The alien, named Sil, is a quick learner. She checks into a motel, asks the clerk, “Where can I find a man?” and picks up the first of her victims in a bar. As the search team follows her trail, the empathist picks up signals that she rejected one guy because he did not have, perhaps, the right genes. Boy, didn’t he. What happens to him shouldn’t happen to a bug on a windshield. And then the other guy meets her standards, and soon there is the prospect of lots of little Sils.
The movie ends with a chase through a sewer system, and into an underground oil lake. There are lots of flames and struggles and lots and lots of scenes where the creature jumps out from behind things. And of course there are the usual false alarms, in which you think it’s the creature, but whew, it’s only a bat/cat/rat. Eventually it develops a tongue like a frog, and can flick it out several yards to capture its enemies.
There is one line in the screenplay that suggests an interesting direction the movie could have taken. Sil, half alien, half human, is driven by instinct, not intelligence, and doesn’t know why she acts the way she does. She says, “Who am I? What am I?” But the movie never tells her. I can imagine a film in which a creature like Sil struggles with her dual nature, and tries to find self-knowledge. Like Frankenstein’s monster, she would be an object of pity. But that would be way too subtle for Species, which just adds a slick front end to the basic horror vocabulary of things jumping out from behind stuff.
Speed Zone
(Directed by Jim Drake; starring Peter Boyle, Donna Dixon; 1989)
Read my lips.
Cars are not funny. Speeding cars are not funny. It is not funny when a car spins around and speeds in the other direction. It is not funny when a car flies through the air. It is not funny when a truck crashes into a car. It is not funny when cops chase speeding cars. It is not funny when cars crash through roadblocks.
None of those things are funny.
They have never been funny.
People are not amused by them. No, not even the people unlucky or unwise enough to have paid money to see a movie like Speed Trap—or a movie like Cannonball Run, of which Speed Trap is a pathetic clone. Audiences sit in dead silence.
Hollywood does not seem to understand this basic principle, which is why so many movies have featured chases, crashes, and flying automobiles in recent years. Occasionally a chase will indeed be exciting—when it has something to do with the plot, as in The French Connection or To Live and Die in L.A. But when a movie is all chases and crashes, then the intelligent viewer will realize that what he is seeing is a big payday for a lot of stunt drivers, and he will lose interest.
Nonstop chase-and-crash comedies have provided some of the worst movies of recent years (both Cannonball Run movies, the Smokey sequels, etc.), but even in that dismal company Speed Zone sets some kind of record. This is a movie that lasts ninety-five minutes and contains one (1) laugh. To save you the admission price, here is the joke:
Dickie Smothers: “We’ve got to go to the Dulles airport.”
Tommy Smothers: “What are we going to Fresno for?”
Dickie: “What makes you think we’re going to Fresno?”
Tommy: “Well, you said the dullest airport, didn’t you?”
None of the other jokes in Speed Zone measure up to that standard. The movie is still another waste of John Candy, who makes a movie like Planes, Trains and Automobiles that showcases his genuine talent, and then waltzes into a cynical, no-brainer ripoff like this with nothing more on his mind, apparently, than the rent check.
The movie features countless other celebrities in bit roles, but none of them make as lasting an impression as the Michelin trademark, which is displayed throughout the film in a blatant example of product promotion. Will Michelin sell more tires this way? I wonder. Would you trust your life to tires made by anyone who thought association with this film would improve their product’s image?
Spice World
(Directed by Bob Spiers; starring The Spice Girls; 1998)
The Spice Girls are easier to tell apart than the Mutant Ninja Turtles, but that is small consolation: What can you say about five women whose principal distinguishing characteristic is that they have different names?
They occupy Spice World as if they were watching it: They’re so detached they can’t even successfully lip-synch their own songs. During a rehearsal scene, their director tells them, with such truth that we may be hearing a secret message from the screenwriter, “That was absolutely perfect—without being actually any good.”
Spice World is obviously intended as a rip-off of A Hard Day’s Night (1964), which gave the Beatles to the movies. They should have ripped off more—everything they could get their hands on. The movie is a day in the life of a musical group that has become an overnight success, and we see them rehearse, perform, hang out together, and deal with such desperately contrived supporting characters as a trash newspaper editor, a paparazzo, and a manipulative manager.
All of these elements are inspired in one way or another by A Hard Day’s Night. The huge difference, of course, is that the Beatles were talented—while, let’s face it, the Spice Girls could be duplicated by any five women under the age of thirty standing in line at Dunkin’ Donuts.
The Beatles film played off the personalities of the Beatles. The Spice Girls have no personalities; their bodies are carriers for inane chatter. The Beatles film had such great music that every song in it is beloved all over the world. The Spice Girls music is so bad that even Spice World avoids using any more of it than absolutely necessary.
The film’s linking device is a big double-decker bus, painted like a Union Jack, which ferries the Girls past London landmarks (so many landmarks I suspect the filmmakers were desperately trying to stretch the running time). This bus is of ordinary size on the outside but three times too wide on the inside; it is fitted with all the conveniences of Spice Girlhood, except, apparently, toilet facilities, leading to the unusual sight of the Girls jumping off for a quick pee in the woods. (They do everything together.)
So lacking in human characteristics are the Girls that when the screenplay falls back on the last resort of the bankrupt filmmaking imagination—a childbirth scene—they have to import one of their friends to have the baby. She at least had the wit to get pregnant, something beyond the Girls since it would involve a relationship, and thus an attention span. Words fail me as I try to describe my thoughts at the prospect of the five Spice Girls bedside at a childbirth, shouting “push!”
Stanley
(Directed by William Grefe; starring Chris Robinson; 1972)
The old man climbed out of his seat in the sixth row and went shuffling up the aisle, asking people what time it was. “Do you have the time?” he kept asking. “The time? What time is it?”
A woman sitting across the aisle advised him to shut up and get lost. “I paid my money and I want to see the movie,” she said. She gobbled her buttered popcorn and stared at the screen, where a stripper was biting off a snake’s head.
“Ooo-eee,” somebody said in the darkness.