“Don’t go. Please! I want a baby.”
SPECIES is one of these movies of the ’90s that isn’t very good but that represents a weird enough collision of influences to be interesting. It’s a studio genre movie so it has an all-star cast. Ben Kingsley (PRINCE OF PERSIA, BLOODRAYNE) leads the government monster hunt, and his team of specialists is Forest Whitaker (BLOODSPORT), Michael Madsen (BLOODRAYNE), Alfred Molina (PRINCE OF PERSIA) and Marg Helgenberger (FIRE DOWN BELOW).
Behind the scenes they got a couple of legit horror technicians in the mix: composer Christopher Young, whose eerie score is very similar to what he did for HELLRAISER, and monster designer H.R. Giger does his biomechanical thing like in ALIEN, but this time with bonus eyes and boobs. This was the first time his creatures got the computer animation treatment, an exciting development in those days. It was only two years after JURASSIC PARK and just doing everything digitally was still in the future, they had to put in some effort to do it so it was usually a big deal. The digital parts look almost charmingly crude now, but luckily they got puppets and costumes in there too, like you did back then. (read the rest of this shit…)
This director Jonathan Glazer, I can’t really put my finger on him. 
Hey, I’ve admitted it before. I’m a Modern Man, I can dig on the cartoons sometimes. But I don’t always gotta go public about it. For example I didn’t need it on record that I thought FROZEN continued the evolution of the Disney Princess formula in smart, pro-girl ways. The rest of the world took care of that, I didn’t need to say anything. Stoicism. But I just saw THE BOXTROLLS which was amazing and I don’t trust the rest of the world to make a big deal about this one, so here I am.
At one point there were rumors that Seagal was going to co-star with Lundgren. Instead we ended up with the more acrobatic all-star team-up of Dolph and Tony Jaa (in his first English role). As you can see, Michael Jai White is also there in a supporting role, along with Peter Weller and Ron Perlman as the skin trader. According to IMDb we should also look out for Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa and Conan Stevens. The second unit director/action and stunt choreographer is Dian Hristov was Dolph’s stunt double in THE EXPENDABLES 3 and ONE IN THE CHAMBER. He’s also been Seagal’s double through most of the DTV era.
“Shouldn’t you be bouncing a ball somewhere?”
Before I officially kick off Slasher Search 2014 I thought there should be an official spot for the annual Recommending of the Horror Movies. As always I already have a bunch of things picked out to watch this month, but will be open to fitting in some suggestions, and I’m sure other people here will be looking for ideas too.
GONE GIRL is the new David Fincher popular fiction adaptation, another murder mystery but this time I guess you could say with a lighter touch than SEVEN, 
In NASHVILLE, Robert Altman used the city to represent America in some way. In MYSTERY TRAIN Jim Jarmusch kinda does the same thing with Memphis, but the joke is that it’s three stories about Memphis through the eyes of foreigners. For all they know the whole country hangs Elvis portraits in their hotel rooms.
I don’t know what I expected Robert Altman’s NASHVILLE was, but not this. It’s about 2 1/2 hours, and it’s about Nashville, and it’s about America, and I don’t know what it’s about. It might be stretching it to describe it as having a plot. It’s a huge cast, too many characters for me to keep good track of, and it purposely doesn’t bother with explaining who they are. But I rarely felt lost or bored.
