Monster Movie Monday: Species (1995)
Review Overview
Featured creature
8Natasha Henstridge
8Thrills and kills
8Matthew Turner | On 26, Jun 2023
Director: Roger Donaldson
Cast: Natasha Henstridge, Ben Kingsley, Michael Madsen, Marg Helgenberger, Alfred Molina, Forest Whitaker
Certificate: 18
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Mixing titilation and creepy monster effects, this unashamedly trashy and highly entertaining sci-fi thriller was a big box office hit on its original release in 1995, ultimately spawning a total of three sequels. Directed by Roger Donaldson, the original film holds up surprisingly well, thanks to a strong sense of pace, some impressively gloopy special effects work and a genre-savvy script that gets the tone exactly right.
The film begins at a government laboratory, where scientist Xavier Fitch (Ben Kingsley) has created an extraterrestrial-human hybrid, code-named Sil (Michelle Williams), after receiving instructions via messages from outer space. When Sil escapes, Fitch assembles a team that includes scientists (Alfred Molina and Marg Helgenberger), an empath (Forest Whitaker) and a mercenary (Michael Madsen) to track her down and kill her.
Though she resembles a human girl when she escapes, Sil undergoes a cocooning process and rapidly matures into a young woman (Natasha Henstridge), albeit one who occasionally sprouts killer tentacles and appendages. Thereafter, she pursues her driving biological imperative: to procreate with a human male and perpetuate her species as quickly as possible.
Some genius on the production team for Species had the inspired idea of hiring HR Giger – the designer of the alien in Alien – to create the creature design for Sil. Accordingly, there’s a degree of similarity between Sil and Giger’s more famous creation, but that arguably works in the film’s favour, while the effects work has endured thanks to a combination of practical effects and state-of-the-art (for 1995) VFX. In addition, Giger was clearly given full reign and the final creature is surprisingly, even terrifyingly, sexual in nature.
On a similar note, Donaldson pays close attention to one of the key rules of the monster movie genre, which is that you never reveal the full creature early on. To that end, there’s a strong sense of escalation, with Sil revealing different aspects of her true form at various points – sprouting tentacles and so on – until a full-on monster-heavy climax that delivers a couple of great surprises on top of the expected final battle.
Donaldson’s genre-savvy direction is assured throughout, maintaining a compelling sense of pace – heightened by having Sil and the main characters constantly on the move – and orchestrating some genuinely thrilling set-pieces, notably a cleverly positioned sequence in a lab, which allows for some exciting tentacle-based action well before the main event. Donaldson also proves a master when it comes to deploying a good jump scare – in addition to a good fake-out moment with a couple of vagrants, he also pulls off perhaps the finest squirrel-based jump scare ever committed to celluloid.
Primarily, however, Species works as well as it does because Donaldson gets the tone exactly right, playing everything straight, despite its inherent ridiculousness, while achieving the perfect marriage between gleefully trashy exploitation sequences and creepy-slash-scary monster moments. At one point, this is pretty much encapsulated in a single image, as alien tentacles begin growing out of Sil’s back while she’s having sex with one of her victims.
Henstridge, a former model, makes a terrific feature debut as Sil, investing her with a wide-eyed innocence and curiosity that means the audience is pretty much on her side while she’s in her human form, especially when she gorily despatches a would-be rapist with an alien tongue through the head – one of the film’s best moments. Similarly, her frequent nude scenes (there are at least seven) undoubtedly contributed to the film’s success, perhaps tapping into Hollywood’s penchant for an erotic thriller at the time, in the wake of Basic Instinct.
The supporting performances are equally good, particularly a post-Reservoir Dogs Michael Madsen, who sparks strong chemistry with Marg Helgenberger – their playful sex scene (with Sil listening outside their hotel room) is another of the film’s highlights. The film also deserves points for not being afraid to kill off key cast members, another monster movie trope that Donaldson whole-heartedly embraces.
The film isn’t entirely without problems. For one thing, the script contains the occasional howler – such as Whitaker’s empath intoning “something bad happened here” on encountering a twisted corpse, or the guy who decides to go and answer his ringing phone mid-pool-sex scene – and it’s never entirely clear whether or not they’re intentional. There are a handful of lost opportunities, both in terms of broader sci-fi ideas – a throwaway line suggests “we’re the disease and she’s the cure”, but that’s about it – and Sil’s character development, most notably in a sequence where she kidnaps a young woman (Marliese Schneider).
Those minor issues aside, this is a thoroughly entertaining sci-fi thriller of a kind that they really don’t make anymore, serving up thrills of all different kinds. Indeed, you may well find yourself empathising with Molina’s Stephen, who remarks at a key moment, “I enjoyed that immensely.”