Alien 2: On Earth (1980) – Review

When you craft a film as memorable as Ridley Scott’s Alien, it’s a given that others will attempt to ride on your biomechanical coat tails despite having less than a third of talent and a fraction of the resources. However, that didn’t stop the likes of such diverse, low budget opportunists such as Roger Corman or Bruno Mattei pulling every cheap trick in the book to try and capitalize on the success of the 1979 sci-fi/horror classic.
However, in this VHS wasteland of copycats, rip-offs and also-rans, surely 1980’s Alien 2: On Earth is the most shamelessly brazen simply for the weapons grade audacity it has for flat out naming itself as Alien’s successor simply because the trademark for “Alien” was registered. While the film is also referred to as Alien Terror in some territories, the fact remains that this amusingly poor cash grab technically managed to beat James Cameron to the punch by a good six years… Man, movie making is weird sometimes.

While the world anxiously awaits the return of a group of astronauts who have bravely headed out on a mission to deepest, darkest depths of grainy stock footage, Thelma, a psychic spelunker and her Bee Gees looking husband join their friends to continue exploring a vast cave system they’ve recently discovered. Before descending into the dark drippy depths, one of their number discovers a funky blue rock and takes it with them, but this proves to be something of an exceptionally bad idea seeing as we later see the ramifications when something hatches out of a similar looking stone and proceeds to eat the face off a little girl.
While all this probably has to do with all that grainy astronaut footage we saw earlier that we learn has resulted in their retrieved space capsule being emptier than the movie’s reserves of artistic integrity, our group of cave diving does continue, blissfully unaware of the highly confusing events going on on the surface. However, they get a sizable hint when their rock hatches and causes Thelma’s ill-defined psychic powers to go into overdrive when one of their number is stricken by a mysterious coma that comes part and parcel with having a blobby, alien organism take up rent-free residence in your skull.
Of course, it soon hatches out through the eye socket (because 80s Italian horror filmmakers really seemed to hate eyeballs for some reason) and grows into a shapeless mass that hunts the rest of the cavers down one at a time in order to give them suitably mushy deaths. As the survivors try get back to the surface while avoiding having their heads chewed loose or their faces removed, they soon discover that whatever is lurking in this cave with them may well have already started the world’s most oddly neat attempt at global domination.

Like a lot of these instances of spaghetti splatter, any hope of movie making basics such as coherent plotting, visual panache and competent acting are jettisoned out the nearest airlock the second the film starts, but even the most forgiving fan of this kind of delirious eurotrash has to shake their head in bewilderment that a self-imposed heir to a future-set space movie stubbonly insists to place their film on earth in the present day. However, while some if the more smug among you may point out that the Alien Vs. Predator movies did the exact same thing, my response is simply “yeah, but they were shit too”.
Of course, this obviously isn’t a sequel in any way shape or form and the fact that Alien 2 ever thought it could palm itself off as such must have been a foolproof idiot test back in 1980, but while the movie is slow, sluggish, stupid and any other negative adjective that begins with “S” that you can think of, there’s still that innate, goofy and perverse watchability factor that come with movies this inept.
There’s the standard stuff of course. Heavy handed dubbing reduces the performances to that of a ninth grade school play and some severe pacing issues inflicts around 30 to fifty minutes of boredom upon us as we watch our group of cave divers chill out at a bar, engage in awkward television interview or go bowling before we even get the slightest sniff if a cave. It also doesn’t help that they do all this with the combined charisma of a battalion of crash test dummies and the second the jump suits and helmets go on, they all prove to be pretty much as indistinguishable as if they were all wearing welders helmets.

But even when the alien – and I use that term loosely as it looks like it’s been created entirely out of left over mince – shows up, Alien 2 still stubbonly refuses to shift out of second gear. The film’s approximation of the iconic chestburster scene begins with an agonisingly slow pan that lasts for around a good fifteen seconds that literally focuses on nothing (seriously – it takes at least nine seconds to work out what the fuck you’re looking at) and when the creature really gets going, its chief form of attack seems to be smearing fake blood over peoples faces with its spleen-like protuberences.
There’s some highlights here and there. The faceless little girl is as unpredictable as it is silly and the moment where an actor who looks suspiciously like Jeremy Allen White from The Bear dangles upside down while a worm like creature gnaws his head completely loose is good for a laugh.
But then, laughs (primarily unintentional ones) are what Alien 2: On Earth is best at as each confounding directorial decision proves to be just as ridiculous as the last. James Cameron set the climax of his official sequel in the hanger of a spaceship, Ippolito holds his in the bowls of a bowling alley. Ridley Scott filmed his creature in such a way to obscure the Xenomorph and get maximum mileage out of H.R. Giger’s ludicrously iconic design. Conversely Alien 2 doesn’t seem to have bothered to design their creature at all and their attempts to hide it means that those POV shots that are framed by a pulsating, alien maw looks more like the camera is unfortunately peeking through the undulating sphincter of a twitching butthole. Even the random addition of the lead actress being psychic is hilariously flubbed, especially as her talents are so fucking lame, she doesn’t predict an attack on her friend until approximately two seconds before it happens – thanks Thelma, you’re a great help.

But then what else should we expect from a film that insists that the surface world is now suddenly deserted even though there are plainly cars pulling off from a set of lights at the bottom left of the screen? Most Italian genre filmmakers of that era were like creative hyenas, preying on the carrion of original ideas in order to make the quickest of bucks.
However, while Alien 2: On Earth features less scares than an episode of Paw Patrol, it no doubt caused some copyright related nightmares down at 20th Century Fox’s legal department.

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