
Species and Anaconda share a few similarities. The first entries in both series are solid examples of mainstream schlock, and both started out with decent budgets and recognisable casts before descending into made-for-TV hell. That last part is an assumption 
since I’ve yet to see Species 3 and 4, but after the second half of the Anaconda series I’m not expecting much from anything premiered on the Sci-Fi channel. They also both have terrible CGI (although the creature design for this one, by H.R. Giger, is actually pretty good).
Two things make Species a worthwhile watch for fans of trashy nonsense. Okay, maybe I should say three.
The first is the character Dan Smithson, played by Forest Whitaker, whose every utterance is laugh-out-loud hilarious. Smithson is an ‘empath’, which is a fancy way of saying he can sense other people’s feelings. What makes him so endlessly funny is that this ability revolves entirely around stating the blindingly obvious at every opportunity. For example, when Smithson walks into a train compartment and sees a dead body on the floor, his magical superpower allows him to make this insightful and no doubt very helpful observation: “Something bad happened here.” Nice work, brainbox.
You may be interested to know I have this same ability. In fact, I’m getting an empathic reading from you lot right now. I’m sensing… that you like films… and reading stuff on the internets.
Was I close? Pretty impressive, right?
The other two enjoyable aspects of Species – and I apologise for going a little juvenile here – arrive courtesy of Natasha Henstridge. She really does have very beautiful boobs, and she’s not even a little bit shy about whipping them out whenever the ‘story’ demands it. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – films like this don’t necessarily
have to show boobs to be entertaining, but it’s always appreciated when they do. Think of it as one of life’s enjoyable little bonuses, like finding a fiver in a coat you haven’t worn in a while.
To be fair to Henstridge, she’s not a completely terrible actress. Species doesn’t require her to do much more than wander about looking like a Scandinavian teenager’s wet dream, and to her credit she does that very, very well.
In the early stages of Species, it seemed like maybe the film had been written by someone who’d taken a few introductory psychology courses (Sil escapes on a long, hard train and the first place she visits to act on her uncontrollable urge for sexy fun is a club called Id) and I was looking forward to spotting more references throughout the film (like in Anaconda 2); but there were only those two I mentioned, which was disappointing. I guess they figured once they had an actress old enough to go topless (Sil is played by a young Michelle Williams for the first twenty minutes or so) there was no need for that kind of thing anymore because they could show boobs now. Who cares about smutty imagery and Freudian references when you’ve got boobs?
Species is not a great film. It’s possibly not even a good film. But it’s an entertaining film, and that’s what I care about more than anything else. Director Roger Donaldson does a solid job with a schlocky, silly premise; and the film’s attempt to blend two of the exploitation genre’s greatest mainstays – aliens and sex – successfully results in some enjoyably brainless nonsense. With boobs.
Taking its top off for entirely legitimate reasons tomorrow: Species II.
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