Ten Days of Terror!: Species

Film: Species
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

There are a number of drums that I will regularly beat as a part of this website. One of them is the fact that so many science fiction and horror movies make science the bad guy. Scientists, people who are routinely ultra-cautious and rarely even make pronouncements of truth are regularly portrayed in sci-fi films (and by that I’m referring to the lower end of the kiddie pool) as reckless and willing to put the fate of the world at risk for a little bit of knowledge. Experiments are routinely conducted in unsafe places, with incomplete or lax protocols and no oversight. Of course, without that, there wouldn’t be a movie—we have to have someone be the bad guy, and if you want giant mutated alien critters running amok, science is pretty convenient. Enter Species, the nudity-filled template for movies like Splice.

We begin with what looks to be a young girl (Michelle Williams!) being exterminated in a state-of-the-art (circa 1995) lab. Ah, but the girl escapes, and the poison that was used in an attempt to kill her instead kills everyone around her but somehow not her. Off she goes, and she soon adapts as well as she can to life outside of her lab facility. She also is growing very fast—soon enough on an Amtrak train, she cocoons, eats a conductor (whose clothes magically fit the new Natasha Henstridge) version of the creature, and away she goes. It’s soon obvious that whatever this creature is, she’s horny and looking to procreate.

Help! Help! I'm Being Repressed!

Film: Sleeping Dogs
Format: DVD from NetFlix on rockin’ flatscreen.

Sometimes I wonder what goes on in people’s heads. With a world of wonderful, meaningful, influential films to choose from the Listmakers opted to give us Sleeping Dogs. Why the hell would they put this film on The List? Where’s the importance of this film? Is it the fact that it was made in New Zealand? Or that it starred a very young Sam Neill? Or that it is yet another example of someone being hassled by the Man? Seriously, I’m coming with nothing here.

Sleeping Dogs makes a huge logical jump pretty close to the start. What we are given is that due to oil embargos and a series of political and social problems, New Zealand is standing on the brink of revolution and civil war. We’re given a further leap in that we are told to believe that the government of New Zealand reacts to this by adopting a collection of fascist policies and martial law and turning the country into a police state. Yeah.