Species III (2004) (V)

Director:

Brad Turner

Writers (WGA):

Dennis Feldman (characters)
Ben Ripley (written by)

Release Date:

27 November 2004 (USA)

Genre:

Sci-Fi | Horror | Thriller

Tagline:

Beauty is only skin deep.

Plot:

Sara (Sunny Mabrey), the daughter of Eve (Natasha Henstridge) begins her mission to mate with humans, while a specialist military team hunt her down to kill her before its too late.

Plot Keywords:

Military | Daughter | Species | Research | Student

Awards:

1 win

Cast

Robin Dunne	...	Dean
Robert Knepper	...	Dr. Abbot
Sunny Mabrey	...	Sara
Amelia Cooke	...	Amelia
John Paul Pitoc	...	Hastings (as J.P. Pitoc)
Michael Warren	...	Agent Wasach
Christopher Neame	...	Dr. Nicholas Turner
Patricia Bethune	...	Colleen
Joel Stoffer	...	Portus
James Leo Ryan	...	Yosef
Savanna Fields	...	Young Sara
Natasha Henstridge	...	Eve
Reed Frerichs	...	ISD Staffer
Marc D. Wilson	...	Crew Chief
Matthew Yang King	...	Specialist Robert Kelley

MPAA:

Rated R for violence/gore, sexual content and some language.

Runtime:

111 min | Argentina:100 min | USA:112 min (unrated version)

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Color

Certification:

Canada:13+ (Quebec) | Canada:14 (Nova Scotia) | Canada:14A (Manitoba/Ontario) | Iceland:16 | Finland:K-15 | Argentina:13 | Australia:MA | Germany:16 | Singapore:M18 (cut) | UK:15 | USA:R | USA:Unrated (unrated version) | Norway:15 | Japan:R-15

Filming Locations:

Monrovia, California, USA

Company:

FGM Entertainment

Trivia:

A scene which was changed due to budgetary reasons had Sara scratch a campus student's cheek with her alien finger, which looked like a spike. Instead, this was changed to Sara throwing the man over her into a hedge in the final film.

Goofs:

Revealing mistakes: Despite never having any human contact, adult Sara clearly has pierced ears.

Quotes:

Young Sara: I'm hungry!
Dr. Abbot: I'd be, too, if I grew six inches a day.

Movie Connections:

Featured in 'Species III': Set Invasion (2004) (V)

Great FX, bad acting

The special effects for Species III were excellent. Sure, like anything, if they had spent more money it could have been even better. However, for a Grade B Science Fiction movie, it had lots of cool effects, especially the gross birth scene. Some of the other effects, such as the goo inside the guts of the Aliens was on the level of the X-Files. However, there was a steady pace of gore or gross effects, so on that level, Species III was excellent. It was as gross as any good Science Fiction Horror-Monster movie should be.

However, the cast of Species III is the major downfall. Robin Dunne is not credible as a wonder-boy scientist who is building a Fusion Reactor as his school project and is also an expert on DNA splicing. How many people on earth are experts in both fields? None of them are still college students. Where did Dunne learn how to splice DNA and build Fusion Reactors if he is still a college student? Correspondence School? Aside from Dunne not acting, talking, or thinking like a brilliant scientist, he also looks like somebody you would expect to be working at McDonald's. Dunne looks dumb.

Sunny Mabry plays the lead Alien, and she is a far cry from Natasha Hentsridge. Mabry plays her role as a cold, arrogant, calculating creature who kills those who get on her nerves. What made Natasha Hentsridge so good in her role was that she conveyed all of the warm human qualities and she was very attractive and seductive. Even though Hentsridge was a monster, she also had a beautiful feminine side. Mabry does not have that at all. She just glares at everyone, and even the girl who plays her role as a child is played as a very rude and mean little girl. I am not sure why the screenwriter thought that making the Mabry/Alien character unfriendly and unappealing would be good.

Dunne room-mate at the College Dorm is played by John Pitac, who looks like a Pizza Delivery Boy. Why an incredible genius like Dunne would have a room-mate and best friend like Pitac also strained the credibility. Pitac seems like a real goofball at first, and then when the hybrid alien woman kidnaps him, he is suddenly at the Lab and he is splicing the DNA just as well as Dunne could. So apparently the College has two students who learned how to splice DNA while they were in High School??

Perhaps the best actor in this movie is John Knepper, who plays the role of Professor Almond, the guy who kidnapped the alien baby from the Military. When the movie starts, Almond (Knepper) is just a soldier. By the time the little alien girl is about ten years old, he is now a Professor at a University. Yet the aliens supposedly grow from baby to adult in just a few days, not even a year. How Almond became a scientist and a professor at a college so quickly is another gap in the story.

Perhaps the best creatures in this movie are the hybrid Aliens. Because of their defective DNA, they have some interesting problems, and the special effects used for the hybrids was pretty good.

Some other writer mentioned pacing. This story would not have seemed so bad if the pacing had been a lot quicker. Due to the plot holes and the lack of good actors, Species III should have concentrated its energy on the strong points, which were the gore and the special effects. Less clunky dialogue would have been good.

A few thoughtful edits could have made this movie a lot better. A good example of the dumb dialogue and directing occurs when when Dunne and Michael Warren (he plays the CIA Agent) rescue Pitac from the two Alien women who want him to create a new Alien from the Ova. The two Alien women are angry and tearing the lab apart and chasing after Pitac who took the canister with the Alien Ova inside. Pitac runs outside of the lab and gets to Warren's car which is parked right by the door to the lab. Pitac then stands by the door to the car and starts talking to Dunne (also standing outside the car) about how dangerous surfing the internet can be. Then the two guys leisurely get into the car, and I was thinking, what happened to the Alien women? They were right behind Pitac! Scenes that did not make sense like that one undermined the suspense of the movie. The director never maintained the pace, and he allowed bad attempts at comedy to ruin the sense of dread that should have been building up as the Aliens were all converging at the College seeking Dunne and the answers to their DNA problems.

Another big scientific mistake is that at one point Dunne allows his Fusion Reactor to blow up, and then Pitac tells Warren "Oh, it is alright now, the system is re-setting itself" as if a Fusion Reactor was like a computer which re-booted after the drive crashed. In theory a Fusion Reaction should keep sucking in more particles if it is out of control (like this one), and eventually it becomes a black hole or else explodes outward like a Nuclear Bomb. It certainly does not just blow up inside a Lab and then re-sets itself!

Overall Species III was not bad. It had excellent special effects but it was hurt by bad directing of below-average actors. If Natasha Hentsridge had played the Alien, and a good actor like Patrick Stewart had played the role of the brilliant scientist, Species III would have been very credible and much better than it was.