Even though I’d be willing to bet serious money that Peter Medak’s impressively dodgy Species II was a concerted attempted by the director to actually exterminate the franchise for good, it seems that the famously horny sci-fi franchise had the survival skills of the alien DNA that spawned the astro-menaces of the first two movies. That’s right, just like the sparcely clothed antagonist of these flicks (Sil or Eve, take your pick), the extraterrestrial threat of the Species films evolved itself in order to ensure its terrible survival in the form of reducing itself to television movie size and as a result, we got Species III – a film that struggles to fit in all the girls and gore of the previous movies with a greatly reduced budget.
It’s actually something of a B-movie franchise rite of passage as a dying franchise desperately staves off its inevitable extinction by resorting to more desperate measure to exist and taking the TV movie/direct to DVD route is the most prudent – but can the tits ‘n tentacles franchise handle its biggest devolution yet?
In the aftermath of Species II, after the most expensive actors have long vacates the scene, we discover that Eve’s ravaged and ventilated body wasn’t quite dead as her corpse is carted off to undoubtedly be disected. However, one of the people in the truck is ambitious scientist Dr. Bruce Abbot who has different and rather worrying scientific plans for the body, but his plans take a weird turn when one of the half-breed children spawned by the mutated Patrick show up and finishes of the already mortally wounded Eve, but not before she quickly gives birth to a baby that Abbot makes off with into the night.
Abbot names the baby Sara and decides to raise her slash study her while simultaneously holding down his job at aggressively teaching biochemistry at a university, but matters start to get pretty complicated when Sara goes through that accelerated growth shit that turns her pre-teen self to legal age the time it takes to have a quick nap inside a ghastly, human-sized cocoon. However, if Sara has grown to adulthood, then logic dictates that so has any surviving half-breeds too and soon Abbot is visited by the grown child who killed Eve back in the ambulance. However, he ain’t looking so hot as his human half isn’t helping his alien bits to resist all the germs and crap that fly around our atmosphere and before his starts leaking mucus and tendrils out of his dying body, he makes a chilling claim. The surviving half-breeds need Sara if they’re going to see their icky lineage to carry on and their attempts to get her will grow ever more violent and yet all Abbot seems to be concerned about is harvesting Sara’s eggs for his own experiments. Can his reluctant assistant, Dean, manage to help Sara fight her potentially disasterous biological urges and fend off any half alien suitors at the same time – especially when she frequently insists on disrobing at the drop of a hat?
To say that Species III lets the franchise down is something of a nonsensical statement because, if we’re really being honest, the sex & slime franchise hadn’t really done much to endear themselves to begin with. Yes, Roger Donaldson’s first movie had that late 90s charm behind it, but bungled it’s basic premise by going for the lowest common denominator. On the other hand, Species II may have been an inadvertent laugh riot due to Peter Medak not giving a single, solitary shit, but you could never in a month of Sundays call the film objectively “good”. And yet, despite all those flaws, at least both movies had a relentless pace and delivered low-rent thrills with a big-ass budget. Species III isn’t even afforded that little luxury and instead takes it’s Frankenstein heavy plot and grinds away at it for nearly two hours – which by low budget, Z-grade sequel terms is a least thirty minutes too long.
Gone are government mercs speeding around in black vans, tons of goopy special effects and Oscar winning actors spew biological scientist-speak in order to make any of this shit sound halfway feasible and in return we get… well, something that attempts to be vaguely thoughtful but ultimately ends up being more structurally sloppy than the wet patch on the mattress after alien coitus. However, I do have to give credit where it’s due I can’t help but give points to a underfunded sequel that overworks to actually deal with any dangling plot threads left over from the previous movies. Characters from the first film are name dropped and the script actually has a whack at tidying up the fact that the alien Patrick from the previous film had a bunch of mutant kids from numerous, exploded baby mamas from Species II. It doesn’t actually make the film any better, but I appreciate the fact that they tried, however, there is something genuinely amusing and a little depressing for the fact that they actually brought Natasha Henstridge back to play a dead body with around two minutes of screen time.
What’s even odder is that with its plot of an arrogant scientist desperately trying to play God while not giving a shit about the consequences enlisting a gifted college student to help him in his gooey, basement lab, you soon realise that Species III has the nerve to try and rip off Re-Animator without anyone noticing. Don’t believe me? Then why is Robert Knepper’s character named Bruce Abbot after an actor who appears in the 1985 classic?
Anyway, the other plus point is that the threequel still tries it’s best to stick in cool moments of sporadic body horror and while it’s a bit more rubbery than previous films, it’s still nice that they included the odd stomach busting with tendrils, the occasional skull pierced by tentacle and someone peeking through a hole in someone’s head to break up the monotony. However, for the most of its runtime, Species III is just content to plod its way to its rather Terminator-like finale at its own speed and make more half-assed metaphors about upbringing, human nature and being ruled by your more bestial side. The problem is, none of it lands and while Henstridge was at least able to provoke sympathy for her man eating space seductress, the best Sunny Mabrey’s Sara can do is glare menacingly and take her top off. If you’re supposed to be on the fence about whether she can be trusted, the film refuses to try and rustle up any tension about it whatsoever and soon you find that you care less than Knepper’s impressively slapdash scientist. In fact, I’d go as far to say the movie itself has no clue about Sara’s loyalties, which is pretty damn strange when you figure that it’s actually the main storyline of the plot.
A bland, slow and lackluster entry in a franchise that’s always prioritised forward motion (usually in the hips), Species III may have loftier ideals that its more crazed predecessors by trying to go full Mary Shelly, but the fact that the plot involves long periods of waiting around that’s occasionally broken up by the promise of boobs or a random burst of gore means that it’s more incompatible than one of those deteriorating half-breeds. Sex sells, apparently – but not in this case.
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