MUTANT SPECIES
I'm not as drunk as I wish I was

  With a title like this, you just know it's straight to video.  Although who would have guessed that Bats would get a big-screen release?

Mutant Species opens with a crew of soldiers boarding a plane, in a scene which looks and sounds an awful lot like the dropship scene in Aliens.  (with "war movie" music playing to make things seem more exciting than they really are)  Then they play loud, "classic" rock (Grand Funk) from the on-board ghetto blaster, bringing Predator to mind (and I hadn't yet seen the climax which featured the ol' "Come on!  Walk right into my booby trap!  What are you waiting for?  Come on!").  Then somebody hollers "Time to kick ass and chew bubblegum!  Anybody got any bubblegum?"  This is about where I flung myself from the balcony.  Since it was only a five- or six-foot drop, I just got cold and went back inside.

They're dropped in "hostile territory" where their orders are "to shoot to kill", and they have "no clearance" ion this place which looks suspiciously like rural Georgia (no, not the former Soviet Georgia).  Well, no wonder - it IS rural Georgia.  They find a crashed American satellite, in which they find a top-secret-classified cylinder-thing which makes their leader (Leo Rossi) start itching.  After one admittedly surprising scene, the rest you can figure out. It's about at this point where they all wish that they brought along a little more equipment than their guns and light camo suits.

Yes, what we're ultimately given is another appearance from The Perfect Killing Machine, which is assembled from the nastiest parts of the nastiest animals...yup, seen that before too.  The movie holds off letting us see this monster, but for a good look you can just look on the back of the box, where indeed this is one cheesy, fake-looking monster (yes, that is a man with a puppy dog's head).

The score by no fewer than three people is just...there's too much of it, especially the "Kill me, kill me!" scene where they basically note-for-note "Bishop's Countdown" from Aliens (repeated again with the climactic countdown to a big explosion). (other points in the movie just as blatantly rip off other moments from the score for that film)  Top-billed Denise Crosby (who's terrible as a forest-dwelling hick hermit chick) doesn't even show up til an hour in.  The characters are somehow even stupider than you'd expect ? one of them, when he pauses to inject a one-liner into his encounter with the creature ("Have you looked in a fucking mirror lately?"), has his gun promptly swatted out of his hand when he could have just shut up and shot it.

Liked the tag line, though (How does it feel to be next?).  And Powers Boothe has some fun as the guy who created this whole mess (the PKM, not the movie).

Directed (and co-written) by David A. Prior, who is like the AIP house director.  You know, the guys who gave us Future Force, and the "sampler" retrospective That's Action.  Hoo boy, that one was like a crap concentrate.  So bad, it could only be hosted by Robert Culp.

But this is Mutant Species.  And that's an entirely different matter.  Except for the fact that it also sucks; the suck is the same.

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