Entry 96: Alien 2: On Earth (1980)

Alien 2: On Earth (1980)

Dir: Ciro Ippolito

"...You may be next!"

 

If you liked Alien, but felt it spent too much time on stunning visuals, a genuinely unnerving creature and creating an air of dread, and too little time on interminable scenes of garage doors opening, cars stuck in traffic, bowling, outrageous 70s fashions and bad folk rock, have I fucking got a movie for you!  Join me in the Basement of Sleaze for Alien 2: On Earth!

In a film that thrillingly dares to expand about 30 minutes worth of narrative into 93 minutes, we open on some glaringly-obvious stock footage of a space launch and are informed that the astronauts are returning to earth (the purpose of their mission and their destination are kept vague).  We're then introduced to psychic speleologist Thelma (Belinda Mayne, Don't Open Til Christmas, Krull) and her boyfriend Roy (Mark Bodin, Anthropophagus).  Thelma has weird visions and a bad feeling about the space mission, but is ignored by her creepy, Freudian professor to ignore the "monsters" around her.  We then get to endure a half hour of Thelma and Roy driving around running errands, going bowling and visiting some Native Americans (none of which have any consequence to the plot), which is livened up only slightly by Thelma bearing her tits and Roy having awesome facial hair.  After a little girl gets her face melted off by a piece of space debris (and admittedly ballsy scene), Thelma, Roy and some random friends decide to go spelunking in some nearby caves.  At this point, the movie finally livens up, and our trapped-beneath-the-earth heroes are attacked by rock-borne, face-bursting alien creatures!  The lethal little buggers look like nondescript bits of viscera that (apparently) have powerful hindquarters, as they're able to leap from victim to victim. Anyway, it turns out that our intrepid stock-footage astronauts from the beginning of the film came back as less-than-human and splashed down in an ocean near the caves (hence the little girl being killed earlier).  As the little alien beasties pick off the heroes one-by-one, we're treated to all manner of decapitations, eyeball-gougings, face-meltings and other manner of bodily mutilation, with gore effects that certainly make up in enthusiasm and quantity what they lack in quality.  It turns out that the creatures are ALSO capable of mimicking their victims (an idea cribbed from John Campbell's novella "The Thing" and which is discovered by psychic Thelma while the film does a sweet, pre-MTV wind tunnel effect with her feathered hair).  Thelma and Roy manage to escape the caves into a deserted city, where Roy is killed and Thelma is forced to combat the creatures alone, with expectedly apocalyptic results. 

The early 80s produced A LOT of Alien cash-ins and knockoffs (Corman produced at least a half-dozen) but, as far as I know, this Italian production was the only one with the cajones to brazenly pass itself off as an "official" sequel (six years before James Cameron's Aliens).  20th Century Fox sued, but the producers of this film won by claiming they were sequelizing a public-domain novel from the 30s also titled Alien; that's a level of sleaziness I can admire!  Alien 2 is pretty typically of Italian ripoffsploitation flicks; it features gratuitous violence and nudity, poorly-ADRed dialogue, a pulsing synth score and mostly thinly-disguised foreign locales passed off as America, with only a couple of "money shots" actually filmed in the good ol' U.S. of A.  Unlike many of his contemporaries, however, Ippolito never brings any sense of style or fun to his direction, relying instead on a TV-movie, point-and-shoot formula.  Only during the final, POV-shot battle between Thelma and the "alpha" creature does the film seem to come alive.  I really can't recommend this but, if you're anything like me, you're eventually going to see it, anyway.  Alien fans will probably want to seek it out as a novelty (as I write this, I'm flanked by two giant action figures of the Giger-designed creature from the first movie, so I know what I'm talking about).