So, this week in the Deep Hurting Project, Species: The Awakening. I have never watched the original series, but, fortunately, I have TVTropes to fill in the gaps of my knowledge, and this entry isn't so much of a sequel as a stand-alone film in the series. And I know little about the series, besides Natasha Henstridge's tits (which won't make an appearance in the movie, due to Henstridge not even appearing in the movie) and the fact that some woman in Puerto Rico watched the original movie and decided it was actually happening, and that's how the Chupacabra became a thing.
- Side note: the Subspecies series also has a fourth film subtitled The Awakening, and I found this out because I accidentally clicked on it before I figured out that it wasn't the movie I was looking for after about a minute of production values even lower than this.
- Worth noting: the hero, played by Ben Cross, is called "Tom Hollander." The fact that he has the exact same name as a British actor who's already appeared in several award-winning film doesn't seem to have occurred to the makers. Also, he's frequently called Uncle Tom, and it's bizarrely awkward, even if he's just a white dude, and, due to my actually reading Uncle Tom's Cabin, I know that most of the baggage that's come with the phrase doesn't actually have anything to do with the original.
- So, getting roofied triggers the girl's alien powers now?
- And, as far as I can see, the signs of her power seem to be limited to her killer tongue, reading a bizarrely thin volume of the Complete Works of Shakespeare just by touching the cover, and some auto mechanic savant skills.
- The CGI is honestly what I expect from a 2007 Syfy original film.
- Bizarrely, much of the film involves one of the creators of the alien girl trying to find the other creator in Mexico. This takes about a third of the movie, and once we find him, we find out he's dumb enough to use the alien DNA cloning tech to bring back people from the dead. This include a random nun who we see killing a dude that I initially thought was her.
- So, from what I understand of the original movie, the bulk of the movie involved the alien girl trying to mate with some guys, and killing them in the process. As I write this, the only sexual things are the scene where the cocreator is found fucking some random girl, and a scene where Ben Cross picks up a girl in a bar (so she can give her an alien transplant), and she robs him. It reads like this is a kid who hadn't yet become consciously attracted to girls wrote a fanfic and the Syfy network decided "fuck it, let's make it the treatment for the fourth movie."
- Is this weird Spinal Tap-looking pod in the previous three films?
- Huh. I blatantly underestimated the amount of titty there'd be in this SyFy original movie from 2007. Maybe the fact that I can remember a few years prior, when Janet Jackson had her career decimated after she had her right tit exposed on National TV, and assumed that this would be a sign that we don't get to see the girl's tits. Well, that and her killings in this movie up until the last quarter of runtime don't have any sort of the sexuality one would expect from a movie whose original entry had a score cue called "Milky Way Breasts." And even then, it's just her walking up to some guy topless and then using her killer tongue on his eye.
- So, as a sign of the alien transfusion, she's bi now? And into sex with a man who acted as her father all her life?
- Alien-poodle hybrids? You know, the sad thing is, that would probably make a better Syfy original movie than this.
- And we finally get the sort of sexy killing I'd expect from the franchise given its reputation about 80 minutes into this 97-minute and 56-second film. And between the shitty lighting and the fact that her alien form looks like the Green Goblin, it just doesn't work.
Comparing the Universal Oneness of All Life to Yo Mama since 2010.
I was born with the gift of laughter and a sense the world is mad.
I was born with the gift of laughter and a sense the world is mad.