Monday, Jul. 17, 1995
FUGITIVE ALIEN IN L.A.
By RICHARD CORLISS
AT FLORIDA'S WALT DISNEY WORLD, the hot new "ride" is George Lucas' Alien Encounter. In this fond tribute to William Castle, sleaze showman extraordinaire of 13 Ghosts and The Tingler, visitors enter a circular room, are strapped into seats and see a huge hideous monster writhing in a plastic tube. Then the alien escapes--and the lights go out. Heavy footsteps approach, and your seat gets a violent rattle. You feel the creature's breath and reptilian tongue on the back of your neck. An icky liquid drenches you; is it someone's exploding guts or your own fear-sweat? The experience is divinely cheesy: 3-D radio, aiming only to scare you nuts. And it works; the crowd happily screams along.
Until every mall theater seat can be juiced and goosed like the ones in Alien Encounter, movie directors will have to rely on mere sight and sound for their scare effects, and moviegoers will have to make do with spook shows like Species. Films, of course, can still do a thing or two that haunted houses can't: develop elaborate story lines, depict complex emotions, lift the audience by means other than hydraulics. Species, written by Dennis Feldman, does some of that, at least in its first hour. This sci-fi horror opus also has the summer's sexiest High Concept: Alien meets The Fugitive. The escaped monster is on the prowl for a mate in Los Angeles--and she's babe-a-licious!
The creature, hatched in the test-tube mating of an alien intelligence and a human ovum, is called Sil. As embodied by model Natasha Henstridge, Sil has a voluptuously thin form and a face--severe and curiously bland--that never reveals its secrets. That's perfect for Species, since the audience's sympathies are meant to shift uneasily between the determination of a crack search team to keep the creature from reproducing and the desire of Sil to increase and multiply, engulf and devour. So Sil goes cruising L.A. bars. A gorgeous blond who just wants sex shouldn't have trouble getting a date. But Sil is picky: no junkies, no diabetics. And no survivors. Her embrace is crushing; her French kiss is to die from.
For a while, director Roger Donaldson (No Way Out) keeps it all working smartly, like a serrated knife on the viewer's nerves. And the creature creators, H.R. Giger and Richard Edlund, make Sil in her alien mode look variously like evil pudding and a spiny octopus. The monster isn't the problem here; it's the humans, Sil's pursuers, who make Species turn specious. One of them (Forest Whitaker) is an "empath" who can intuit everything about Sil--her moods, motives and fears--everything except that she's standing right behind him. Alfred Molina, playing an expert in cross cultures (and Sil, when riled, is one very cross culture), doesn't get at all suspicious when a beautiful woman looking exactly like Sil shows up in his hotel bedroom and insists on having sex. Even Hugh Grant might decline that proposition.
Well, if smart people didn't do stupid things, there wouldn't be horror movies. And for those who indulge its inanities, this 2-D alien encounter has some final surprises, including its own baby boom. Watch out, folks. Sil has a baby. Boom!