“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…)
Well, POLTERGEIST was a movie that people loved, so the best thing to do is to get the surviving cast members back together four years later (the actress who played the older daughter had been murdered), but not Spielberg or Hooper. The director this time is credited as Brian Gibson (WHAT’S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT) but I bet Tobe Hooper secretly was uncredited director to make up for not getting full control last time. You can’t disprove it so go ahead and add it into wikipedia if you want.
